'Doctor' defends cancer treatment

An unlicensed Austrian doctor accused of mistreating Christchurch lung cancer patient Melissa Judith Taylor in Thailand claimed yesterday that he has done nothing wrong.

"I have not committed any crime," Hellfried Sartori, 67 - known as Dr Ozone - from his police station cell in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai.

Sartori was arrested on Sunday in a Chiang Mai hotel and charged with fraud as well as practising medicine without a licence.

Police told Bangkok's the Nation newspaper that they were investigating the extent to which Sartori was responsible for the deaths of several Australasian cancer patients, who flew to Chiang Mai to be treated by him - usually in hotel rooms, at a cost of up to $60,000.

According to the Nation, Ms Taylor's relatives told Thai police that they flew with her to Chiang Mai after reading an online advertisement in which Sartori was portrayed as a qualified practitioner of a "liquid ozone" treatment.

The relatives, who witnessed the treatment, said Sartori used a syringe to withdraw liquid from a small metal cylinder, then injected three doses into Ms Taylor, in veins in her chest and neck. She passed out after the injections on June 22.

She was rushed to the intensive care unit of Chiang Mai-Ram Hospital.

Hospital officials said Ms Taylor, 33, was discharged on July 4 and New Zealand Embassy officials in Bangkok said she had recovered sufficiently to return home.

Sartori said he took a deposit of more than $30,000 from her family soon after they flew to Thailand, but had repaid half of that sum to them before they left Chiang Mai last week.

Sartori served two jail terms in the United States after administering his so-called "ozone treatments", Thai police said.

His websites claim the ozone treatment cures everything from Aids and cancer to allergies and hardening of the arteries. It consists of injections of "liquid ozone", usually into a vein.

But Sartori denied he had done anything wrong.

"All I did was to try to help people after they approached me."

In Perth, Detective Senior Sergeant Casey Prins said major crime investigators were waiting on results of pathology tests on six cancer patients who had been treated in the riverside suburb of Mosman Park. Four of the Perth patients had died over one weekend last year.

- NZPA