IT PROMISES to be the most controversial “reality” television show yet. Disney is offering the seriously ill the chance of a “miracle” cure by becoming a guinea pig for pioneering surgery.

Patients requiring brain or spinal tumour treatment and other sufferers of debilitating or life-threatening diseases are invited to take a chance on Miracle Workers.

Patients are introduced to an elite team of surgeons who will offer them a second chance of life if they sign up to breakthrough medical techniques.

The producers are looking for patients who have been given little hope by doctors. They must also be too poor to afford “elite medical care”.

They will be filmed every step of the way, “from consultations to surgery to recovery”. But the small print on the patient application form states: “The results of any medical treatment cannot be assured.”

For sensation-hungry television producers, a show in which human life itself is in the balance is the ultimate concept. Miracle Workers will be screened on the ABC network, owned by the Walt Disney Corporation, in the US this spring. The series tagline is: “When a person’s life is on the line and doctors insist that nothing more can be done, it’s time to turn to the Miracle Workers.”

The series has been developed by DreamWorks, the production company co-founded by the film director Steven Spielberg. Broadcasters in Britain are interested in a British version, although broadcasting restrictions may prevent it.

The Miracle Workers medical team includes Redmond Burke, a pioneering cardiac surgeon who performed the first heart and lung transplant on a child in New England. Also taking part is Billy Cohn, a cardiovascular surgeon who has been called the “Thomas Edison” of heart surgery for his inventions that have changed surgery techniques.

The first show features a three-year-old boy with the potentially life-shortening spinal condition scoliosis. He undergoes a rarely performed operation to implant an expandable prosthesis made of titanium into his chest. Viewers are told that the child faces the possibility of paralysis.

Another programme features a father and teenage son who have brain tumours. Local doctors had told the father that he would lose sight in one eye as a result of surgery, but a new brain-imaging technique enables the team from Miracle Workers to remove the tumour without damaging the visual fibre. ABC paid the $100,000 (£56,000) cost, which the family’s insurance did not cover.

ABC insisted that the show was not a cynical exploitation of the most vulnerable. Stephen McPherson, president of ABC Entertainment, said: “Even if the show gets no ratings we help a lot of people. In a day and age of mean-spirited, bug-eating shows, we’ve done something good.”

Applicants will not be required to compete against each other for operations, ABC said. The families will not be given financial inducements to undergo surgical procedures. And the producers “emphatically recommend” that they continue any medical treatment they that they are already having.

Miracle Workers is the logical extension of a trend for increasingly extreme reality shows. It follows Extreme Makeover, an ABC hit in which participants change their appearance through plastic surgery.

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