Na Son Nguyen / AP

Patients sit in a sauna room at the Scientology Health Center of the Vietnam Association of Agent Orange Victims in Thai Binh, Vietnam. The center runs a 25-day health program which, as well as massive consumption of vitamins, includes four-hour sauna sessions and a morning run.

THAI BINH, Vietnam — North Vietnamese army veteran Nguyen Anh Quoc grimaces as he forces down the last of the 35 vitamins he takes each morning. After decades of suffering from illnesses he believes were caused by exposure to Agent Orange, he is putting his faith in a regime advocated by the Church of Scientology.

"I have to take them," the 62-year-old said at a treatment center established with the help of a Scientology-funded group. "They will clean up my body."

Na Son Nguyen / AP

Patients at the center take a dose of 35 vitamins early each morning.

The center, a converted mushroom farm in northern Vietnam, owes as much to Scientology's desire to expand around the world, away from scandal in the United States, as it does to pressure in Vietnam to try to help aging veterans still suffering from the effects of war.

Many medical experts regard the treatment — a 25-day vitamin and sauna regime — as junk medicine or even dangerous. But for now at least, it has found fertile ground here. Read the full story.

Previously on PhotoBlog: The legacy of Agent Orange

Na Son Nguyen / AP

Patients get their pulse and blood pressure checked by doctors at the center. While there is no medical evidence that the treatment is effective, Vietnamese authorities are supporting it as a way of relieving some of the suffering of the between 2 and 4 million people suffering from illnesses linked to exposure to Agent Orange during the war.

Na Son Nguyen / AP

A patient enters a sauna room.

Editor's note: Photos taken on March 18, 2013 and made available to NBC News today.

38 years after the U.S. Air Force withdrew from the Danang air base in Vietnam, attempts to clear the area of a dioxin linked to cancers and birth defects have finally started. Reuters reports:

Vietnam and the United States took the first step towards cleaning up Agent Orange contamination on Friday, a development that the top U.S. diplomat in the country said was one of the most significant between the two countries.

A ribbon cutting near a barren, sun-baked corner of the Danang airport grounds where the defoliant was stored before being sprayed from U.S. warplanes during the 1960s and early 70s held symbolic meaning for a relationship that has come under the spotlight amid renewed tensions in the South China Sea.

AP, file

U.S. Air Force planes spray the defoliant chemical Agent Orange over dense vegetation in South Vietnam in this 1966 photo.

David Guttenfelder / AP, file

Nguyen Thi Kieu Nhung sits inside her family home next to the Danang airbase in Danang, Vietnam on May 21, 2007. The girl was born with physical deformities, including twisted limbs, a misshapen head, and protruding eyes suspected by local health officials to have been caused by dioxin in the chemical defoliant Agent Orange. More than 30 years after the Vietnam War ended, the poisonous legacy of Agent Orange has emerged anew with a scientific study that has found extraordinarily high levels of health-threatening contamination at the former U.S. air base at Danang.

Kham / Reuters

Soldiers detect Unexploded Ordnance (UXO) and defoliant Agent Orange during the launch of the "environmental remediation of dioxin contamination" project, in Vietnam's Danang City on June 17, 2011.

Kham / Reuters

Agent Orange victims are seen at a hospice in Danang City on June 16, 2011.

Read more in our story: US, Vietnam team up in war on Agent Orange.

To learn more about the legacy of Agent Orange, watch photographer Ed Kashi's film from Danang, The leaves keep falling, and visit the Make Agent Orange History website.