Pair Charged in Applying Unorthodox Medical Care : Treatment: The Newport Beach clinic owners inject patients with a mixture called the ‘Ongley Solution.’ Some say it works, but others have complained of adverse effects.

The owners of a controversial Newport Beach orthopedic clinic have been charged with 25 criminal misdemeanors stemming from their use of an unorthodox and allegedly harmful treatment for muscle, joint and back disorders.

Milne J. Ongley, 65, and Dr. Louis Schlom, 69, who own the Institute of Orthopedic Medicine on Superior Avenue in Newport Beach and a now-closed branch in San Diego, will plead innocent to all charges, their attorney said Thursday.

The two men, who have a long history of scrapes with various medical authorities, inject patients with a drug mixture called the “Ongley Solution,” and then manipulate the afflicted body part.

State officials alleged Thursday that the solution is not sterile and is not approved by the state or the federal Food and Drug Administration. While some patients say they have been helped by the treatments, others have complained of adverse effects, including severe swelling and infections. One patient alleged the treatment caused paralysis.

In the criminal complaint filed Wednesday by the Orange County district attorney’s office, Ongley and Schlom are charged with conspiring to practice medicine without a license, grand theft, using patients in medical experiments without their consent, unlawfully using an unapproved new drug, falsely representing Ongley to be a physician, false advertising and other misdemeanors.

“There is not one reported case of an injury as a result of someone being treated with the Ongley Solution,” said their attorney, James F. Campbell of San Francisco. “This is more fanatical, preposterous conduct on the part of the (California) Medical Board.”

Ongley and Schlom did not return telephone calls to their clinic Thursday.

Campbell described Ongley as “a modern-day miracle worker” who will produce scores of patients to testify that they have been helped by his treatment.

“The solution is being used right now by probably 100 doctors or more in California and probably thousands in the U.S.,” Campbell said.

The California Medical Board disciplined Schlom in 1978 and revoked Ongley’s acupuncture license 10 years later. In addition, criminal charges were filed against Ongley in San Francisco in 1985 but were eventually dismissed, according to Deputy Atty. Gen. Frank Pacoe of San Francisco.

Ongley has also been repeatedly sued for negligence, including a 1987 lawsuit by former world-record and Olympic high jumper Dwight Stones.

Stones received a series of injections of the Ongley Solution into his hamstring in 1986, and was then told to perform a violent stretch, said his attorney, Brian R. Magana. He tore his hamstring and was out of competition for more than six months.

“He never really got back in competition after that,” Magana said. The suit is still pending in Orange County Superior Court.

Ongley, a New Zealand native, lost a $79,906 malpractice judgment in that country in 1973, Pacoe said. According to the New Zealand decision, which was made part of the San Francisco court record, Ongley injected a man with his solution while several nurses held the patient down and one nurse covered his mouth to muffle his screams of pain, Pacoe said. The man ended up paralyzed from the waist down, he said.

“It’s a horror story,” Pacoe said.

Campbell said the New Zealand man was not injected with the Ongley Solution and that “once he collected the money he was miraculously cured and walked out.”

State medical investigators said Ongley came to the United States in 1975 and began working with Schlom in Orange Grove, in San Diego County, in 1976. Ongley obtained an acupuncture license in California but has repeatedly failed to pass the licensing examination for physicians, they said.

In 1977, Schlom was accused of aiding and abetting Ongley in the unlicensed practice of medicine. And in 1979 the California Medical Board suspended Schlom’s license for 30 days.

In 1985, Ongley was charged in San Francisco with practicing medicine without a license after three patients complained of problems after his acupuncture treatments, Pacoe said.

One man who had the Ongley Solution injected into his knee suffered a massive infection and was hospitalized for more than two weeks, Pacoe said. The man won a civil negligence judgment for more than $30,000, he said.

The San Francisco criminal case against Ongley was eventually dismissed, but the medical board revoked his acupuncture license.

Ongley then moved to Southern California, where he and Schlom opened clinics in Newport Beach and in San Diego. The San Diego clinic was closed last August, Campbell said, while the Newport Beach clinic remains open.

Two undercover state medical investigators visited the clinic last November, one of them complaining of lower back pain, said Kathy Schmidt, senior investigator with the California Medical Board.

Ongley “examined and diagnosed, which included reading X-rays and prescribing injections of the Ongley Solution,” Schmidt said. The two men were arrested, resulting in the current charges, she said.

Schlom and Ongley are also under investigation by the state attorney general’s office in San Diego, Deputy Atty. Gen. Thomas S. Lazar confirmed. Lazar declined to elaborate Thursday.

The clinics in Newport Beach and San Diego as well as Ongley’s trailer home in Dulzura were searched in November, and various vials, bottles and syringes of Ongley Solution were seized and analyzed, authorities said.

The unopened vials of solution, manufactured by Salt Lake Drug East in Salt Lake City, were found to contain a non-sterile solution of dextrose (sugar), water, glycerin, a fatty acid used in hand lotion, and phenol, also known as carbolic acid, an antiseptic, said Zuma Ross, senior investigator with the food and drug branch of the state Department of Health Services.

Ross said that, in clinic literature, Ongley and Schlom assert that back pain sufferers often have weak ligaments, and that “the Ongley Solution is supposed to cause cells in the ligaments to multiply, and actually cause the ligaments to strengthen. He claims that he has gotten some medical evidence that this actually happens, but they’ve never presented it officially to the FDA or the state.”

Ross said she did not know why the solution contained phenol, which she said is a strong acid sometimes used to peel skin.

“I don’t know what would happen to you if you were injected with phenol,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a very pleasant thing to put in somebody’s body.”

Ongley and Schlom are scheduled to be arraigned April 12.