Clinic That Treated Mrs. King Is Closed

Officials said Friday they have shut down the health clinic in this seaside town where Coretta Scott King died earlier this week, saying it was operating without proper licenses and in violation of health regulations.

Kurt W. Donsbach, the director of the clinic, the Hospital Santa Monica, has a criminal record and has been known for more than a generation in Southern California and Mexico for offering alternative treatments -- many of them considered suspect by medical authorities -- to terminally ill patients, according to court records and health experts who monitor fraudulent alternative health practices.

At this point, no evidence suggests that Donsbach’s treatments hastened the death of King, the widow of civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Accompanied by her daughter Bernice and a nurse, King, 78 and partially paralyzed by a stroke last year, had arrived at the facility Jan. 26 suffering from ovarian cancer, clinic officials said. She died Tuesday.

The King family’s decision to turn to the hospital, however, highlights the continued popularity of clinics operating on the Mexican side of the border that provide alternative treatments, primarily to American patients. Medical authorities and U.S. government officials consider many of the treatments worthless, and in some cases dangerous, but have little ability to close the clinics.

Mexican officials can investigate the facilities only if there are complaints, which are rare because the facilities usually treat non-Mexicans and do not advertise in Mexico, said Francisco Vera Gonzalez, health secretary for the state of Baja California.

No complaints against Donsbach or Hospital Santa Monica, also known as the Santa Monica Health Institute, have been filed in Mexico, Vera Gonzalez said.

Mexican officials became aware of the allegations surrounding Donsbach after King’s death and sent inspectors Thursday, Vera Gonzalez said.

Although the facility appeared to operate as “a hotel and spa,” inspectors found “installations for providing hospital care and conducting surgical procedures,” Baja California health officials said in a statement. The only medical procedures permitted at the facility are blood transfusions, the officials said.

The Hospital Santa Monica website says Donsbach opened the facility in 1983 to offer “a very eclectic approach to chronic degenerative diseases.”

“We’re finding a lot of clinics that register normally and end up doing procedures that are not permitted,” Vera Gonzalez said. Last year, he said, health authorities in Baja California closed 25 facilities.

Donsbach, 72, is a chiropractor and is not licensed to practice medicine in Mexico or California. He practiced in Southern California in the 1970s and 1980s and faced a variety of charges. In 1971, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of practicing medicine without a license.

In 1996, he was indicted by federal officials on charges of illegally bringing $250,000 worth of unapproved drugs into the United States and of not paying income taxes. Under a plea agreement, he paid back taxes but avoided jail time.

Interviewed by telephone from his home in the upscale San Diego suburb of Bonita, Donsbach blamed the closure on the U.S. medical establishment and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which he said had been pursuing him for years. “We’ve been open for ... years doing this,” he said, adding that Mexican officials “checked us out in June and gave us a clean bill of health.”

“It’s all a setup, a U.S. thing,” he said, predicting that his clinic would reopen within a week or so. “The moment they close down a clinic, they open it up very quickly, the same place, same people.”

Mexican officials said the clinic will remain closed for at least 30 days. The clinic could be allowed to reopen if hospital officials can demonstrate they were operating under the terms of their license.

King arrived at his clinic after he had several conversations with her children, Donsbach said. “It wasn’t a casual thing. They investigated after two members of their congregation had come here and benefited.”

By the time she arrived, however, King was very ill, he said. “We were just trying to keep the woman alive during the two days she was there.”

The Hospital Santa Monica is at the end of a winding dirt road in Rosarito Beach, 16 miles south of San Diego and within earshot of the crashing surf. A photograph of Donsbach with President George H.W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, hangs prominently near the facility’s central staircase.

Lorena Blanco, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana, said 20 American patients were at the Rosarito clinic when it was ordered closed.

On Friday, 18 patients remained at the facility. Mexican authorities said 14 are Americans or U.S. residents and two are Canadian. The others are from Australia and Italy.

The U.S. Consulate is helping relocate them back to the states. All are able to walk, Blanco said.

“We’ve had four consular officers at the clinic for the past two days helping them with the paperwork that’s necessary for their departure and assisting those who need help returning to the U.S.,” she said.

Patients were being treated for a variety of ailments, including cancer and obesity.

Dick Doletzky, a 65-year-old cancer patient from Michigan, said he had seen King being wheeled into the clinic. “She wasn’t speaking. She looked very ill,” he said.

Doletzky said his wife had used a battery-operated fan to cool King as they both received treatment in a metal-domed oxygen chamber that another patient said “looks like a spaceship.”

Bernice Britt, 50, of Lake County, Calif., said she was in a condition similar to King’s when she arrived at the facility last year. “I was basically dying,” said Britt, who traveled to Mexico from Lake County on Friday after hearing of the allegations against Donsbach.

Grape-sized tumors had covered her back, shoulders and neck when she first arrived last year, Britt said. Now all but two are gone. “This place is doing miracles,” she said.

Grace Kramer of Connecticut, whose husband was being treated for lung cancer, also saw King. She said the presence of such a prominent woman at the facility showed the patients who sought treatment there were not ignorant.

“I looked at her, and I thought, ‘God, what a beautiful woman,’ ” Kramer said. “She was worldly, she was informed and trusted her church members who came here and were healed.”

Others have a far more negative view. Adriana Morones of Los Angeles said her sister, Dulce L. Medina, 41, died at the clinic Sept. 20 after undergoing a weight-loss procedure that is experimental in the United States.

The family now believes that Medina died of poor medical care at the hands of careless or inexperienced doctors.

“They called us and said she passed away” from a heart attack, Morones said in a recent interview. “They said they tried for 45 minutes to revive her ... but I don’t believe them.”

The family filed a complaint with Quackwatch, an organization that monitors what it considers fraudulent alternative health practices.

Donsbach “is fairly persuasive,” said Dr. Stephen Barrett, who operates the Quackwatch website. “I’ve gotten more inquires from people about him than most.”

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Tobar reported from Mexico City and Marosi from Rosarito Beach. Times staff writers Tony Perry in San Diego, Shari Roan in Los Angeles, H.G. Reza in Tijuana and Carlos Martinez in Mexico City contributed to this report.