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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | February 2006 
Alternative-Medicine Clinics in Baja have History of Controversy
 Anne Cearley & Penni Crabtree - Union-Tribune
| | Yolanda Denise King hugged clinic founder Kurt W. Donsbach at a San Diego funeral home yesterday. (Nelvin Cepeda/Union-Tribune) |
Battling advanced ovarian cancer, Coretta Scott King joined a long list of desperate people to seek out questionable alternative medical therapies south of the border in Baja California.
The 78-year-old widow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was admitted Thursday to Hospital Santa Monica, an alternative cancer clinic in Rosarito Beach founded and directed by Kurt Donsbach, a former San Diego chiropractor. King died at the clinic at 1 a.m. yesterday, according to Lorena Blanco, spokeswoman with the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana.
The hospital's medical director, Humberto Seimandi, said King died of respiratory failure that was a result of medical complications. Those included a stroke and heart attack she suffered last year and the advanced ovarian cancer. One of her daughters was at her side at the time of her death.
No treatment at the clinic had been started before her death, he said.
“She had so many complications that we were actually just dealing with complications,” Seimandi said.
The Tijuana area has been a mecca for alternative medicine for more than 40 years, reaching the height of its fame in 1980 after actor Steve McQueen was treated for cancer at another Rosarito Beach clinic with laetrile, a treatment made from apricot pits. McQueen died a few months after his treatment.
Donsbach has had a long and controversial career promoting treatments that many medical and health-fraud experts consider useless or unproven. His clinic's Web site touts such therapies as microwave energy for “heating” cancer cells, and anti-cancer nutritional supplements formulated by Donsbach.
Though the clinic's Web site refers to Donsbach as “Dr.” and says he has “successfully treated thousands of critically ill patients,” it fails to mention that Donsbach has no medical degree. Nor does the Web site cite Donsbach's conviction in 1996 for federal tax evasion and smuggling illegal medicines across the border.
Dr. Stephen Barrett, director of Quackwatch, a nonprofit group that combats medical fraud, said the U.S. government should pressure Mexico to “clean up the Tijuana 'alternative' clinic cess pool.”
“When someone well-known and highly respected goes there it just demonstrates how vulnerable people are,” Barrett said.
Donsbach did not return telephone calls seeking comment.
King initially gave her name as Ruth Green when she arrived at the clinic, according to one of the clinic's physicians, Dr. Rafael Cedeño Barragán.
King's ovarian cancer was detected from a biopsy taken in the United States about six months ago, said Cedeño, who had reviewed her U.S. medical records.
Cedeño said King arrived in poor health, with fluid in her lungs. Her body was half-paralyzed from the stroke and the cancer had spread to her abdominal area. |
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