Miracle in a Bottle

Though he was state-certified for general practice, McDonagh failed a board-issued oral exam for competency in 1991. According to news reports at the time, he flubbed questions about CPR, hypertension and antibiotic use. By 1995, he'd also failed two board-issued written exams and had his license revoked. But he was allowed to continue working, pending an appeal. In early 1997, he took a less-rigorous test to be certified by the American Osteopathic Board of Family Physicians as a family practitioner and continued practicing. Meanwhile, two patients had complained to the state about McDonagh's use of chelation therapy.

It was the ammunition Missouri health regulators needed. In December 1996, the board brought suit against McDonagh, alleging 13 counts of negligence and malpractice.

A state investigation of McDonagh's records revealed a pattern: Since the late '70s, he'd diagnosed patients without obtaining their medical records or recording the results of their physical exams. Other mistakes were charted on the racked bodies of former patients. In the 1980s, he misdiagnosed a case of gangrene, which festered until the patient fell into a coma and had to have his leg amputated above the knee.

He gave another patient one-quarter of the dose for a normal flu vaccination while administering thyroid injections that, according to court documents, caused the patient to feel "hyper." When the patient complained, McDonagh reduced the thyroid shots but didn't discontinue them. A third patient with a blocked artery claimed to have suffered several strokes under McDonagh's care. The doctor had prescribed Monistat, a yeast-infection cream, for a patient with a bacterial urinary-tract infection. On many patients, he ran batteries of what appeared to be unnecessary tests -- pulmonary tests on nonsmokers, seemingly inconsequential tests for food allergies, HIV, anemia and hepatitis B -- on the theory that the body was like a crossword puzzle whose seemingly unrelated problems might be connected. In 1989, McDonagh had settled a $1.5 million suit for malpractice.

The only consistent thing about his files was that each record had serious inconsistencies, argued David Meyers, a KU cardiologist who analyzed McDonagh's records for the board's initial case against the doctor. Meyers testified that McDonagh hadn't used orthodox methods to treat anything. In some cases, McDonagh's prescriptions and diagnoses ran contrary to existing medical knowledge.

On the witness stand, McDonagh argued that he had kept slipshod records, recording only positives about his experiments, to avoid possible liability lawsuits. His handwriting was illegible because he had cut nerves and tendons in his right hand on a broken bottle while sliding into third base during a childhood game of sandlot baseball, he claimed.

On cross-examination, the board's attorney, Kansas City-based Glenn Bradford, asked McDonagh whether he thought that not being able to produce data to substantiate his studies might weaken the validity of his claims.

"I don't know," McDonagh said.

"You don't know?" Bradford pressed.

"I don't know."

"Do you have an opinion?"

"I don't have an opinion. I don't know."

"Do you think it weakens the validity of your conclusions as represented by your papers that you can't show your underlying data?"

"I think it might."

McDonagh prevailed in the initial trial -- and won again after years of appeals -- by soliciting "expert" opinions about the safety of the procedure from ACAM- and ABCT-certified chelation therapists, some of whom used his studies to push their own businesses. In 2001 the board appealed again, sending the central debate -- whether alternative medical practices could be regulated by peer groups such as ACAM rather than by traditional state agencies -- to the Missouri Supreme Court.

In the meantime, one of McDonagh's fellow chelationists fared worse before state health regulators. In 1996, the Missouri medical board filed a malpractice suit against Lawrence Dorman, a McDonagh protégé who practiced in Independence and had attended the University of Health Sciences a few years behind his Gladstone counterpart. Dorman tells the Pitch that he believes chelation therapy is safe -- he says he even made himself the guinea pig, dosing himself to gauge effects before treating patients. Until four years ago, he hosted a Saturday-afternoon alternative-medicine radio show called You and Your Health on KCCV 760, a Christian-sponsored broadcast that reached Oklahoma, Iowa and Arkansas. Patient support was so strong that more than 300 of his clients rallied at the initial hearings, held at the Westin Crown Center.

Dorman lost his license in January 2002, after he was convicted of negligence and incompetence for injecting a patient -- 54-year-old Edward St. Clair, minister of the New Life Fellowship Church -- with hydrogen peroxide and causing a fatal heart attack. St. Clair's wife also won a $68,000 wrongful-death settlement.