Imagine being paralyzed or suffering from a debilitating disease such as Parkinson’s. Imagine that you have lost your eyesight or have been injured in a car accident, which has left you with a major spinal cord injury. Imagine being told that you will never walk again, or that you will shake violently with tremors for the rest of your life or that you will never see again. What would you do to have a chance to be cured? Most people say they would do just about anything for even the slightest improvement and for a chance, no matter how small, to be cured. Now imagine if you will, being told that there are now medicines and treatments, which although they have not met FDA approval in the U.S., you can receive as long as you can make the trip and pay the money. That is exactly the case for hundreds of people who are doing just that.More and more people with severe injuries and diseases are heading to China to receive unproved medical treatments, which may or may not offer patients improvements in their health. People are mortgaging their homes and holding fund raisers in hopes of getting a miracle cure. Many of these people have actually reported some results with their treatments. But is China doing a great injustice to some patients by exploiting their vulnerability, or are they really making a difference in their health?
This is exactly what western doctors, who claim that documentation is mostly lacking, want to know. These doctors warn that patients are serving as guinea pigs in a country that isn’t doing the rigorous lab and human tests that are needed to prove a treatment is safe and effective. Western doctors also warn that the stem cell treatments these patient are receiving could be injections of just about anything, and claim that much of what a patient is feeling could be a placebo effect. The doctors also mention that part of the Chinese therapy involves a rigorous physical therapy treatment given over 30 days. They say that this, combined with the “hope” factor and the injections, could very well cause this placebo effect. However, many patients who received the treatments at a hospital in China, claimed excellent results.
Jim Savage, a Houston man with paralysis from a spinal cord injury, says he can move his right arm. Penny Thomas of Hawaii says her Parkinson’s tremors are mostly gone. The parents of 6-year-old, Rylea Barlett of Missouri, born with an optical defect, say she can see. China is only one of several countries where such techniques are being offered, but just how many people are being treated in these countries is not known. The use of stem cells for treatments isn’t new. For decades, doctors around the world have been using adult stem cells from blood and bone marrow — and more recently from umbilical cord blood — to treat cancers of the blood, like leukemia and lymphoma, and blood diseases such as sickle cell anemia. Doctors say that there are still so many stem cell strategies that have yet to be explored. Many of them are being tested on lab animals, and others have either not yet been used in humans, or have had very limited testing on humans. This is the major concern for western doctors, but ask any of these hopeful patients if they care about that and they will tell you “no”.
One such patient is Chris Hrabik, who was severely injured in a near fatal auto crash that left him with limited use of his hands and legs. He said he was able to move his left fingers within days of the first injection of umbilical cord stem cells into his spinal cord. There’s been little progress since he left China, but he called the incremental changes significant. “I just wanted something back, no matter what it was,” said Hrabik, who attributes some of the changes to the physical therapy that he had in China. The Gorilla wants to know….could China become the new leader in stem cell research? It’s certainly something to consider now-isn’t it?