For Those Considering Doing Stem Cell Therapy Abroad
By Dr. Anthony G. Payne
If you do a Google search using “stem cell clinic”, you’ll come up with 5,730 websites (This and other searches done on August 24, 2008)
“stem cell treatment” — 154,000 websites
“adult stem cell therapy” –69,100 websites
Only a fraction of these listings are actual facilities offering some form of stem cell therapy, but even so how does one figure out who is on the up-and-up? That is, who is offering legitimate, safe forms of stem cell therapy, if any? And for which diseases or conditions do the various kinds of stem cells being offered actually work, if any?
Critics, skeptics, and many others are often quite strident in their denunciation of just about every private, commercial outfit that offers stem cell treatments – be it fetal cell, umbilical cord, or other adult stem cells. Many academicians and university-based stem cell researchers in the US dismiss reports of stellar clinical benefits in patients treated by private foreign stem cell clinics or hospitals as being ”scams”, “frauds” or the like. Most argue that no one should be seeking out such treatments, at least not outside of formal, government sanctioned clinical trials.
With regard to the “scam” aspect, I would ask readers to keep this in mind (This is a quote from an article by “yours truly” that concerns the almost knee-jerk negative reaction of many stem cell experts to the ongoing cord blood stem cell work of Fernando Ramirez Del Rio, M.D. in Mexico. The entire article can be accessed by clicking this link: Is Something Amiss?)
In the world of biomedicine, the question of whether a particular drug or procedure is effective or not is settled in the arena of science – namely, well designed and executed clinical studies. One doesn’t dismiss a treatment or procedure that has a rational foundation (i.e., doesn’t violate established scientific laws or principles) a priori – which is to say, before conducting tests. But this has been exactly what many experts in stem cell biology have done when it comes to the observations and data collected and reported by SRI. Rather than suggest the need for controlled studies to determine whether or not the clinically significant improvements reported in scores of patients treated with purified cord blood stem cells in Mexico for non-blood maladies pan out, many of these scientists have dismissed the entire treatment as “a scam”.
This is not the kind of degree of informed open-mindedness one would expect of highly placed researchers in major institutes and universities.
Of course, people with conditions or health challenges…
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