using DOM functions with embedded html / encoding

I'm interested in creating an xml doc from my php5/mysql 4.1 app. I'm using PHP's DOM functions to create the xml file. Some of the text fields now have well-formed html embedded in them. When I do a $dom->createElement('item_name', $clean_slot), it encodes the values to &lt;b&gt; for <b>. How would I suppress this behavior. It doesn't look like there is any other variable I can pass to createElement or to appendChild. thanks, jonathan