“It was fine after the injection, but I was woken up by severe pain [like] I had never experienced in my life,” she says. “The pain lasted for three to four days.”
Despite the pain, she says, she injected herself again two months later, and a month after that she traveled to China, where Liu, despite having no medical training, injected her, using an anesthetic cream to numb the skin.
“While this act technically fell outside legal boundaries, in China, if the patient is competent and gives informed consent, such compassionate-use interventions rarely attract regulatory attention unless harm is done,” Liu tells WIRED.
Legal in China?
Experts on Chinese medical regulations tell WIRED that new treatments like Liu’s would have to meet strict conditions before they can be administered to patients. “It would have to go through the same steps in China as it does in the US, so that will involve clinical studies, getting ethics approval at the hospitals, and then the situation would have to be reviewed by the Chinese government,” Ames Gross, founder and president of Pacific Bridge Capital, tells WIRED. “I don’t think any of it sounds very legal.” The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which handles all international press inquiries, did not respond to a request for comment.
As well as the initial pain, the chlorine dioxide injections also appear, the patient says, to have made the cancer worse.
“The tumor shrinks first, then it grows faster than before,” she says, adding: “My tumor has spread to the skin after injection. I suspect it is because the chlorine dioxide has broken the vein and the cancer cells go to the skin area.”
Liu did not agree with this assessment, instead blaming the fact that the patient had not completed the full course of four injections within a month, as he typically prescribes.
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