Miracle in a Bottle
Raymond Borkholder lounges placidly on a vinyl chair in a clinic that looks like a dungeon crossed with a 1970s condo.
Chains dangle from the ceiling above rows of similar recliners. Medical tape binds Borkholder’s arm to slabs of orange foam. Hanging from the chain above him is a glass bottle filled with an amber liquid the consistency of vegetable oil. The substance bubbles as it completes its route, flowing from the bottle to a needle buried in his constricted arm.
Borkholder wears his standard religious uniform, a blue long-sleeved shirt and black pants. His yellowed beard, cropped close to the angles of his jaw, is nearly a foot long. He’s surrounded by about 20 geriatric patients, also hitched to glass bottles, watching daytime shows on nearby TVs.
A farmer and part-time welder, Borkholder lives in an Amish community 20 miles outside South Bend, Michigan. In the late ’90s, he says, his world was a slow-moving blur. He weighed close to 350 pounds and had been diagnosed with osteoporosis, diabetes and congestive heart failure. Bloated and partially blind, he spent nearly a year and a half immobilized. He’d sired 13 children, five of whom lived at home. He could provide for none of his 23 grandchildren. By then, medical problems were a family plague. Two sisters had gone blind from diabetes (one also had her leg amputated as a result of the disease); three brothers and a sister had dropped dead from diabetes or heart-related complications.
Then Borkholder heard about Dr. Edward McDonagh and his Kansas City clinic, which offered as treatment an astonishing curative known as chelation therapy.
Originally used to treat shipyard workers who’d been exposed to lead-based paint in Germany in the 1930s, chelation — pronounced key-lation — is now the FDA-approved treatment for lead poisoning. Its boom era was the 1960s, when auto-industry grunts in Detroit were still dipping car batteries in lead and some farmers cleaned their hands with gasoline.
The treatment consists of adding an amino acid — EDTA (ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid), the cleaning agent for root canals and a preservative in mayonnaise — directly to a patient’s bloodstream to remove potentially harmful metals from the body. Its name derives from the Greek chele, meaning claw — the procedure “claws” out metals, dissolving iron, mercury, copper, aluminum, nickel, lead, cobalt, zinc, iron cadmium, magnesia, magnesium and calcium. Stripped of such minerals, cells shrivel. But the therapy refuels cells with a follow-up IV drip of highly concentrated vitamins.
Sitting at a sparse desk in a bare-walled back office of the clinic, McDonagh’s partner, Dr. Charles Rudolph, explains the one problem with chelation therapy: No one knows how it actually works. Medical theories from the 1960s that called chelation a “roto-rooter” for the body’s veins have been debunked. Other theories since then have tried to explain its purported success.
“If you have to make one statement to show what happens when you get older, the soft tissue gets hard and the hard tissue gets soft,” Rudolph says. Chelation flips that process. “They are always painting the Golden Gate Bridge so it doesn’t rust. Well, if we paint our cells with antioxidants, they are going to break down less often,” he says, adding that women live longer than men because they lose metals during their menstrual cycles.
The McDonagh Medical Center occupies a nondescript commercial building in an office park behind a strip mall off Antioch Road in Gladstone. Inside the reception area, one wall is draped with a bedsheet-sized American flag; another is adorned by a photo of the office-sponsored Little League team. Outdated portraits of McDonagh and Rudolph, smiling in wide-lapel blazers, hang behind the check-in counter.
In the treatment room, patients sit close, sharing their near-death tales like addicts in a support group.
There’s Dick Cool, a 74-year-old Iowa man who has been dosing for eight years, reducing his artery blockage, he says, from 90 percent to 70 percent. And there’s Curtis Hoffman, a 72-year-old former grain and livestock farmer — two of his arteries collapsed after a bypass in 1990, but now he can dance polkas. There’s Mark Wubbon, 66, a South Dakotan who once sold his 1,500-head hog farm because he suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, a perforated lining in his stomach and congestive heart failure. His memory was so bad that he carried a note card in his front pocket to write down where he parked. He has replaced it with a to-do list.
The blue-shirted, bonnet-clad Amish gather in one corner.
“I’ve seen a lot of miracles happen here,” Borkholder says later. “One of the first things I noticed is, when you get into the chelation room, that’s where the healing begins, because everyone has their story and everyone is positive about it. You go into the chelation room, and we are basically bonded together like a family.”
In 1998 Borkholder drained 11 bottles in two weeks, then 33 in a month, then more in monthly doses. This month, when he celebrated his 57th birthday, he weighed in at just under 300 pounds and could ride his bicycle the 8-mile round trip to work. He’d also spent roughly $75,000 consuming more than 270 bottles of the drug.
Every day, between thirty and fifty patients visit the McDonagh Medical Center, filling the parking lot with cars from as far away as Indiana and Texas. The basic treatment starts at about $100 a session, but the clinic recommends that its chelation patients complete a 30-bottle series and come back for booster sessions. The treatment hasn’t been approved by the FDA, so Medicare doesn’t cover the cost. Patients pay up-front and sign a liability waiver.
The center offers sick people one thing that traditional medicine doesn’t: hope. But McDonagh’s thriving chelation therapy business has made his clinic the biggest target of the Missouri State Board of Registration for the Healing Arts. The state licensing board has spent years trying to prove that epic success stories like Borkholder’s are campfire tales stoked with shoddy medical records and unsubstantiated studies. The University of Kansas recently joined a first-ever National Institutes of Health study to try to determine whether chelation therapy is really effective. The results of the five-year trial should settle a decades-old feud.
The McDonagh Center calls chelation a liquid alternative to bypass surgery. Center literature boasts that the elixir can dissolve arterial blockage, increase circulation by 30 percent to 40 percent and help smokers recoup 10 percent to 20 percent of their lung capacity. It is also a diuretic and a fountain of youth. “I’ve got 80-year-olds that pass for 60,” Rudolph says.
McDonagh, the clinic’s lithe, nearly bald 72-year-old founder, still works there. On a recent fall day, he wore a white lab coat and walked the halls quietly. He spoke little but had a firm handshake. Ducking into an exam room, he offered the waiting patient a jab at traditional medicine: “I looked at the records — you must need surgery” he said as an icebreaker, drawing a round of laughs as he closed the door.
McDonagh declined to speak with the Pitch. Though he was once known as a frank, upbeat banterer, the last half-decade’s legal and media scrutiny have left him wary, says Rudolph, who acts as the company’s mouthpiece. Now in his late 50s, Rudolph looks like a caricature of the shaggy doctor with the linebacker build depicted in his office head shot. He’s a thicker man with thinner hair who recently started taking chelation to lose some of his roughly 300 pounds.
When McDonagh opened shop in 1962, Rudolph explains, he entered an unregulated industry. He got in early, gaining more clients with each passing generation and locking up business in the region. As controversy regarding the safety and effectiveness of chelation therapy escalated, his burgeoning clinic became an industry flash point. Patients revered him as a medical wiz; traditional doctors condemned him, calling him a profiteering con.
But McDonagh didn’t get into alternative medicine to earn money. He did it to save his marriage.
Norma McDonagh had mood swings. They hit just after the couple married in the early ’60s.
Each morning, she’d slug down two, three, sometimes four cups of coffee and chase them with twice as many cigarettes. Her generally pleasant early morning vibe would shift toward cantankerousness as the day progressed. But McDonagh noticed that when his wife ate, her temper mellowed. The simple conclusion was that she’d been irritable because she was hungry. But the cause-and-effect reaction was so pronounced that he began considering the possibility that her attitude might be related to a medical condition.
He was a doctor, a 1961 graduate of the Kansas City College of Osteopathic Medicine (now the University of Health Sciences in Kansas City), but he couldn’t diagnose the illness. Neither could several other local practitioners.
The answer would arrive through bulk mail. One day McDonagh received a leaflet for an alternative medicine seminar in St. Louis. The subject: How to treat angry and depressed people. The newlyweds took a cross-state road trip and learned something McDonagh hadn’t found in textbooks: That Norma suffered from a glucose metabolic defect and hypoglycemia. The prescribed natural remedies worked. Life for the couple became bearable.
McDonagh’s ensuing search for knowledge would form a foundation for his practice — and a narrative in later court documents. He attended another seminar in Florida in 1962, where he heard a doctor recount the wonders of chelation therapy. Returning to Kansas City, he went to the library to read up on the concept. He found that chelation was mostly dismissed by his fellow general practitioners, who all seemed to say the same thing: This stuff doesn’t work. It’s quackery. It will kill people. If it was any good, we’d all be doing it.
McDonagh would come to believe that the medical establishment was engaging in what he called a money-motivated “cover-up.” Traditional medicine’s devotion to invasive surgeries troubled him. So he left the city to work at a hospital in Cameron, Missouri, a town of 8,000 people where McDonagh figured he could conduct health experiments unnoticed. He worked with last-ditch cases: Patients who had already visited three or four doctors, who were on multiple prescription medications and suffered from a number of maladies. Patients who had nothing to lose by betting on a long shot.
He ran a medical boot camp, hospitalizing men and women and treating them with chelation every day for thirty days, then laying off for a month before repeating the process. Patients suffered bruising from their fingertips to their shoulders on both arms and had cabin fever, he later told the court. But those with high blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes and kidney problems seemed to be improving.
“I was just elated with the success we were getting, and I thought, gee, you know … everybody in the country should be aware of this, because there’s a treatment that can really help people,” he would later testify. “Then I thought I better back off a bit, because it’s new to me. It’s new to everybody else in the area. These patients are doing great and so wonderful. But what happens in three or four years? Maybe their liver is going to fall out. Maybe they’re going to have kidney failure. So I just kept my mouth shut. We observed them.”
But McDonagh also recruited more subjects, spreading the word by writing a column for a rural health journal called Acres, USA. He spoke to area Lions Club chapters, talked to schoolchildren and addressed national alternative-medicine conferences. In the ’70s, he left Cameron; before the decade was out, he had set up the Gladstone clinic to accommodate his swelling load of patients. By then, McDonagh had relegated his clients to outpatient status because insurance companies weren’t picking up the tab for overnight stays. He also added an exercise component — 30 minutes of low-strain movement — and a special “no-white” diet that banned sugars and starches such as rice and potatoes.
Splitting his time between the clinic and the now-closed Park Lane Medical Center in Raytown, he tried to apply what he’d learned. But after Park Lane disciplined him for taking the then-maverick action of adding vitamin C to a patient’s post-operation IV (the procedure has since been proven harmless when it’s done in small increments), he decided to concentrate exclusively on his own practice.
Business boomed, and in 1978 he took on a partner. Rudolph was a biochemist who had done post-doctoral work at the University of Oklahoma and earned a medical degree from the Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine and had worked alongside McDonagh at Park Lane.
The industry grew, and chelationists had organized, joining the American College for the Advancement of Medicine to develop a formal chelation protocol in the mid-’70s. Another group, the American Board of Chelation Therapists, offered more professional status for doctors who met specific criteria. By following protocol, publishing papers and submitting their records for reviews, McDonagh and Rudolph were dubbed ACAM fellows and ABCT diplomats. It was, Rudolph says, “the highest you can be in all the societies.”
Chelationists regulated themselves, sidestepping the need for FDA approval by asking patients to sign liability waivers.
But national opposition against alternative medicine had organized, too, and McDonagh had set up shop in hostile territory.
In 1984, John Renner, a doctor from Independence, joined the National Council Against Health Fraud, a watchdog group that had started in Southern California in 1977. Renner practiced at St. Mary’s Hospital and maintained professor posts in family practice at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Medical School and in preventive medicine at the University of Kansas School of Medicine. Dubbed the “Quackbusters,” doctors in the NCAHF believed that chelation therapy was unethical and should be banned.
Renner took his health-fraud-exposing efforts to extremes, dragging reporters to health expos where he would bandage his body or confine himself to a wheelchair and solicit bunk advice and remedies. Soon after joining the NCAHF, he started his own patient-protection group, the Consumer Health Information Research Institute, housed in a four-story building at 35th Street and Broadway.
Elected to the NCAHF board of directors in 1987, Renner would become president in 1998. His crosstown rivalry with McDonagh sparked lawsuits that burned for decades.
Renner prodded the Missouri Board of Registration for the Healing Arts to investigate safety standards at McDonagh’s clinic. In 1989, the board withheld judgment on the validity of chelation therapy because McDonagh’s practice predated regulation. Instead, the board questioned McDonagh’s medical training.
Though he was state-certified for general practice, McDonagh failed a board-issued oral exam for competency in 1991. According to news reports at the time, he flubbed questions about CPR, hypertension and antibiotic use. By 1995, he’d also failed two board-issued written exams and had his license revoked. But he was allowed to continue working, pending an appeal. In early 1997, he took a less-rigorous test to be certified by the American Osteopathic Board of Family Physicians as a family practitioner and continued practicing. Meanwhile, two patients had complained to the state about McDonagh’s use of chelation therapy.
It was the ammunition Missouri health regulators needed. In December 1996, the board brought suit against McDonagh, alleging 13 counts of negligence and malpractice.
A state investigation of McDonagh’s records revealed a pattern: Since the late ’70s, he’d diagnosed patients without obtaining their medical records or recording the results of their physical exams. Other mistakes were charted on the racked bodies of former patients. In the 1980s, he misdiagnosed a case of gangrene, which festered until the patient fell into a coma and had to have his leg amputated above the knee.
He gave another patient one-quarter of the dose for a normal flu vaccination while administering thyroid injections that, according to court documents, caused the patient to feel “hyper.” When the patient complained, McDonagh reduced the thyroid shots but didn’t discontinue them. A third patient with a blocked artery claimed to have suffered several strokes under McDonagh’s care. The doctor had prescribed Monistat, a yeast-infection cream, for a patient with a bacterial urinary-tract infection. On many patients, he ran batteries of what appeared to be unnecessary tests — pulmonary tests on nonsmokers, seemingly inconsequential tests for food allergies, HIV, anemia and hepatitis B — on the theory that the body was like a crossword puzzle whose seemingly unrelated problems might be connected. In 1989, McDonagh had settled a $1.5 million suit for malpractice.
The only consistent thing about his files was that each record had serious inconsistencies, argued David Meyers, a KU cardiologist who analyzed McDonagh’s records for the board’s initial case against the doctor. Meyers testified that McDonagh hadn’t used orthodox methods to treat anything. In some cases, McDonagh’s prescriptions and diagnoses ran contrary to existing medical knowledge.
On the witness stand, McDonagh argued that he had kept slipshod records, recording only positives about his experiments, to avoid possible liability lawsuits. His handwriting was illegible because he had cut nerves and tendons in his right hand on a broken bottle while sliding into third base during a childhood game of sandlot baseball, he claimed.
On cross-examination, the board’s attorney, Kansas City-based Glenn Bradford, asked McDonagh whether he thought that not being able to produce data to substantiate his studies might weaken the validity of his claims.
“I don’t know,” McDonagh said.
“You don’t know?” Bradford pressed.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you have an opinion?”
“I don’t have an opinion. I don’t know.”
“Do you think it weakens the validity of your conclusions as represented by your papers that you can’t show your underlying data?”
“I think it might.”
McDonagh prevailed in the initial trial — and won again after years of appeals — by soliciting “expert” opinions about the safety of the procedure from ACAM- and ABCT-certified chelation therapists, some of whom used his studies to push their own businesses. In 2001 the board appealed again, sending the central debate — whether alternative medical practices could be regulated by peer groups such as ACAM rather than by traditional state agencies — to the Missouri Supreme Court.
In the meantime, one of McDonagh’s fellow chelationists fared worse before state health regulators. In 1996, the Missouri medical board filed a malpractice suit against Lawrence Dorman, a McDonagh protégé who practiced in Independence and had attended the University of Health Sciences a few years behind his Gladstone counterpart. Dorman tells the Pitch that he believes chelation therapy is safe — he says he even made himself the guinea pig, dosing himself to gauge effects before treating patients. Until four years ago, he hosted a Saturday-afternoon alternative-medicine radio show called You and Your Health on KCCV 760, a Christian-sponsored broadcast that reached Oklahoma, Iowa and Arkansas. Patient support was so strong that more than 300 of his clients rallied at the initial hearings, held at the Westin Crown Center.
Dorman lost his license in January 2002, after he was convicted of negligence and incompetence for injecting a patient — 54-year-old Edward St. Clair, minister of the New Life Fellowship Church — with hydrogen peroxide and causing a fatal heart attack. St. Clair’s wife also won a $68,000 wrongful-death settlement.
“Anything we do will be prosecuted ten times more heavily than their buddies doing traditional medicine,” Rudolph says of Missouri medical regulators. “I think it’s a travesty. If you had to put it in layman’s terms, I think Dorman got the electric chair for jaywalking. If that had been any other doctor other than a chelation doctor, he wouldn’t have lost the decision,” he says. “The board is discriminating against the general public. They are supposed to be protecting them against us alleged quacks, but what they are doing is screwing with health care.”
Case documents filed with the Missouri Supreme Court estimate that more than 1,000 clinics administer an average of 500,000 doses of chelation throughout the United States each year. But chelation is banned in Iowa, and in Kansas, its pioneers have kept a low profile. “We don’t advertise,” says Hugh Riordan, who runs the 40,000-square-foot Center for the Improvement of Human Functioning International in Wichita. Riordan says his holistic health business caters to patients from every state and from 47 countries and uses chelation conservatively. “We only chelate once a week, because it puts an extra load on the kidneys,” he says.
Bob Sager, an ACAM director and doctor in Liberal, Kansas, says he immigrated to the United States in the late ’80s to avoid a chelation ban in Canada. He treats a half-dozen patients with the cocktail.
“I do some now, but I’m very quiet about it,” Sager says. “I do not see it as a panacea.”
In the chelation industry, reputation grows by word of mouth, which makes the McDonagh Medical Center a mecca. And its status was elevated this August when, facing a Missouri Supreme Court decision that would require all parties to retry the case, the state agreed to settle out of court. Now, for the first time in years, the clinic may be able to practice without fear of prosecution.
The settlement binds the McDonagh Medical Center to a recently passed state rule mandating that chelation patients sign waivers that indicate their understanding that the therapy is of “no medical or osteopathic value.” After signing consent forms, they must wait three days to start the treatment. The center must also follow legal mandates for obtaining and filing patients’ medical histories. And in adherence with a 1999 Federal Trade Commission clampdown on false advertising, the center had to delete three self-published articles from its Web site (“Chelation Can Cure,” “Reversing Degeneration and Aging Through Chelation Therapy” and “Reversal of Terminal Congestive Heart Failure by EDTA Chelation Therapy”). Also, the board can make one unannounced inspection of McDonagh’s clinic a year.
By the time he won, McDonagh had spent more than $350,000 in legal fees and $30,000 for expert witnesses. The case outlived Renner, who died during open-heart surgery in 2000, and McDonagh’s wife, Norma, who died unexpectedly this past January.
But the chelation industry’s real victory might have come last month, when the University of Kansas Medical Center signed its first test patient for the study of chelation sanctioned by the National Institutes of Health. <p<> KU has furnished a hospital room with recliners and televisions. The $30 million, five-year trial will include more than 2,300 patients at 100 test sites and is more than 20 times larger than any previous study of chelation therapy. Data will be correlated by statisticians at Duke University’s Clinical Research Institute and by doctors at Harvard University.
The principal investigator is Jeanne Drisko, program director for KU’s department of integrated medicine, which piggybacks alternative medical techniques with traditional treatments for research inside the hospital.
She’s also a former McDonagh Center patient.
Drisko graduated with a medical doctorate from KU in 1979 and returned to work there nearly a decade later. In the mid-’90s, she spent a year commuting to Wichita to study under Riordan at the Center for the Improvement of Human Functioning International. She was treated at the McDonagh Center in the late ’90s with an intravenous bottle of vitamin C to clear up a bad respiratory-tract infection.
A few months ago, Drisko took over the study — from KU cardiologist David Meyers, who testified against McDonagh before the Missouri medical board in the ’90s. “The chelation community holds its evidence to be several thousand satisfied patients,” Meyers tells the Pitch. “Unfortunately, anecdotal evidence is always trumped by well-designed scientific studies. To date, there is no scientific evidence that it is effective.”
Drisko, though, is determined to prove otherwise. “The consumer is way ahead of the doctor,” Drisko says. “The conventional doctor is curious about these kinds of therapies but unsure of the evidence behind them. That’s why we’re here — to do research on alternative therapies.”
Drisko has spent months searching for test subjects, but it’s been difficult. Candidates must be at least 50 years old and have had a heart attack six weeks prior to enrollment. Most KU cardiologists don’t yet understand the therapy enough to pitch it in their own ward. Drisko has asked McDonagh for referrals and has gone as far as posting fliers in Wild Oats and Whole Foods stores and around the KU Medical Center campus. So far, two volunteers have signed up.
