Officials Target Baja’s Deceptive Health Clinics

Health authorities in Baja California vow to continue a months-long crackdown on dozens of alternative health clinics around Tijuana that offer unorthodox treatments to gravely ill U.S. patients who have given up hope for a cure north of the border.

In the most recent action, state health inspectors, accompanied by local and federal police, shut down a Tijuana clinic Thursday that apparently used chicken liver extracts and guinea pig tissue in injections that formed part of its alternative cancer treatment.

The San Martin Clinic, run by a San Diego County-based firm called American Metabolic Institute, was treating five patients, all of whom appeared to be Americans, said Alfredo Gruel, a physician who oversees health regulation for the Baja California health department.

The clinic had been closed two weeks earlier for offering experimental treatments without proof of the research protocols required under Mexican law. It was ordered to accept no new patients but it violated that directive, Gruel said.

Gruel said the clinic would be allowed to continue treating five remaining patients--so they would not risk losing money for treatments they had paid for--and then would be closed. The owners face the possibility of thousands of dollars in fines.

Inspectors have closed at least six alternative treatment centers this year, along with nearly two dozen other clinics around Tijuana that failed sanitation standards or had other problems.

The shuttered alternative clinics, with mostly American patients, were in violation of Mexican federal law requiring research protocols before providing experimental treatment. Such treatments must be conducted for free, Gruel said. During the recent crackdown, inspectors have turned up cases in which clinics had operated for years without even being registered with state health authorities.

Two of the clinics--owned by Americans--that were closed previously by state officials have been permitted to reopen. They cannot offer alternative therapies--just conventional care. One of the clinics, BioPulse International, paid a $22,000 fine. The second, Century Nutrition, can resume operations only if its U.S.-based prior operator, Hulda Clark, is no longer involved.

“We will be checking into these clinics frequently,” Gruel said.

Officials believe about 50 alternative treatment centers are mixed among the 500 medical clinics overseen by the health department’s 30 inspectors, a force that Gruel said will expand soon. But he said it remains unclear exactly how many clinics are operating.

“What we’ve found here is that a lot of clinics have established in this area all kinds of alternative medicine and outright quackery. They did not even request a permit to operate a clinic or said they would be doing normal surgical care,” Gruel said.

Unorthodox cancer treatments, some of which are only now being offered in the United States, have long been offered in Baja California, within easy reach of U.S. patients.

Actor Steve McQueen made headlines in 1980 when he underwent a series of unconventional treatments--from injections of live animal cells to coffee enemas--at a hospital south of Tijuana. He died of lung cancer months later in a hospital elsewhere in Mexico. Kim Perrot, a point guard for the Houston Comets of the Women’s National Basketball Assn., received alternative treatment in Tijuana two years ago after surgery for tumors. She died six months later.

Unsanctioned clinics blossomed alongside lawful alternative centers over the years because of lax oversight and, very likely, official corruption, Gruel said.

The clinics advertise on the Internet, describing treatments that aim to purge toxins using vitamins and herbs and to attack cancer cells using ozone and electrical impulses, along with more familiar weapons, such as chemotherapy. One San Diego firm offers a $129 tour of various clinics for prospective patients and their loved ones.

U.S. cancer specialists view many of the experimental treatments as unreliable and dangerous.

But advocates of alternative medicine say many patients, after being discharged from American hospitals to die, have brought their cancer under control through treatment at Mexican clinics.

“The clinics we deal with and refer people to have excellent quality, even by U.S. standards,” said Edward Griffin, president of the Cancer Cure Foundation, a nonprofit group in Newbury Park that promotes alternative medicine. But, he added, “there are quite a few that I haven’t even gotten around to visiting that don’t meet those standards.”

Gruel said the crackdown was part of a wider push to clean up Baja’s health facilities and not an attack on alternative therapies.

“The Baja California health department is not against alternative medicine,” Gruel said. “We want people to come to Tijuana to be treated. We want them to be treated fully and well.”