Providing a substitute to surgery

Paul Clinton

For more than two decades, Julian Whitaker has been offering clients

his brand of alternative medicine, via the route of vitamins, oxygen

treatments and other methods off the beaten path.

Whitaker, who founded the Newport Beach-based Whitaker Wellness

Institute in 1979, has argued that his therapies are better than

surgery, at least for heart disease, arthritis and other painful

ailments.

Whitaker says he thinks that surgical recommendations are usually

a business decision, not a medical one.

“No surgeon is going to say you don’t need it and stay in

business,” Whitaker said. “Ninety percent of bypass surgery is

unnecessary.”

Instead of the knife, Whitaker offers the chamber.

Patients sign up for a week’s worth of treatments in a hyperbaric

oxygen chamber, where they are given “pure oxygen.” Reclining on beds

inside deep-sea-like steel chambers, with small portholes to allow

technicians to check up on them, the patients receive a dose of 100%

oxygen at double the air pressure. At sea level, people breathe a

cocktail of 20% oxygen and 80% nitrogen.

Other items from the treatment menu are chelation vitamin

injections, acupuncture, reflexology and prolotherapy, in which a

vitamin fluid is injected around joints to reduce pain.

Whitaker also offers a treatment known as Enhanced External

Counter Pulsation, where the patient is wrapped in a body stocking

and undergoes compressions of their legs. Whitaker says the treatment

improves circulation.

A weeklong treatment regiment of any of these treatments, which

costs between $4,000 and $6,000, is designed to keep the client free

of drugs and surgery, Whitaker said.

Whitaker, the editor of Health & Healing, the nation’s largest

health newsletter, has also been a thorn in the side of the Federal

Drug Administration.

He won a major victory as a participant in a lawsuit against the

federal agency in 1999, when a federal appellate court judge,

supported a Whitaker-supported claim that producers of vitamins and

supplements could make certain “health claims” on the labels of their

products.

Over the past decade, Whitaker has participated in half a dozen

lawsuits challenging the FDA’s authority to ban claims on product

bottles. These cases are still tied up in the courts.

“The agency’s policy is not to comment on pending litigation,”

agency spokesman Jason Brodsky said.