Miracle in a Bottle

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.