State Acts to Pull License of Allergist : Medicine: The Canoga Park doctor treated thousands of patients with urine injections. He’s appealing the revocation order.

State medical authorities have moved to revoke the license of a Canoga Park doctor who treated as many as 6,000 allergy patients by injecting them with their own urine. The practice represents an “extreme departure from the standard of care in California,” authorities said.

But Dr. Jorge R. Borrell has appealed the revocation order and a Los Angeles Superior Court judge last month temporarily blocked it.

In a harshly worded order canceling Borrell’s license last month, the Board of Medical Quality Assurance said Borrell, who operates clinics in Canoga Park and Anaheim, exhibited a “shocking and extreme” lack of medical knowledge.

Board officials said Borrell, 69, failed to test patients to see if they were being injured or endangered by his treatments and failed to keep proper medical records on them.

He received his medical training in Mexico and completed his residency in urology in the United States. But officials described Borrell as a self-taught allergist and immunologist.

Borrell last month appealed his license revocation to Superior Court Judge Miriam Vogel, who temporarily blocked the state order pending a March hearing to decide if enough evidence exists to uphold it. The judge ordered Borrell to stop giving urine injections in the meantime.

In an interview Wednesday, Borrell, who has a weekly radio talk show and sells audio cassettes giving medical advice, defended his urine treatments as a safe and effective “folk remedy” that has been practiced for more than a century.

“It sounds kind of preposterous or ugly or dirty or whatever,” he said. “Even though years ago a number of doctors used it here, they’ve been scared away.”

He said the treatment stimulates the immune system to produce allergy antibodies.

But state officials say urine injection is not a proven medical treatment for allergies. They said such injections can lead to infection, kidney failure, breathing difficulties and even death.

“Common sense would tell you that if you went to a doctor and he said, ‘I’m going to cure you by injecting urine,’ you’d look at him and say goodby,” said Phil Foster, the Medical Board’s regional supervisor for the San Fernando Valley.

“That would be the normal person’s reaction,” he said. “It’s beyond my imagination how anyone could fall for that kind of quackery.”

Borrell said he has treated 5,000 to 6,000 patients with urine injections over a 12-year period, but state officials said they had received only one complaint about him.

“I can’t explain it,” Foster said.

Foster said none of Borrell’s patients died or required hospitalization as a result of the treatments, and he was aware of only one patient who became ill.

In legal documents, state authorities cited three patients given urine shots, including one who received 13 injections. In each case, Borrell had informed his patients that he was giving them urine injections.

Borrell said that two or three patients developed infections from his treatments and “that was before proper filters were available” for the urine.

According to state legal documents, Borrell is medical director at two clinics operating under the name of Allergy Control Medical Group. In addition, he operates the private Advanced Testing Laboratory, where he refers patients for allergy testing.

State authorities said the laboratory uses the cytotoxic leukocyte testing method, rather than skin tests, to determine what substances cause allergies in patients. The method involves combining a known allergen with blood to see if it produces a lower white blood count indicating a reaction.

But that testing method, officials said, has “no known scientific value or validity” and routinely results in both false negative and false positive results.