TruDOSE and Autism: One Company, 48 Clinics, No Evidence

A Texas company sells a system for intravenous platelet-rich plasma and tags nearly half of its listed providers for autism. The claims start with the company.

Of about 100 providers in TruDOSE's public directory, 48 carry the tag "PANS/PANDAS/Autism." They are in 22 states. Three are pediatric practices.

TruDOSE markets a method of preparing platelet-rich plasma (PRP) from a patient's blood, with the dose set by proprietary software, and giving it back by intravenous infusion. Its creator, Tapley Holland, has described patenting intravenous uses of the technique. The company lists its trained providers in a public directory and tags each one with conditions.

No randomized trial has shown that PRP, by any route, improves autism. The closest controlled evidence is Duke University's trial of an intravenous infusion of a child's own or donor cord blood in 180 autistic children, which found no improvement in social skills or autism symptoms. The evidence and the risks are set out in full on our Florida page.

Where the autism message comes from

• The directory. The "PANS/PANDAS/Autism" tag sits on TruDOSE's own provider cards. The company is the first party linking its product to autism.
• A parent-facing webinar. Documenting Hope, an organization for parents of chronically ill children, hosted a webinar with Tapley Holland and Adam Breiner, ND, one of the tagged providers. The page says TruDOSE has shown "positive outcomes" in autism. It also advertises a free TruDOSE study for autistic children at a Venice, Florida clinic, "pending IRB approval": in other words, recruited before an ethics board had approved it.¹
• A parent-facing article. The same organization says TruDOSE can "promote neurological repair, and support cognition," while conceding that "it is still unknown as to why results are inconsistent and why not all children benefit."²
• Matching clinic blog posts. Tagged providers in Davie, Florida and Pasadena, California publish posts with the same title, "TruDose PRP Therapy for Children with Autism." The wording differs, which points to a shared topic rather than copied text.³

The 48 listings

Sorted by state. Each link goes to the provider's card on TruDOSE's website, where the tag appears.

Swipe sideways to see the full table on a phone. A pediatric neuro-immune practice in New York (Neuro-Immune Care Center) is also listed, but its card shows no condition tags, so it is not counted.

Regulatory records of listed practitioners

We searched public sources for disciplinary or enforcement actions against the practitioners listed above. Five have a documented final action. None of these actions concerns TruDOSE, PRP or autism; they are listed because they bear on how each practitioner's past conduct has been judged by a regulator.

For the other listed practitioners, our search found no public action. That is not a verified clean record: most state licence lookups and nursing board records were not searched directly, and minor or older orders are often not indexed online. Corrections are welcome.

What we do not know

• Whether each clinic advertises PRP for autism on its own website. We have checked only the Florida clinics.
• Whether the tags were chosen by the clinics or assigned by TruDOSE.
• How many children have been treated, and at what price.
• The full extent of the network. Some providers are listed only behind a patient portal, and We The People in Venice, Florida, which recruits autistic children for a TruDOSE study, does not appear in the public directory at all.
• A few cards hide some tags behind a "+N" marker, so the true number of autism-tagged listings may be slightly higher.

What about Canada?

No Canadian provider appears in the TruDOSE directory, and we found no Canadian clinic selling PRP for autism. Corrections are welcome. If one appears, the rules are different from those in the United States.

• Health Canada leaves most PRP to the provinces. In July 2019 (updated August 2019) it said that PRP prepared by practitioners, including physicians and dentists, from a patient's own blood and given back to the same patient in a single procedure is regulated by the provinces and territories as part of medical or dental practice. Selling PRP outside those conditions needs Health Canada authorization. Health Canada still acts on deceptive advertising and unsanitary manufacturing.⁴
• That makes the provincial colleges the main check. Alberta's College of Physicians & Surgeons has PRP guidelines (last updated October 2024). They treat PRP as a procedure whose benefits "continue to undergo further definition and evaluation," and require a "recognized application" and written informed consent.⁸ Ontario's College of Physicians and Surgeons has no PRP-specific policy that we found. Its policy on complementary and alternative medicine says physicians "must not provide" treatments shown to be ineffective, must give patients "an accurate representation of the strength of evidence," and must disclose any financial benefit.⁹
• Naturopaths are a separate question. British Columbia's 2026 standard for naturopathic injectable therapies lists PRP injections among therapies naturopathic physicians may perform with additional training. It lists IV therapy separately and does not say whether PRP may be given intravenously.¹⁰ We have not found any province that clearly allows a naturopath to give PRP intravenously.

When Health Canada made its 2019 clarification, Timothy Caulfield, Canada Research Chair in health law and policy at the University of Alberta, told CBC News that the change was understandable technically but "disappointing" as policy: "I really hope we see the provincial regulators step into that void, and make it clear if they're offering patients something, it should be proven to be effective beyond testimonials and anecdotes. Any representation should be accurate and reflect the state of the science."⁷ He shared the story on X the same day.

What Canadian health authorities say about PRP

We looked for every Canadian evidence review, regulator statement and professional position on PRP that we could find, for any condition. None concluded the evidence was strong enough to recommend PRP. We found none that addresses autism, or the treatment of children for any condition.

Swipe sideways to see the full table on a phone. "Insufficient" or "low quality" means the evidence is too weak to say whether PRP works, not that it has been proven not to work. WorkSafeBC quotes are from the reviews' records in the INAHTA database. Choosing Wisely Canada's sport and exercise medicine list (November 2024) does not mention PRP. A shareable image of this table: prp-canada-authorities.jpg.

Related on QuackeryWatch: PRP for autism in Florida · Chelation for autism · All Dubious Rx entries