NYTimes.com
Martin and Coretta, Patron Saints of the American Civil Rights Movement
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DID THE FAITH OF CORETTA SCOTT KING DISPOSE HER TO BELIEVE IN A SHAM PRACTITIONER'S SHADY CANCER TREATMENTS IN MEXICO?!
According to Black Entertainment News, Hospital Santa Monica, the alternative medical center in Mexico’s Baja California
state, where Mrs. King spent
her final days, was shut down last week by the region’s top health regulator for serious
improprieties - conducting surgeries, X-ray procedures and internal medicine without
appropriate authorization...
inspectors (who) visited the two-story concrete hospital on (Feb. 2) to review hospital records following the media attention surrounding Mrs. King's death... found unconventional treatments and unknown substances at the facility, where King was being treated for ovarian cancer and other infirmities since suffering a stroke and heart attack last year.
It was in Room 34 where King died in her sleep.
A report in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution raised questions about the clinic the allegedly attended, the Hospital Santa Monica in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, about 16 miles south of San Diego. On its web site, the clinic claims to have “a very eclectic approach to the treatment of chronic degenerative disease, diseases by and large considered incurable by the orthodox medical profession.”
Most of the clinic’s clients are cancer patients “who have been told that there is no hope, all traditional therapies have failed,” states the clinic’s web site.
Donsbach the chiropractor works in mysterious ways to relieve his clients of their wealth.
Meanwhile, over @ Quack Watch a very skeptical Stephen Barrett, MD, questions the background of Hospital Santa Monica’s
founder and director, Kurt Donsbach.
According to Hospital Santa Monica’s web site, Donsbach is a DC, ND, and PhD... who "has long been recognized as a world leader in charting effective wholistic treatment programs for chronic degenerative diseases; particularly, cancer, cardiovascular disease, candidiasis and arthritis, as well as for detoxification and rejuvenation."
SO HELP ME OUT HERE: Are devout religious believers more, or less, likely to be taken in by the claims of such charlatans as Kurt Donsbach? Mrs. King was a demonstrably bright woman. She's an alumnus of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
She was an important figure in the movement to gain civil rights for African-Americans, founding the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta, and fighting for a national holiday to honor his birth.
Mrs. King was, by all accounts, a Bible-believing adherent to Christianity, which teaches the resurrection of the human soul. On the one hand we must assume that we have a strong, devout Christian believer in the promise of her God's afterlife where she will be reunited with her slain husband; on the other hand we have a 78-year-old widow with numerous ailments, any one of which probably qualifies her as imminently terminally ill - who is desperate to hold onto life.
In the face of the unknown - her blessed assurance gives way to grasping for the snake oil, the impotent elixirs of the the medicine show huckster. Is this another sort of "death-bed conversion"? Don't expect living, healthy, faithful adherents to acknowledge it - that sometimes the scam artist's pitch is no less credible to the terminal patient than a lifetime of fantastic promises taken from the book they call holy.
