Miracle in a Bottle

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.