The Current - ALS patient dies alone after paying $84K US to a Sask. facility

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

A 70 year old American woman — died alone in a Montana hospital  Susie Silvestri put her home up for sale so she could afford to come to a private, unregulated health centre in Moose Jaw. She eventually was forced to flee Canada after falling through gaps in Saskatchewan’s health care system. The CBC’s investigative reporter Geoff Leo shares Susie’s story.

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Late last year, a 70-year-old American woman died alone in a Montana hospital. She had been forced to flee Canada after falling through gaps in Saskatchewan's healthcare system. Her journey reveals profound failures in how private businesses offering treatment to the sick are regulated in the province, according to an expert consulted by CBC. That woman, Susie Silvestri, had ALS, a deadly disease that causes patients to progressively lose control of their muscles. Susie put up her home for sale so she could afford to come to Canada, chasing the promise

of healing from a private, unregulated health center in Moose Jaw. Her brother, George, was not so sure about this plan. Sort of, Susan, I think you're crazy, but best of luck for this trip. She was in good spirits. I was excited for that, but on the other side of the coin, I wasn't wildly optimistic that it was going to be successful. But she was. Susie ended up fighting for her life while the company's management did little to help.

CBC's investigative reporter, Jeff Leo, joins me now from Regina with Susie's story. Jeff, good morning. Good morning. Tell me a little bit about Susie Silvestri. Despite her brother's skepticism, she ended up, choosing to come to this health care clinic in Canada. Why was that? Desperation.

I mean, she was diagnosed with ALS in 2023 in her home state of North Carolina. And as I'm sure you know, like, ALS is a terrifying disease. It kills 80% of patients within five years of diagnosis. There's no known cure. And the ALS Society of Canada says treatment options right now do very little to slow it down. But a few months after her diagnosis, she learned about Dan. And Goodnow, he's a scientist from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and he runs the Dr. Goodnow Restorative Health Center. So Goodnow claims his supplements and his program can stop the progression of ALS and actually make patients improve, turn things around.

And so in August of last year, Susie got on a Zoom call with Goodnow, and she was thrilled by what she heard. And we know this because she communicated with several family numbers by text, typing with her one good hand. Here's her other brother, Charles, reading what she wrote to him last summer. On the 29th of August, she says, oh, my God, I can't get there soon enough. Filled about working with them, feel halfway healed already. My current state is not a problem. He is such a sweet man. How could I not be healed?

So you've been looking into Dan Goodnow for a little while now. What have you found out? Yeah, so I came across him earlier this year. We had a story actually on the current back in June. Goodnow says he's discovered that ALS is caused by a deficiency in special fats called plasmalogens. And he claims he can fix the health of an ALS client through what he calls human biochemical engineering, essentially using his supplements to restore the health of patients to, in his words, original manufacturer's specifications.

So in sales calls that others who were looking for help recorded, and they provided, to us. We heard him. We heard his staff say they've got 100% success rate, you know, halting and reversing the progression of ALS. When I asked, Dan, good now, about that claim. Here's what he said. And we do document every single person that comes through our center, okay? They leave that center better than they came in. And that's just simply a fact. He says it's simply a fact. Is there any evidence behind his claims? Any reason that would lead people to believe that the program that he is offering would make them better. Yeah, well, of course, we did ask for evidence, like published research that would support

his claims. He acknowledged he didn't have any, though he said he's working on studies, but he pointed to the accounts of his patients who said they felt better on the program. We found several patients, however, who said they got worse. So the chief scientist with the ALS Society of Canada says he's not seen any scientific evidence supporting GoodNow's claims. And he says, like, if there was something there, scientists around the world would be flocking to study the supplements and the program. But Susie was persuaded, and her brother Charles was hopeful.

I was hoping she'd get cured. I was on her side. I was very skeptical, but I was hoping she'd get cared. And she was trying like how, when you've got a death sentence, you're going to try whatever you can. When you've got a death sentence, how advanced was Susie's ALS at that point? What led her, I guess, to take those next steps and sign up with good. No's Center. Yeah.

So this center, they advertise a three-month live-in restorative health program in Moose Jaw. And then Susie decided that was her best option, a very expensive decision. The cost of the program, which includes food, lodging, good now supplements, $75,000 US. They charged her an additional $9,000 because her ALS had progressed to the extent that she needed extra help and she wasn't able to bring anyone with her. At that point, she was not able to go to the bathroom on her own, not able to feed herself. or walk or get out of bed on her own. So, you know, do the math, $84,000, but it doesn't stop there for her because, of course,

she needed to get from her home in North Carolina all the way to Moostra, and she wasn't going to drive. So the only way she could safely do that was by hiring a medevac and crew, a special medical plane, which costs her another $20,000. So that takes the total bill to more than $100,000. She didn't have the money to pay for all of this. So here's her brother again with another text. 22nd, she said, my home goes up for sale tomorrow so I can go to the clinic and can.

I'm, um, I am letting go of just about everything. So that's a lot of money. And I mean, she, as she says, she's letting go, but just about everything. Yeah. She takes the medevac, arrives in Moose Jaw. How do things go from there? Well, she was initially thrilled. She posted to, uh, her Instagram, uh, account on a September 12th, just over a year ago, how happy she was with the facility and optimistic. She told one of the care workers at the facility, Aldana Kerbs, that she was going to walk out of that facility three months later. I spoke with Kerbs about this.

She said she was always baffled by how many patients arrived at the facility with that sort of expectation, which she saw as completely unrealistic based on her own experience working there. She said she hadn't seen that sort of recovery. And so she would ask managers, why is everyone coming here expecting healing? And she says, here's the response she got. We were told that they weren't told that, right? And that they were just grasping at straws because that's all they have left and whatnot.

And then the other argument was that neurodegenerative diseases can cause some, you know, cognitive issues. And so that was one of the arguments he used to say, we didn't say that. We didn't say that. It was just, they're just angry at the world because they have this, you know, kind of thing. But after our story came out, which showed that the center had actually been telling people in sales calls that they had a 100% success rate in stopping and reversing ALS, Kerbs told me she put in her two-week notice. She quit. So go back to Susie.

She arrives there full of hope, as you said, in optimism. What happened after she got to the center? So she was almost immediately hit with a series of health issues that were exacerbated by her ALS. So a few days into her stay. She was diagnosed with COVID pneumonia, hospitalized at the Moose Jaw Hospital for a week. And then after she was back in the center, she was placed into isolation. So it's important to point out here, the Good Now Center does not have any medical staff. It's unregulated.

There is no provincial oversight. The province told me it considers this center to be essentially like assisted living. You know, you got food, lodging, some light housekeeping, maybe a little bit of programming. But the care worker, Aldana Curbs, paints a different picture of her time with Susie and some other clients when she was working there. For a diaper change, there were two people because one of us needed to turn her and the other person needed to clean. By the end there of her stay, she wasn't eating very much at all, just like mashed bananas and I made her broth some days. It was our impression, I think, that she required a higher level of care than we were proper. prepared to give based

of our training and things. There are two kinds of Canadians, those who feel something when they hear this music. And those who've been missing out so far. I'm Chris Howdy. And I'm Neil Kuksel. We are the co-hosts of As It Happens, and every day we speak with people at the center

of the day's most hard-hitting, heartbreaking, and sometimes hilarious news stories. Also, we have puns. Here Why, As It Happens, is one of Canada's longest running in most beloved shows. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. So Susie gets to the Good Now Center has these other health complications. The care worker looking after her eventually tells you, Jeff, that she doesn't feel like she's had enough training to properly take care of people in Susie's condition.

How does Susie handle all of that? So we learned as time went by, she was having an increasingly difficult time swallowing Good Now supplements. This is quite a common phenomenon as ALS patients. progress, you know, they stop losing control, like not having the ability to swallow. Here's Charles, again, reading another text from Susie while she was in the center in September of last year. And then on the 15th, I'm having a hard time right now. Can't cough up and out the flam exhausting moments like this.

If I could leave, I would, so difficult. This sounds awful for her. Yeah. I mean, there's staff there, so how do they realize? that she's in this condition. What's going on there? Well, so at one point, weeks after the text, she told her brother that she had met with Good Now. He said that she was progressing quite well. So there were, you know, seemingly some levels of ups and downs. El Dana Kerb said she and the other staff were working with Susie on her mobility. And they saw some modest progress. But throughout,

she was in and out of hospital, back and forth. And then her health really started going downhill. So about almost three months into her stay, early December, Good Now Careworker goes in to see Susie and realizes she hadn't eaten for days. And so we know about this because we've been given a really unique window into this world. I have text messages. These are real-time messages from a care worker with the Good Now Center who was helping Susie. She sent these messages to a friend of hers who shared them with me. I did reach out to this woman. She declined to be interviewed.

She also asked that we not name her for fear of retribution. What do we learn from these text messages from the care worker? Well, so we learn about Susie's crisis that she was experiencing. She started begging for a feeding tube so she could eat. But the Moose Jaw Hospital said no. Susie's an American, her American insurance company, wouldn't pay for the surgery. The hospital would only do the surgery if it was deemed an emergency, which at that time it was not. So they did install a temporary solution, the nasal feeding tube, but given her condition, Susie found out almost impossible,

breathe. So, like, within hours, they had to take it out. So there she was stuck. She can't swallow. She can't get the surgery that she needs to put a feeding tube in so that she can feed her body. What happens next? Well, so Susie decides her only option is she's got to find a hospital in the U.S. somewhere that will do the surgery and where her insurance will actually cover the procedure. So there she is. She's with her one good hand again. She gets on her laptop and starts looking. The care worker, spoke with. Aldana Curbs, who was looking after Susie at the time, was really troubled that after paying all that money and coming all that way, there was Susie on her own.

To see little Susie with her, you know, laptop trying to figure this stuff out by herself, I think more care should put into that, you know, like, I think they should have made more of an effort, in my opinion, to call around and find her the appropriate services. first. So given how sick you're describing Susie being there, planning to get to a U.S. hospital from Saskatchewan could not have been an easy thing. I mean, it was difficult for her to get to Saskatchewan in the first place. What did she do? No, definitely not. And the anonymous worker I mentioned earlier, whose name were not revealing, told her friend in text messages how frustrated she was with Good Now Management that they weren't supportive, weren't helping Susie

through all of this. Susie was able to find a hospital in Sydney, So that's about a four-hour drive south of Moose Jaw that would do the surgery that her insurance company would pay. And the anonymous worker helped Susie. She kind of jumped in and helped her rent a patient transport vehicle, essentially an ambulance, without any medical equipment, at Susie's expense. And they prepared to cross the border. This worker didn't have medical training, but she decided I should borrow my dad's heart monitor and oxyminer so she could track Susie's health as the traveled, which is what she did. So they took the trip on December 8th and eventually they made it to Sydney, Montana. And so when they got there, was Susie able to get the surgery for the

feeding to? Yeah. A few days later, after they got her kind of stabilized, they were able to install the feeding to, but frankly, it didn't help much. Her condition continued to deteriorate. She was, you know, desperately trying to get home, but she was also starting to research assisted suicide. She was, you know, in despair. The good now care work, worker who was with Susie there texted the Good Now Center's CEO, Jana Horsnell, to let her know that, you know, Susie's doing this research. She's considering assisted suicide. And the CEO is not happy. And in text messages, back to the worker, she says, quote, you do not represent us. Susie hired you and you are there on your own with her. That is nothing to do with us. The care worker tells her friend, you know, she didn't hire her. She was, you know, there as a friend. But this whole experience was the final straw for the good now worker. She had been at Susie's side in the Montana hospital for more than a week. She was surviving on food vouchers that the nurses were giving her so she could eat every day.

So after all this, she put in her notice and she quit. As for Susie, she didn't survive much longer. She died on Boxing Day, December 26th, all alone in the hospital. Here's her brother, Charles. I think they just robbed us because they had no way. take care of somebody in her condition. I'm sorry. No way at all.

I mean, these people are declining. They've got to expect that there's going to be medical problems, and you don't have any facility to take care of them, you know? It's kind of crazy. That's awful. If you go back to the center for a moment, you mention that Good Now's Center is unregulated. There is no government oversight.

How is that possible, given what we've heard happened to Susie? How is that possible? Yeah, this story is baffling to one expert that I spoke with, for sure, Dan Floresone. He's a guy who used to run the Saskatchewan health care system. He was the deputy minister of health between 2008 and 2013. He now teaches public policy at the University of Saskatchewan. And he says it's shocking that a facility that provides care to, like frankly, some of the sickest patients in North America has no government oversight is operating completely outside the health care system. In addition, Dan Goodnow is not a medical doctor, so he's not under the jurisdiction of the College of Physicians and Surgeons.

So Florazon says, like, this story, this situation is an opportunity for the province to take a deeper look, a deeper look at this case and what it says about the regulatory system. Right now, at Saskatchewan's the Wild West, we've got to figure out a way to actually contain this, to create a regulatory regime. I think the gap is the legislation, as it currently stands, gives very few tools in the toolkit to be able to deal with this new and emerging type of entrepreneur. So buyer-weare is not the principle by which we want to operate a health system. So you contacted Diane Goodnow to ask him about running a facility that is unregulated and about what happened to Susie. What did he say? As I mentioned, we did a fair bit of reporting about Goodnow earlier this year, questioning his claims about.

his program, and he has launched a lawsuit against CBC for those stories, alleging that they were defamatory. CBC asked good now for a comment on this story, and his lawyer wrote back to us saying, quote, no comment, we don't talk to people. We are an active litigation against. Jeff, thank you very much for this. You're welcome, Matt. Jeff Leo, is an investigative reporter with CBC News. He was in Regina. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name's Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.