Death by Natural Causes

Around 11:30 a.m. on July 25, 2001, Su Wilson found her 16-year-old daughter, Megan, lying in bed at their Kenmore home, her chest heaving. "Megan, get up! You have to use your medication," Su recalls telling her daughter, who suffered from chronic asthma. According to her mother's recollections, Megan rose from her bed and used a device called a nebulizer, which transmitted a medicinal vapor to her lungs. When that didn't work, Su called Megan's primary care physician, a Kirkland naturopath named Lucinda Messer.

One critical fact about that day is in dispute. Messer says that she repeatedly urged Megan and her mother to go to the hospital—and they refused. It's noted on the medical chart from that day. But Su Wilson insists Messer never mentioned the hospital.

In any case, these things seem clear: Several hours after Megan woke up, she and her mother arrived at Messer's office, which at the time was across the street from Evergreen Hospital. Messer was busy with another client, so an acupuncturist who worked out of the office, Dan Brown, performed acupuncture on Megan. Messer then treated Megan with a shot of vitamin B-12 and an herbal remedy called a tincture.

What Messer did not do was perform tests used by conventional medical doctors to determine the severity of an asthmatic attack and whether a patient needs to receive emergency care. There is no consensus on whether such tests should be a part of naturopathic care. But most medical doctors agree that they are essential. "The very basics were not done with this child," says Robert Baratz, a Massachusetts internist and critic of alternative medicine who reviewed documents related to the case at the request of Seattle Weekly.

Megan and her mother went home. Some time later, with Megan still struggling to breathe, her father, Arnold Wilson, took her to Lakeshore Clinic. She lost consciousness as they drove into the parking lot and never recovered. Megan Wilson, a pretty, easygoing teenager with long, dark hair and Chinese features inherited from her mother, was pronounced dead at 6:43 p.m., the summer before her junior year of high school. She died of an attack that almost certainly would not have been fatal had she received standard hospital treatment.

The state Department of Health is investigating Messer. Unwilling to release details of an open investigation, the agency will not confirm whether the Megan Wilson case is at issue. But the timing of the investigation, launched in November, coincides with an anonymous letter the Department of Health received outlining the circumstances of Megan's death. The case also resulted in a lawsuit by the girl's parents against Messer and Brown.

It is a landmark case for alternative medicine in this state, both because of the tragic outcome and because it raises important questions about the standard of care to which alternative practitioners should be held.

It also reflects a new era in naturopathy, a field which, simply put, believes in using nature to heal nature. Home to the country's most prominent school of alternative medicine, Bastyr University in Kenmore, Washington is one of only 14 states plus the District of Columbia that licenses naturopaths. In 1993, as part of a sweeping health care reform package, the state passed a law requiring insurance companies to cover services rendered by all types of licensed health care providers, including naturopaths. The move prompted several insurance plans to proffer naturopaths as primary care providers. Regence BlueShield did so. So did Boeing, which is self-insured and is where Megan's father works the graveyard shift as a heating and refrigeration technician.

Once confined largely to providing care that supplements treatment by medical doctors, naturopaths increasingly have become the first person to which patients in all kinds of distress will turn. In April, the Legislature strengthened naturopaths' primary care role by expanding their authority to prescribe drugs, including controlled substances such as codeine and testosterone.

The backing by the state and insurance companies has fueled naturopathy's growth. Numbering in the dozens only a few decades ago locally, naturopaths now claim 700 license holders statewide.

"My case was the first case in Washington where natural medicine was tried—and nobody knew what they were doing," Messer says. Actually, the case never reached trial. It was settled in 2003 for a confidential amount that Messer says was around $250,000 or $300,000. Messer's insurance company never reported the settlement to the state Department of Health, as required by state law.

Messer herself, however, reported the case to the Naturopathic Physicians Board of Medical Examiners in Arizona, where she is also licensed. The board dismissed the case. Looking through the case file now, its executive director, Craig Runbeck, realizes that the board seemed to have considered only information supplied by Messer.

'It's crap, bullshit stuff,' Dr. Lucinda Messer says of the Wilsons' charges of negligence. She asserts that it's the Wilsons who were negligent for shunning conventional medical help. 'There was so much neglect here.'

"It's crap, bullshit stuff," Messer says of the Wilsons' charges of negligence. She asserts that it's the Wilsons who are guilty of negligence for shunning conventional medical help. "There was so much neglect here," she says. If patients ignore your advice, she asks, "What do you do? What do you do?"