Desperately Ill : Hope Sold at Clinics of Tijuana

Flies buzz around the head of the emaciated woman as she lies on a dirty chaise longue in the courtyard of a drab two-story brick building that looks like a cheap motel.

People walk in and out of the building, some holding intravenous bottles above their heads like shuffling Statues of Liberty as medications drip into their veins. Strips of metal screening have been tacked across doorways in a makeshift effort to keep flies out.

In a dining hall across the courtyard, people eat vegetables as a skeletal figure with no hair--seemingly ageless, sexless--lies on a battered old couch under an intravenous hookup.

The woman in the courtyard is taken into a room where long acupuncture needles are stuck into her forehead and the tops of her feet. A young man leans over her and moves his open hand up and down near her face.

“Do you feel the force?” he asks.

She nods her head weakly, yes.

$2,000 a Week

This is the Rosarita Beach Clinic, which, despite its name, is more than five miles from the ocean.

It costs $2,000 a week to stay here.

The clinic is one of a dozen or so such medical facilities in Tijuana, some gleaming clean and some run-down, that each year cater to thousands of patients--mostly Americans--who spend millions of dollars on wildly unorthodox treatments that reputable medical scientists and specialists dismiss as worthless and sometimes dangerous.

Many of the patients come in desperate search of treatment for deadly and crippling diseases such as cancer, multiple sclerosis and arthritis.

Others come for treatment of vaguely defined ailments that periodically come into vogue among some health faddists.

Still others come simply to try to stave off the effects of growing old.

Most of the clinics are run by American entrepreneurs who hire Mexican medical doctors as staff physicians to administer treatments, some of which involve drugs, such as Laetrile, which are illegal to import into the United States. These entrepreneurs sometimes operate vitamin and food supplement distributorships in California and sometimes prescribe their products to patients after they leave the clinics.

Although health insurance policies normally exclude coverage for unorthodox treatments, visits to the Tijuana clinics frequently are paid for by U.S. insurance companies through the efforts of an “insurance coordinator” that files claims for clinic patients. These claims frequently list the treatments as “chemotherapies” with cryptic initials that insurance companies sometimes mistakenly assume are accepted medical practices, according to insurance investigators and federal authorities.

At least two spinoff businesses, specializing in lodging and transportation for clinic outpatients, operate on the California side of the border. One of them, run by a San Diego real estate dealer, is dubbed Casa Hope and has strung a banner across the sidewalk on the Mexican side of the border welcoming clinic patients to Tijuana.

Clinic operators frequently offer virtually the same treatments for all illnesses, from cancer to fungus infections. The treatments include:

- Hydrogen peroxide injections.

- Extracting blood from a patient, submitting it to an electrical charge and injecting it back into the vein.

- Injections of so-called “live cells” from unborn calves.

- Coffee enemas.

- “Light therapy” using lamps with colored plastic lenses.

- Injections of Laetrile mixed with dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO).

- Treatments with a machine that allegedly shrinks cancerous tumors with an electric charge.

None of these techniques has any known therapeutic value, according to reputable medical specialists and scientists from all over the United States who talked to The Times.

But clinic operators contend in interviews, on television talk shows, in health store literature and at “alternative” health c onventions that the American Medical Assn., the federal Food and Drug Administration and big pharmaceutical companies have conspired to discredit and persecute them, driving their practices south of the border.

Steady Stream

But with the help of groups such as the Cancer Control Society in Los Angeles the clinics have been able to maintain a steady flow of patients through their doors.

The Cancer Control Society was co-founded by Betty Lee Morales, the late owner of a vitamin company. The society, which espouses unorthodox medicine, holds an annual convention in Los Angeles at which Tijuana clinic operators lecture and promote their nostrums. In addition, the Cancer Control Society helps organize bus tours of the Tijuana clinics.

Norman Fritz, the society’s president, is a paid consultant to the Hospital de Baja California. Better known as the Gerson Clinic, the facility specializes in coffee enemas and a diet of vegetable, fruit and raw liver juices.

The cost of the Gerson clinic is about $2,000 per week for a three-week treatment, followed by a stringent 18 months of dieting at home.

Unlike some clinic operators, Charlotte Gerson has no compunction about using the word cure in making a pitch for her treatments.

She is the daughter of Max Gerson, a German physician who claimed cancer cures during the 1950s. Although Charlotte Gerson admits that her formal education ended after two years of college, she claims she learned so much about medicine working with her late father that she is able to teach Mexican medical doctors to cure cancer, heart disease, multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease--virtually anything.

“Not only cancer,” she told a tour bus group that included a Times reporter earlier this year. “We have seen people (with) MS recover completely and remain well. . . . We have seen . . . some complete recoveries in Lou Gehrig’s disease. “Most of these patients,” she said, “suffer essentially from toxicity.”

“Detoxification” is the watchword at the Tijuana clinics. Patients are “detoxified” through all manner of enemas, colonics, diets and concoctions.

Gerson, who popularized coffee enemas among clinic operators, claims that the treatment causes the liver to release poisonous bile. But most medical scientists dismiss the practice as useless, if not outright harmful.

“I can see this patient getting a coffee enema and saying, ‘Can you put a little more cream in it?”’ scoffed Dr. Labe Scheinberg, professor of neurology and rehabilitation at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a member of the advisory board of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

“There’s no rationale for that,” he added. “It’s just whatever the (clinic operator) wakes up with that day and says, ‘I’ll try that on MS and there are some fools out there that will come and take this treatment.’ ”

Clinic operators do not produce hard scientific data to support their successful treatments. Instead, they offer testimonials from former patients who say that they or members of their families were healed at the clinics. Such testimonials often are difficult to substantiate and sometimes involve contested diagnoses or disagreements over what caused the “cure.”

For example, Harold Manner, operator of the Manner Clinic in Tijuana, was honored in a parade in Belle Vernon, Pa., in 1984 after being credited with healing little Jeremy Snyder who, according to his mother, Cindy Snyder, had been comatose with a brain tumor when he entered the clinic in 1983 at the age of 4.

Cindy Snyder is convinced that Jeremy was healed by the Manner Clinic, with its “Manner Cocktail”--intravenous Laetrile, DMSO and vitamins--along with other treatments.

But Dr. Thomas Lyons, a Pittsburgh neurosurgeon involved in Jeremy’s diagnosis, credits the boy’s apparent recovery to radiation treatments before his trip to the clinic.

Called Dangerous

“It’s not very common,” he said, “but it sure happens. . . . It’s a known fact that beneficial effects of radiation may be delayed.” Critics of the clinics say the treatments are not only worthless and a waste of money, but can prove fatal.

For example, Harry Schneider, a Palm Desert dentist, tells of his twin brother, Larry, who was diagnosed as having testicular cancer in 1980 at the age of 26.

Larry Schneider had a testicle removed in an operation and was advised to seek follow-up treatment at the renowned M.D. Anderson Center in Houston.

He refused and went instead to the Gerson clinic for three weeks of treatment. He then followed the Gerson diet at home for three or four months, switched to another “curative” diet and sought other unorthodox remedies as a tumor steadily grew, according to his brother.

Within 18 months of his diagnosis he was dead. Conventional physicians say testicular cancer, if diagnosed early, has a high cure rate.

But, Harry Schneider was asked, couldn’t Gerson advocates argue that Larry Schneider didn’t stay on the diet, which involves, among other requirements, drinking fresh vegetable and fruit juices throughout the day for 18 months after leaving the clinic?.

“They’ve got you over a barrel either way,” said Harry Schneider, “as any quack therapy will.”

Along with cancer victims, arthritis sufferers flock in large numbers to the Tijuana clinics. And Kurt W. Donsbach claims great success with arthritis patients at his shiny new clinic on the ocean west of Tijuana.

Donsbach is chairman of the board of the National Health Federation, an organization headquartered in Monrovia that lobbies on behalf of unorthodox medical practitioners, holds “alternative” health conventions and publishes a monthly magazine in which some of the Tijuana clinics advertise their treatments.

Criminal Charge

Donsbach pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of practicing medicine without a license in California in 1971 after assuring an undercover agent who feigned having breast cancer that the disease “could be controlled if she followed his advice and adhered to a strict regimen of vitamins, minerals and chaparral tea,” according to a summary of the case by state Food and Drug officials.

Donsbach said his record has been expunged because he has been a “good and proper citizen.”

Just as Gerson is known for coffee enemas, Donsbach’s clinic is known for hydrogen peroxide injections. All his patients receive hydrogen peroxide whether they are afflicted with cancer, arthritis or the disease currently in vogue at the Tijuana clinics, a fungus infection called candidiasis.

“On the basis that superoxygenation can do no harm to anyone,” says Donsbach, “we use hydrogen peroxide on all patients.”

“Oxygen,” he contended, “is the basis of the entire detoxification system in the body.”

Donsbach says he takes a mixture that is 35% hydrogen peroxide and 65% water and mixes two to three parts of that solution with 100 parts of water to make his medicine.

He claims that his hydrogen peroxide treatment works “extremely well” with arthritis sufferers:

“I would say that 90% of our arthritis patients are pretty much arthritis-free for years after.” But Dr. Frederic McDuffie, senior vice president of medical affairs of the Arthritis Foundation, said that injections of hydrogen peroxide are ineffective at best and, if strong enough, harmful.

“If he did (inject) enough to do anything,” McDuffie said, “it would break down the red cells. Hemoglobin would be released into the bloodstream and this could . . . block up the kidneys and cause a high fever. A person would be sick as a dog.

Seen as Worthless

“What he gives is nothing,” McDuffie added. “It immediately (is absorbed). . . . If it did any good, you’d have to inject it into the joint . . . and probably it would make the joint inflammation worse rather than better.”

McDuffie said that studies show that arthritis sufferers are highly subject to temporary positive effects from placebos.

“If you give a person with arthritis anything with enthusiasm,” he said, “about 30% will improve temporarily. . . .”

McDuffie said that analyses of medicine brought back from Tijuana by patients at some clinics disclosed that they had been given cortisone without their knowledge. He said he did not know which clinics were involved.

Cortisone, he said, can be effective for some forms of arthritis, but it must be given in small doses and monitored closely because it can cause softening of the bones, peptic ulcers and other adverse problems.

Donsbach, like other Tijuana clinic operators, frequently diagnoses patients as having candidiasis.

“It is a rapidly growing pandemic in this country and the AMA cheerfully sits around and wonders if there is any such thing,” insisted Michael L. Culbert, information director for American Biologics, a Tijuana clinic with ties to a vitamin distributorship in Chula Vista. The systemic candidiasis theory currently popular is based on Candida albacans , a fungus present in the uro-genital tract, that is commonly the source of vaginal yeast infections, especially during use of antibiotics.

Proponents of a candidiasis epidemic maintain that overuse of antibiotics, among other factors, has caused yeast infections to spread throughout the entire systems of a growing number of people, both men and women.

Vague Symptoms

Critics say the symptoms are so general and vague--headaches, fatigue, feeling “spacey”--that they could be caused by virtually anything.

“The wide range of symptoms in the popular diagnostic tests would make it difficult for any individual to be certain that they were not suffering from this ailment,” wrote nutritionist Edward R. Blonz in the Dec. 12, 1986, Journal of the American Medical Assn.

Blonz, formerly an assistant professor of nutrition at the University of Minnesota and currently a project manager at the federal Western Regional Human Nutrion Center, went on to warn that the lack of a reliable method of diagnosing candidaisis makes the public vulnerable to what he called “entrepreneurial adventurism.”

Tijuana practitioners are known to administer scratch tests on the skin, diagnose candidiasis, administer another scratch test after three weeks of treatments and proclaim the patient well.

Last year, Donsbach was so confident of his ability to treat--he doesn’t like to use the word cure--candidiasis and some other diseases that he offered a money-back guarantee for a $5,000, three-week treatment at his Tijuana clinic.

At that time, Donsbach’s clinic was located in what former patients describe as a run-down motel. But there were so many refund demands--which Donsbach considered unwarranted--that the guarantee was discontinued, according to a clinic letter to prospective patients.

Don Chiavario didn’t ask for his money back, but he is far from satisfied with his visit to Donsbach’s clinic late last fall.

Chiavario, 74, a retired restaurateur and builder from Victorville, is an almost lifelong believer in unorthodox medical practices.

Clinic’s Diagnosis

Suffering chronic constipation, a body rash and fungus-like growths on his fingernails, Chiavario checked into Donsbach’s Tijuana clinic last November and was diagnosed as having candidiasis.

The rash and fingernail problem seemed to improve somewhat during the program, Chiavario said, but he said he became very sick at the clinic and his stomach bloated with constipation.

On Dec. 21, four weeks and $5,750 later, Chiavario said, he was proclaimed by Donsbach to be free of candidiasis. Still sick and bloated, he went home to Victorville.

Ten days later, he said, he was admitted to a hospital emergency room and the next day a section of his colon had to be removed.

Donsbach maintains he has a “glowing testimonial” from Chiavario for treatment of his rash.

He denies any knowledge of or responsibity for treating Chiavario’s problems with his colon.

Not all patients to the Tijuana clinics are there seeking cures for diseases. Some are searching for the Fountain of Youth.

“Act, look, feel younger. Live Longer with Live Cell Therapy,” says the ad for Genesis West, published in the Health Freedom News, the monthly publication of the National Health Federation.

“Live cell therapy,” the ad continues, “is based on the fact that tired organs can be restored and revitalized through the implantation of fetal cells.”

Genesis West, owned in part by Maureen Salaman, president of the National Health Federation, is connected to a vitamin distributorship in Redwood City. The Genesis West clinic, located in an office building adjacent to the posh Fiesta Americana hotel in Tijuana, does not treat cancer, but claims to be effective in treating a host of illnesses from Parkinson’s disease to impotency.

Aging Process

But the clinic purportedly specializes in stopping the aging process.

Cells said to have been taken from livers, brains and pancreases of calf embryos in West Germany are frozen and flown to Tijuana where they are thawed and injected into patients’ backsides. The cost: about $3,000 for a five-day treatment that includes meals and a room in the Fiesta Americana.

“It actually does not rejuvenate the body,” Dr. Salvador Vargas, medical director of the clinic, said of the treatment.

“What it does,” he claimed, “is it stalls the decaying process of the individual.”

“That is a direct descendant of alchemy,” said Caleb Finch, professor of gerontology and neurology at USC, of the “live-cell” treatment. “And it might be better found around the witches’ caldron in the staging of MacBeth.”

The patient’s immune system would immediately attack the foreign “live cells” injected into the body, Finch and other medical scientists said.

“They get chewed up and removed through urine and the digestive system,” he said of the injected cells.

In contrast to the clean and modern offices of Genesis West, the St. Jude International Clinic is located in a grimy and dismal old two-story building on a steep side street near downtown Tijuana.

There, according to clinic patrons, operator Jimmy Keller places jars of vitamins and supplements within what he calls patients’ “force fields” and then tests their strength by pushing down on their extended arms. If Keller finds that a patient’s strength is increased while a certain vitamin is within the “force field,” he prescribes that substance.

Wanted by FBI

Keller is wanted by the FBI on a federal grand jury indictment for medically related wire fraud. Federal authorities said that while operating back and forth across the Mexican border at Brownsville, Tex., in 1984, Keller claimed to be able to diagnose cancer by holding snapshots of patients against a plate attached to a machine.

Keller, who refused to be interviewed by The Times, used the rhythms and cadences of a Southern revivalist preacher as he told a clinic bus tour audience that he successfully treats various diseases, using everything from snake venom to what he termed “Panama gas.”

Despite his seemingly outrageous treatments, people flock to Keller.

Among them is Andy Terzuoli, 39, who possesses a doctorate in electrical engineering and for months has been taking his wife, Carol, to Keller’s clinic for cancer treatment. Carol Terzuoli, 38, a nutritionist, suffers from terminal throat cancer and is unable to speak.

“If she dies,” said Terzuoli of his wife, “I’m the type of person that would not be able to live with myself if I didn’t try anything that was given to me.”

After spending six weeks as an outpatient at Keller’s clinic, Carol Terzuoli went back home to Ohio.

“She’s really about the same,” her husband said last week.

Next: How insurance companies pay for Tijuana treatments.