KUALAL LUMPUR: ARIANNA (not her real name) has been going to two different clinics to get her monthly dose of a hazardous concoction administered intravenously for about a year now.
She has little knowledge about the “cocktail” that she has been injecting into her bloodstream, except that she believes she has become several shades lighter than before.
Each session takes about an hour. The New Straits Times’ Special Probes Team tagged along on one of the sessions to record how these rogue doctors put patients in harm’s way. At one clinic, the doctor himself was a dealer of some suspicious cosmetic products — injectable ones as well.
The counter receptionist told members of the team that no registration was required for the purpose. The team followed Arianna straight into the consultation room, and as others before us had done, she passed the three bottles, including the biggest — a 1,200mg/l dose of glutathione — to the doctor.
The bottles quickly exchanged hands and in less than five minutes of his mixology skills being put into motion, the cocktail was ready to be injected into Arianna’s veins.
As she sat on a sofa in the room, waiting for the last drop to finish, another patient walked in.
Hers was the straightforward beauty injection to the arm.
A member of the team later struck up a conversation with her to discover that hers was supposedly an anti-ageing product from South Korea that promises flawless complexion. She, too, knew little about what she was putting into her body.
She, however, had no doubts of its “safety”, saying the doctor would have otherwise advised her against it. We saw her point.
The lady with the spotty complexion told us that she had just restarted the treatment after her previous spree of beauty injections left her hand almost paralysed. This doctor was supposed to be her better option now.
The team then bought the product that Arianna had used for an independent laboratory analysis.
The results showed that the product she had been injecting directly into her bloodstream contained a host of highly dangerous substances, including mercury.