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Doctor Nice

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Three years after committing to the Coalition on Revival, Hotze opened his Health and Wellness Center on Braidwood Road in Katy. With money he earned in his private practice, as well as funds from an engineering company founded by his father, Hotze bankrolled a series of local conservative candidates. By the mid-'90s, he was a bona fide kingmaker. But soon his political clout deteriorated, and by 2000 the Texas Ethics Commission had fined his political action committee a record $5,000 for violating campaign finance laws.

With publicity focused on Hotze's political activities, his private practice never got any attention. But the Hotze Health and Wellness Center's claims are typical of those that get the attention of the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the Texas Department of Health, and mainstream and alternative practitioners.

Hotze graduated from the University of Texas Medical School in Houston and entered a mainstream family practice. But according to the story he shares in his literature, he turned to alternative medicine in the late '80s, when his father's heart disease failed to respond to conventional treatment.

Testifying before a congressional health care subcommittee last year, Hotze said, "My dad used to tell me -- and he wasn't a doctor -- 'beware of doctors, they will poison you to death with their drugs.' "

But at some point during Hotze's journey into alternative medicine, things got weird. Hotze, who had spent the last decade in family practice, switched his focus from his father's heart disease to a pathogenic smorgasbord of allergies, hypothyroidism and yeast infection. He reported to the Texas State Board of Medical Examiners that he was a board-certified otolaryngologist, but the American Board of Otolaryngology (located in Houston) and the American Board of Medical Specialties have no such records.

The Houston Press left numerous voice-mail messages with Hotze's assistant, asking her to provide proof of certification, but there was no response. However, state board spokesperson Jill Wiggins related in an e-mail that Hotze faxed her a request on June 20 to correct his profile. Hotze is no longer listed as being board-certified.

However, he claims to be at the forefront of identifying the relationship between a woman's allergies and her hormones. On his Web site he claims to have been led down this road in 1996, when a patient gave him an audio tape of Dr. John R. Lee, the pioneer of botanically derived "natural progesterone" for menopausal women and the originator of the dubious term "estrogen dominance." Hotze had found his calling.

According to an undated study posted on his Web site that reads more like ad copy, Hotze explains that natural, or "bioidentical," hormones are "derived from diosgenin, a plant molecule found in soybeans and wild yams. Diosgenin is extracted from these plants and converted into progesterone in the laboratory. Progesterone can then be converted into the three human estrogen hormones…Because the supplemented bio-identical hormones are exactly the same as those which we produce, they are identical in action."

In the same study, which does not appear to have been published outside his Web site, Hotze stated, "In the interest of all my female patients, I felt that I had a responsibility to offer them this new treatment opportunity." (Hotze's work does not exist in any recognized peer-reviewed journals. The only publications he lists on the Texas State Board of Medical Examiners' Web site are articles in Houston Lifestyle&Homes and Spirit, the in-flight magazine for Southwest Airlines.)

Armed with his newfound belief in natural hormone therapy, Hotze claimed in his literature and on his Web site that his brand of bioidentical hormones "protects against breast cancer and uterine cancer," for which he provides no scientific evidence. Hotze did not respond to questions about where he purchased the raw materials for his hormones, or in what laboratory they were converted into human estrogen.

But now Hotze had something to offer women who had had no luck with traditional medicine -- and that's quite a population.

A 1993 Commonwealth Fund survey found that women change physicians more often than men; the main reason being lack of communication. More women than men reported instances where their doctor talked down to them. Women also were more likely to report occasions where doctors said their problems were imaginary.

Clearly, many women were not getting the treatment they deserved. So Hotze created a warm, caring environment more like a spa than a doctor's office. Patients became "guests" who would never be treated like second-class citizens.

Hotze's literature describes the difference between his Health and Wellness Center and what his guests were used to: "It is intentionally designed to look and function differently than a typical doctor's office. Our office is filled with fresh flowers and attractive furnishings in addition to having a warm, friendly staff who consider it a privilege to serve our guests. Service is timely. Phone calls are returned promptly and every effort is made to accommodate you."

Flowers. Fancy furniture. Friendliness. Fortune.

According to his booklet for prospective patients, Hotze's intakes run from $2,000 to $3,900. Guests are prescribed drugs available only through his in-house pharmacy that cost about $300 a month. He also recommends a plethora of dietary supplements, also available in-house, which run $150 to $200 the first month. A ten-week supply of his experimental allergy drops is $288. He claims 1,500 new guests a year, with 35 percent coming from outside Texas.

Hotze admits that insurance companies generally do not recognize his treatments as "medically necessary." Most patients pay entirely out of pocket. And patients are told up front that if they don't get better, it's because they have a negative attitude. "When individuals do not believe they can get better, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy," Hotze's literature states. Of course, the opposite also can be true. In medicine, it's called the placebo effect.

His literature is chock-full of bizarre, unsubstantiated claims wrapped in pseudo-scientific jargon. For example, birth control pills prevent "the production of women's biologically identical female hormones and pheromones, making them less attractive to men." This, despite the fact that no one has ever identified a human pheromone, and subjective claims of physical beauty are largely irrelevant to the field of medicine.

His weird claims don't apply to just women, as is evident in the statement that "When men lose their testicles to disease or injury, they have difficulty reading a map, performing math problems and making decisions."

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