Infertile {couples} turning to ‘controversial and harmful blood remedy’ in Mexican clinics – though the process is illegitimate in the US

• Couples at their wits end hoping to conceive are being encouraged to travel to Mexico to undergo a controversial blood therapy
• Lymphocyte immunization therapy or LIT has been suspended in the United States since 2002
• Couples are paying thousands of dollars to undergo the therapy – just across the border from Arizona
  

By James Nye

Published: 23:10 BST, 25 February 2013 | Updated: 19:49 BST, 27 February 2013

Parents desperate to conceive feel they have no choice but to travel to Mexican clinics to spend thousands of dollars in cash on a controversial and potentially dangerous blood therapy suspended in the United States.

Lymphocyte immunization therapy or LIT is fast becoming a last resort for couples for whom IVF and natural conception has failed but because it is not offered by U.S. insurance firms would-be moms and dads are flooding over the border in hope.

Pioneered by American fertility physician Dr. Alan Beer, his eponymous Center for Reproductive Immunology in Los Gatos, California, is actively encouraging parents into shady dealings with Mexican physicians during which cash is handed over in turn for access to treatment.

Dr. Alan Beer, who died in 2006, theorized that a woman’s immune system can become hyper-defensive, mistaking her partner’s sperm as a disease and actively stop a fetus from growing.

‘Effectively, women become serial killers of their own babies,’ he wrote in his 2006 book, ‘Is Your Body Baby-Friendly?’ reported the San Francisco Chronicle.

Beer argued that LIT works by injecting a woman with her partner’s blood cells until her immune system fails to see them as foreign – much like an allergy shot in reverse.

The science of LIT argues that the therapy blocks prospective mother’s antibodies who have been trained to see male sperm as foreign invaders.

The course of treatment also is supposed to shift the body’s immune response to a state where it accepts foreign cells.

Beer claimed the credit for pioneering the treatment in the United States and said that in Mexico, LIT was responsible for achieving an astounding 78 percent success rate in parents who attended clinics there.

However, a 1999 study by the University of Chicago with women who had had more than three miscarriages came to different conclusions.

Eighty-six subjects over the course of their research underwent a course in LIT and 85 patients received a placebo according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

One-third of the LIT patients became pregnant, but 50 percent of the control group also became pregnant.

‘This therapy,’ the researchers concluded, ‘should not be offered as a treatment for pregnancy loss.’

So, in 2002 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration suspended it, citing the scientific findings of the University of Chicago that it does not work.

However, that move left prospective parents such as Jennifer Benito-Kowalski and Steve Kowalski without another option once natural conception and IVF had failed.

Ruling out adoption, and feeling the advance of time, 38-year-old Jennifer and her husband traveled to the Alan E. Beer Center for Reproductive Immunology and Genetic in Los Gatos for help.

Despite LIT being illegal in the United States, this has not stopped the doctors at Beer’s from directing hundreds of patients to leave the country to undergo the procedure – all paying cash in hand.

‘They’re couples who are very, very frustrated,’ said Dr. Edward Winger, the clinic’s director.

‘They’ve been through the system. They’ve been told, ‘Oh, if you just do this, it’ll work. Oh, if you just do IVF (in vitro fertilization), it’ll work.

‘I’m very convinced that this approach of going after the immune system, and making adjustments there, is an approach which is based rationally and does work.’

Encouraged by the physicians at Los Gatos, the Kowalski’s approached a clinic just over the Arizona border in Nogales, Mexico, run by Dr. German Quiroga.

Subsequently contacted via email by the doctor’s assistant, the Kowalski’s were asked to travel to meet in a McDonald’s in Tuscson and to bring $600.

‘It seems so movie-like,’ Jennifer recalled later to the San Francisco Chronicle. ‘I didn’t know what to expect.’

The nervous couple were told to leave their hotel the next day and drove to the border where they were instructed they would be picked up.

A van arrived and inside was Dr. German Quiroga and another couple from St. Louis headed for the clinic in Nogales also.

Altogether the group were transported across the border to Mexico to Nogales, known for its booming private cosmetic, dental and fertility clinics.

Taken up to Dr. Quiroga’s second floor office, he drew out Steve’s blood and made a solution from his white blood cells and then gave Jennifer four shots in each arm.

The procedure was so fast that later that afternoon they were back in Arizona.

Soon after, Jennifer developed red marks and itching on her skin – a common side-effect according to a 2006 survey of 2,600 LIT patients in Germany.

Failing to fall pregnant over the course of the first treatment, the Kowalskis paid for an additional four to the tune of $3,450, plus travel costs – but they felt this was a deal compared to the $12,000 average cost of IVF they had paid before.

‘You have a therapy that does not cost nearly as much as what IVF costs,’ said Los Gatos clinic director Winger to the San Francisco Chronicle, ‘and you can prevent needing a second failed IVF.’

The Los Gatos clinic is adamant it does not receive any money from LIT treatments that their patients seek outside the country.

Also, the Los Gatos clinic does not perform any treatments in which eggs and sperm are handled, the California Department of Public Health does not class it as a fertility clinic.

However, because of this and their experimental approach to medicine, many experts are unconvinced.

‘There’s no scientific evidence that’s consistent to support this theory,’ said the Kowalski’s own fertility physician at their local hospital to the San Francisco Chronicle.

‘But there have been a handful of patients who conceive after the immunotherapy.’

‘It makes no sense whatsoever and it’s potentially dangerous,’ said Dr. Joseph Hill III, a physician at the Fertility Centers of New England and a critic of Beer.

‘I’m surprised anyone in this country is still doing anything along those lines.’

Despite all their efforts, last year, after another miscarriage, the Kowalski’s decided to use a surrogate in India and halt LIT.

‘I don’t know if they (Beer’s clinic) would have ever said, ‘You guys ought to try something else, maybe we can’t help you after all,’ said Kowalski to the San Francisco Chronicle.

However, one patient, Jacquelyn Smit, 41, of Half Moon Bay in California has given Beer’s program the thumbs up after she became pregnant with twin boys.

She already had a daughter in 2007, but failed to conceive again and miscarried six times in three years.

Learning of LIT on the Internet, she went to the Beer clinic who told her she had a two percent chance of falling pregnant without their help.

Deciding to follow their advice she made her way to Mexico: ‘I don’t believe that I would have my twins if I hadn’t gone through their protocol,’ she said.

‘The conception was never the problem,’ she added. ‘It’s holding onto the pregnancy that was the problem. So I think it’s the way my body reacted to a pregnancy that had changed.’

However, Jennifer could never understand why she couldn’t fall pregnant, but is magnanimous about the program.

‘I know other women and they do go through the Beer protocol and it works for them,’ she said. ‘But it didn’t work for me.’