Rau, who is seventy-six, has been practicing for forty-four years, mostly in the northeastern canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden, which includes Schwellbrunn. He estimates that he’s seen more than ten thousand patients. The back cover of his book “The Swiss Secret to Optimal Health,” which was published in English in 2007, touts him as the “Mozart of medicine.” He has taught hundreds of other doctors, naturopaths, and healers his techniques.
Traditional doctors do not generally rate the kinds of treatments given by Rau highly. American health authorities, for example, do not consider live-blood analysis to be a reliable diagnostic tool. The F.D.A. regards ozone as having no “known useful medical application in specific, adjunctive, or preventive therapy.” The distribution of ozone machines for medical treatment is prohibited in this country—at least for now. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who currently leads the Department of Health and Human Services, is a champion of alternative treatments. (Rau told me that he approves of Kennedy’s push to “really evaluate vaccinations” and his efforts to study alternative techniques.)
In February, 2021, Rau, who had run a clinic in another Swiss town for more than twenty-five years, opened BioMed with Alexandra Kotthaus, a German doctor. Kotthaus, who is fifty, had been working with Rau for several years. She became interested in practicing alternative medicine because of a metabolic condition related to her liver. She also considers herself unusually sensitive to medication. “It took me a lot of time, power, and investigation to heal myself,” she told me.
That March, a seventy-six-year-old patient from a wealthy Cypriot family, Evie Lanitis, arrived at BioMed, complaining of a host of minor maladies, including bursitis in her toes, dental pain, and digestive issues. She was the sort of person who often finds her way to Rau. Many of his patients are well-to-do women. (Women are generally more likely than men to see doctors when they don’t feel well, and the gaps in research on how illnesses affect women leave an opening for alternative practitioners.) Alexandra Manglis, Lanitis’s daughter, told me that her mother “erred on the side of hypochondriac.” Lanitis told Kotthaus that she wanted to improve her stamina so that she could be a good grandmother—in three months, Manglis’s first child was due.
Lanitis’s treatment began, in part, with a yarrow compress placed over her abdomen, to soothe her liver. The next day, she got a ginger wrap for her kidney area. She was also prescribed the hyperthermia treatment, followed by a “restorative infusion” and then a colon cleanse. Rau wrote in Lanitis’s medical log, “Healthy! Really has mostly stomach symptoms and sleep problems.”
After a week or so at BioMed, Lanitis was given an I.V. infusion of alpha-lipoic acid. The substance has long been available as a pill; health-food stores often market it as an antioxidant supplement that can help alleviate nerve pain, among other benefits. In pill form, alpha-lipoic acid may ease symptoms, cause mild harm, or do nothing. But an intravenous dose reaches the bloodstream more thoroughly. In the U.S., the F.D.A. has not approved the use of alpha-lipoic acid as a treatment for any condition. Nevertheless, some alternative-medicine doctors give these infusions to their patients. This can be risky, in part because high-dose intravenous use of the acid has been associated with reduced levels of blood platelets, which play a key role in clotting.
Rau told me that he has given patients the infusion hundreds of times. But Lanitis began experiencing severe pain in her upper abdomen within a few hours of being administered the acid. She rested in her hotel room for a while, then managed to get downstairs to an examining room, where Rau tested her platelet count. He found it abnormally low. Within the next two hours, the count plummeted even further, to seventy-nine billion platelets per litre of blood. (Normal platelet counts vary from a hundred and fifty billion to four hundred billion per litre.) Rau and Kotthaus drove her to a hospital in the nearby town of Herisau. The doctors, seeing her platelet count, suspected liver failure and concluded that a better-equipped hospital should treat her. As her condition worsened, she was transferred by ambulance to a hospital in St. Gallen, the largest city in the area, where she threw up blood.
