Therapy: Psychic Surgery

The American Medical Association has been warring against questionable treatment ever since the group was founded in 1847. Yet the battle is endless and so far from being won that this month the A.M.A. convened what it called a national conference on quackery in Chicago.* The A.M.A.’s president-elect, Manhattan’s Dr. Gerald D. Dorman, sadly reported that if today’s Americans cannot find the quacks they want in the U.S., they will go halfway around the world for them.

Just a year ago, Dorman said, 108 Americans and two Canadians chartered a plane and flew to Baguio, summer capital of the Philippines. They were seeking “psychic surgery” at the hands of Antonio Agpaoa, who styles himself “Dr. Tony.” Where Agpaoa ever picked up the title of Dr. is unclear; he is a school dropout (at the third grade) and, said Dorman, is a former sleight-of-hand artist. He claims that he can perform abdominal, heart and even brain surgery with his bare hands, using no anesthesia or aseptic precautions. He also claims that he can close the surgical opening without leaving a scar, which is perfectly logical, since his laying on of hands actually involves no opening.

Even more disturbing to Dorman is the fact that when “Dr. Tony” visited the U.S. in 1967 to drum up trade, he was able to address meetings in hotels, churches “and other respectable locations,” and showed his movies at a TV-industry convention. The Philippine Board of Medical Examiners has asked the courts to enjoin Agpaoa from “illegally practicing medicine.” But he has imitators.

From Unborn Lambs. In Europe, said Dorman, the “rejuvenators” hold forth, promising to “make you young again” or revitalize a “wornout” part of the body. He cited Rumania’s Dr. Anna Asian, who claims to restore senile and decrepit patients with injections of procaine (Novocain) and vitamins. American patients have tried the treatment with no medically provable benefits. If Asian’s claims were true, says Dr. Nathan Shock of the National Institutes of Health, “you’d be adding ten years to your life every time the dentist filled a tooth.”

In Switzerland, Professor Paul Niehans attracts wealthy Americans and Europeans alike* with his “cellular therapy,” in which embryonic cells from the organs of unborn lambs are injected (TIME, Aug. 31, 1959). Niehans is hardly in the same league with some of the practitioners cited by Dorman; he is a licensed physician with the proper credentials and an impressive personality. He carefully selects patients who are likely to respond to his treatment, which includes rest, good care and good food, and excludes liquor and tobacco. That is enough to insure that many will feel better. But there is no scientific evidence that his cellular treatment has any value, said Dorman, and of course any injection of foreign protein could cause a bad reaction.

Down Mexico Way. By virtue of propinquity, Canada and Mexico are meccas for questionable healers seeking across-the-border trade. But Canada’s drug laws are about as strict as the U.S. code, and the Ottawa government forbids the distribution of a dubious cancer drug, “Laetrile.” It also forbids shipments between provinces of “Liefcort,” a hormone preparation for arthritis dispensed by Dr. Robert Liefmann in Montreal. Liefmann is now appealing in the Quebec courts against a medical board decision suspending him from practice for five years, for allowing unlicensed assistants to give his treatment.

But, said Dorman, both Laetrile and Liefcort are still available in Mexico, especially in border towns near California and Texas. San Diego is the headquarters for a lay group named the International Association of Cancer Victims and Friends, which drums up business for the Mexican clinics “where the discredited and worthless cancer products are used.”

Dorman pointed out that it took the Food and Drug Administration almost 20 years to end U.S. sales of a phony cancer medicine produced by self-styled “Dr.” Harry Hoxsey in Texas. The federal judge presiding over the case was taking the preparation himself to prevent recurrence of what he thought was cancer of the stomach. (It wasn’t.) Now, said Dorman, a former nurse of Hoxsey’s is making and selling the brew in Mexico.

Lest anyone conclude that medical quackery is only a foreign specialty, A.M.A. President Dwight L. Wilbur offered some sobering estimates of the annual take from the domestic variety. He cited the FDA’s standard figure of about $1 billion a year but suggested that this covered only interstate quackery. Wilbur estimated that intrastate quackery, immune to federal authority, probably mulets the sick of another $1 billion.

* The A.M.A. defines quackery as the sale or administration of drugs and treatments that are not approved by legally constituted medical authorities, either because their value has not been proved or because they have been shown to be worthless. This covers the activities of M.D.s as well as those of unlicensed practitioners. * Among them: Pope Pius XII, King Ibn Saud of Arabia, the Imam of Yemen, Georges Braque, Somerset Maugham, Gloria Swanson. Though Niehans did not personally treat Sir Winston Churchill or Konrad Adenauer, they used his cellular injections.