Sunland, California, 2004–2005: dowsing, a Rife machine and “magic drops” for a man with spreading kidney cancer
When Clive McLean developed back pain and twitching on his left side in August 2004, an oncologist at UCLA, Dr. David Hoffman, found kidney cancer that had already reached his brain. Hoffman told the couple the outlook was grim, but offered options: gamma-knife radiation for the brain tumours, removal of the diseased kidney, and interleukin-2, a drug that produces a good response in a minority of patients with this cancer, some of whom survive for years.
McLean had been a client of Feline Butcher’s nutrition practice for about fifteen years. According to his widow, Erica McLean, Butcher advised against surgery and, two days before the radiation treatment, brought a visitor to the house: David Chuah. Chuah presented himself as a biochemist and a cancer doctor, Erica told the Times, and said he could cure her husband.
He then gave a demonstration. Clive held bottles of remedies while Chuah swung a dowsing rod around him; by Erica’s account, the size of the circles the rod traced was supposed to show which remedies he needed. The McLeans left that first visit $450 poorer, with two products called “magic drops” and “C-3 drops.”
After the radiation, the couple told Hoffman they would pursue alternative treatment instead of his plan. Hoffman did not try to talk them out of it. He told the Times that the dowsing rod and the drops were never mentioned to him, and that he learned of the promises of a cure only at the end.
Over the fall and winter, according to Erica McLean’s account to the Times:
By February 2005 Clive could barely walk. Erica says Butcher advised against returning to Hoffman or having an MRI, on the grounds that tests would weaken him further. Those tests would have shown how far the cancer had progressed.
On March 17, 2005, Chuah arrived with a large bag of new pills and powders. Clive, by then down from 155 to 95 pounds, lay unresponsive in a rented hospital bed. Erica says that when she asked how to use the new products, Chuah instead asked to use the family computer, typed up a bill for $120,000 and waited for a cheque before catching his flight home to British Columbia.
She asked for his Social Security number; he said he didn’t know it. She ordered him out of the house. Clive McLean died twelve days later. Doctors told the Times the treatments he had paid for were useless.
| Paid to | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| David Chuah | $18,630 | Plus the $120,000 bill, which he did not pursue |
| Feline Butcher | about $20,000 | Her attorney said she was innocent of the allegations and had nothing to do with McLean’s death |
| Studio City Health Center | $18,000 | For treatments performed at the clinic, where Butcher was listed as office manager; Erica said Clive received no direct care from the physician there |
| Per-session fees | $75–$175 | $175 per vitamin drip, $150 per Rife session, $75 per colonic |
Erica McLean complained to the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, which investigated both Chuah and Butcher and, by early 2006, had referred the case to the district attorney for possible charges of grand theft and practising medicine without a licence.
Charges were eventually laid against Butcher, not Chuah. In 2008 the Los Angeles City Attorney’s office prosecuted her in Los Angeles Superior Court on more than a dozen counts of practising medicine without a licence and one count of grand theft, all arising from her treatment of Clive McLean; she pleaded not guilty. Contemporary reports put the count at 17 or 18. After a trial of about three weeks, the jury was reported to have returned verdicts of not guilty on all counts on November 14, 2008. That report comes from online postings made at the time; QuackeryWatch has not yet confirmed it from a court record or a mainstream news report.
Erica McLean pressed the case for more than three years, helped by a private investigator who worked for her without charge. In 2008 she told a Los Angeles media blog that Chuah had left the country. QuackeryWatch has found no record that Chuah was charged in California or that any Canadian authority took action against him.
While the criminal case against Butcher was pending, the Medical Board of California filed an accusation against Dr. Charles E. Law, Jr., the physician whose Studio City clinic Butcher worked from (Case No. 17-2005-168509, filed June 18, 2008). It concerned three patients. The Board abbreviated their names, but the first, “C.M.,” matches Clive McLean in every particular: a client of Butcher’s since 1991, diagnosed at Cedars-Sinai on August 16, 2004 with kidney cancer that had spread to the brain, and dead of it in March 2005. The accusation alleged that:
The Board charged Law with repeated negligent acts, gross negligence and inadequate records. The second patient in the accusation, “J.L.,” another longtime Butcher client, was given vitamin C infusions while ill in May 2006 and died on May 10, 2006; the coroner gave the cause as undetermined. According to Quackwatch, Law settled in 2009 by a stipulation in which he admitted fault, and was placed on four years’ probation. It was his second discipline: in 1995 his licence had been revoked over record-keeping, with the revocation stayed and five years’ probation imposed.
The accusation does not mention David Chuah, and the Rife sessions, dowsing and “magic drops” Erica McLean described are not part of it; the Board’s case was about Law’s own conduct. The Board gives McLean’s date of death as on or about March 25, 2005; the Times gave March 29.
If you know any of these facts, or were treated by David Chuah, QuackeryWatch would like to hear from you.
Clive McLean’s cancer was very likely to kill him whatever he chose; his oncologist said so plainly. But conventional treatment offered him a real if slim chance of remission or more time, and he gave it up for remedies chosen by a swinging rod. His widow’s point to the Times was that the cost was not only the money: it was the months he spent being driven to colonics and drips instead of living the time he had left.
The case also shows how hard such practitioners are to reach. The man who took the most money was, by all accounts, a visitor from another country who could simply fly home, whose credentials could not be checked, and who answered to no licensing body on either side of the border.
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