Rosarito, Mexico – The cafeteria of the alternative-medicine clinic where Coretta Scott King died last week was full of true believers Wednesday afternoon, all swearing by the anti- cancer treatments of a man who never went to medical school and has a long history of fraud allegations against him in the United States.
That man, hospital founder Kurt Donsbach, was presiding over the room, asking for testimonials from his patients. Several said their doctors in the United States had told them to go home and wait to die.
Then they came to the holistic-health clinic 16 miles south of San Diego and discovered that Donsbach’s treatments worked.
“Nobody takes your hope away here,” said a 65-year-old Catholic nun and registered nurse who has ovarian cancer and asked not to be named.
To his critics, Donsbach is a huckster who lures people in fragile condition to his clinic in Mexico with empty promises of revolutionary treatments. Donsbach has no medical degree.
They say some become seriously ill or die from infections contracted at the clinic, known both as the Hospital Santa Monica and the Santa Monica Health Institute.
The U.S. Embassy said Friday that the clinic had been closed, but Mexican officials weren’t immediately available to explain why.
To his admirers, Donsbach is a practical healer who uses unconventional techniques to help the body’s immune system fight off cancer rather than bombard the patient with chemotherapy and radiation.
“We don’t have miracle therapies,” Donsbach said. “We have a mosaic of doing many different things to impede the progress of cancer in the body.”
Huckster or healer, Donsbach and his hospital are part of a long tradition in Tijuana and nearby Rosarito, where clinics offering treatments not approved in the United States have flourished for years under a government not famed for regulatory scruples.
In 1980, actor Steve McQueen received an anti-cancer treatment in Rosarito known as laetrile, made from apricot pits. He died a few months later.
King, 78, came to the hospital Jan. 26, suffering from ovarian cancer that had spread to her intestines, doctors said. She was also partially paralyzed from a stroke. Daughter Bernice King and a nurse accompanied her.
Donsbach said the family had heard about his clinic from members of their church congregation.
“They were faced with a wall,” he said. “There was no answer in allopathic medicine, and they wanted to try anything that might be beneficial.”
But the doctors who saw her, Humberto Seimandi and Rafael Cedeno, told reporters they could do nothing for her. King’s health was so precarious that they never started her on any of Donsbach’s treatments.
No autopsy was performed after she died Tuesday. The death certificate was signed by an adjunct member of the clinic’s staff, Dr. Carlos Guerrero Tejada.
The hospital is a modest, white, two-story building on a dirt road. Patients wander about with intravenous poles, receiving drips of hydrogen peroxide and vitamin C intended to boost the immune system. In one room, doctors heat tumors with microwaves to weaken them.
The building faces a small piece of Baja California beach, bathed in clean Pacific light. At sunset, if one looks out to sea and squints, the spot could be mistaken for a paradise.
For George Ott, 63, a cabinetmaker from Lake Peekskill, N.Y., this paradise quickly turned into hell. Last summer, Ott was told that the kidney cancer for which he had been treated two years earlier had returned, this time in his lungs.
Donsbach’s claim that 70 percent of his patients are still alive after three years, as well as his promise of a cure without heavy chemotherapy, sounded enticing to a dying man, so Ott paid $12,500 for a 10-day stay in early August. Within five days, he said, he contracted a blood infection from a dirty intravenous needle that damaged his heart and nearly killed him.
“Desperate people do desperate things, and sometimes not the smartest thing in the world,” he said.
Donsbach denied that Ott’s infection had resulted from a dirty needle and said the infection did not develop until the day before he left the clinic.
Some patients swear by the clinic, however. Luke Ring, 65, a retired surgical assistant from Texas, said he had kept his throat cancer at bay for three years using Donsbach’s treatments, especially one that mixed small doses of chemotherapy with glucose.
“Nothing is perfect,” he said. “But the treatment here is pointed toward raising the immune system to fight cancer.”
Donsbach dismisses questions about his checkered history or lack of medical credentials as irrelevant. He maintains that most of his patients do better than those receiving conventional therapies in the United States.
Meanwhile in Georgia, King’s home state was making plans to honor her in a sign of civil rights gains in the nearly 40 years since her husband’s assassination.
When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot April 4, 1968, Georgia’s few black legislators asked then-Gov. Lester Maddox, a die-hard segregationist, if King’s body could lie in honor in the state Capitol.
Maddox not only swore he would never authorize a public tribute of King in the Capitol rotunda, he was outraged to see state flags, then dominated by the Confederate Cross, flying at half-staff in tribute to a black man.
But today, Coretta Scott King was to become the first woman and first black to lie in honor at the state’s Capitol.
“This is not just a salute to Mrs. King. It’s a tribute to her and her husband and to all they stood for and did,” said U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga.
The state flag she helped change – now bearing a much smaller Confederate battle emblem – was lowered by Gov. Sonny Perdue upon news of her death and will wave at half-staff until her funeral Tuesday at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, where Bernice King is a minister.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.