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."