ANAHEIM : Doctor Loses Bid to Regain His License

A judge refused Friday to reinstate a doctor’s medical license that had been revoked by state officials after he treated up to 6,000 allergy patients, including those at an Anaheim clinic, by injecting them with their own urine.

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge John Zebrowski denied an appeal by Dr. George R. Borrell to overturn a Dec. 4 cancellation of his license by the Medical Board of California.

Borrell, 69, operates clinics in Canoga Park and Anaheim under the name Allergy Control Medical Group.

State medical authorities said Borrell’s urine injections constituted an “extreme departure” from proper medical care. They said Borrell, who attended a military medical school in Mexico but was described as a “self-taught” allergist, also exhibited a “shocking and extreme” lack of medical knowledge.

Borrell could not be reached for comment Friday. But in previous interviews, he has defended his urine injections as a safe and effective “folk remedy” that has been practiced for more than a century.

While urine treatment sounds “kind of preposterous or ugly or dirty,” it had helped numerous allergy sufferers, Borrell said.

But state medical officials labeled urine injections as quackery, and said they can lead to infection, kidney failure, breathing difficulties and death.

Zebrowski said his decision was based not on “either tolerance or repugnance for the concept of urine injections” but on a lack of legal evidence that Borrell’s license was improperly revoked.

Borrell’s lawyer, Herbert Selwyn, said Zebrowski and state medical officials had “already made their minds up” about taking away Borrell’s license after first hearing of his treatments.

State Deputy Atty. Gen. Earl Plowman said the license revocation means Borrell will have to either sell or close his two clinics.

In an interview with The Times last December, Borrell said he injected 5,000 to 6,000 allergy patients with their own urine over a 12-year period. He said only two or three of them developed infections from the therapy.

State officials acknowledged they knew of no patients who died or required hospitalization as a result of urine therapy and that they received only one complaint about Borrell.

But they said many of Borrell’s patients were chronic sufferers desperate to believe that his unusual therapy was helping them.

“This is something we’ve seen again and again and again in quack cases,” Plowman said. “There’s a lot of people out there who are deathly afraid of institutionalized medicine, who are looking for quick cures.”