Did an Alternative-Medicine Guru Accidentally Kill Patients?
The New Yorker · D. T. Max ·
In Switzerland, Thomas Rau offers treatments that many conventional doctors would question. Now, D. T. Max reports, he’s accused of lethally negligent care.
Rau believes that virtually anyone can benefit from his interventions, many of which he defines as preventive. But he told me that his specialty is treating people with what he calls “unclear” conditions. He estimates that eighty per cent of such patients—principally, sufferers of long COVID or chronic-fatigue syndrome—go home from his clinic “massively improved.” In 2024, he spoke at an event in Brooklyn called “The Future of Medicine,” in which he described himself as “the master in rebuilding cellular function.”
Rau’s tool kit includes colon hydrotherapy (irrigating the bowels with warm water), ozone treatments (infusing the blood with the gas), and hyperthermia therapy (placing a patient on a bed heated by infrared-A radiation to mimic a fever, which supposedly shrinks tumors). He isn’t concerned by the absence of studies confirming that the treatments performed at BioMed work. “I pay a lot of taxes,” he told me when I visited him in Switzerland, in 2024. “I pay scientists’ salaries.”
Rau, a licensed doctor in Switzerland, says that he doesn’t reject mainstream medicine. But he certainly seems skeptical of its efficacy. He has said, “You give anti-inflammatories, you give anti-immune drugs—you give anti, anti, anti.” Although he’s not always opposed to conventional treatments, he often modifies the typical approach to fit his theories. For instance, he sometimes injects a chemotherapy drug directly into a tumor site—a nonstandard application. (He boasted to me, “This is a treatment I developed!”) A key goal of his cancer-treatment protocol is to lower inflammation throughout a patient’s body by removing gluten from her diet. Good health, he likes to say, comes from harmonizing the patient’s “inner milieu.”
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