Stem Cell Therapies -The Good, The Bad and the Really Ugly!

I began using real human stem cells in 2001 and have now treated over 7000 patients. I initially thought that the medical field would go crazy very quickly since the results were so good and if done correctly the treatments were safe and long lasting. My enthusiasm back in those early days was met by derision, name calling and slander and I was attacked by my medical board and many doctors of our community. When I presented the first clinical results using the patient's own bone marrow for treatment of a variety of chronic diseases at Cambridge (SENS) in 2008 I was booed and had junk thrown at me by the scientists that were attending the conference. They yelled at me that I was a fraud and that there was no way that bone marrow stem cells could help anyone with anything! Things have changed since then!

This was the first time they had heard about bone marrow as a treatment and for them it was just too simple to be true. Since then, using a person's own bone marrow as a treatment has over a thousand articles published and it is being used everyday in hundreds of doctor's offices around this country. Bone marrow is in general the safest and the only FDA approved stem cell therapy for doctors to use and to advertise. The FDA is usually concerned about a therapy's safety and the claims the provider is publishing. To advertise that a drug is effective for treating a disease requires millions of dollars and years of research and because of this anyone who claims that stem cells of any type will fix or treat this or that condition effectively can get into trouble with the FDA. That is why I don't advertise much and if I do I mention only bone marrow.

Times have changed now and while I continue to do my daily work without much publicity I am flabbergasted at the chicanary and false claims being put out by many stem cell providers. Physcians are generally not trained or experienced in the office production of stem cells nor the manufacturing of stem cells. They know very little about the process but they do know how to listen to smooth talking positive salespeople and to buy their products and turn around and given them to their patients. Almost no physicians have even a simple lab to test for bacterial contamination and not even a microscope to be able to look directly at the stem cell product they are buying and using. If they did have a microscope they most likely would not know what they are seeing so why bother?

This is dangerous since the products they buy are often improperly prepared and contain pieces of tissue derived from the process of preparing these products since they just grind up the frozen tissues and put them into vials and sell them. It takes time and effort to separate the stem cells from the umbilical cord blood and tissues and since all of the tissues have growth factors these suppliers just sell the whole thing as one treatment i.e. some stem cells but most of the product is tissue from another human being. These tissues can and do cause graft vs host reactions like a foreign body reaction which can make a person very sick for a long time. Since the patient, the doctor and the providing lab do not know the blood type of the umbilical cord, the amnion or the placenta that is being used what you have is a type of Russian Roulette since you may or may not have a reaction because your blood type may be the same as the tissue you are being treated with or it may not be (A,B,O compatabilities).

If these tissue chunks are given intravenously or directly into the spine all kinds of bad things can occur. I know of one case that did develop pulmonary embolic after an injection of these crude "stem cells".

How to protect yourself from these bad reactions? First of all if you are an active person why not do a bone marrow treatment? This is using your own bone marrow and the results are usually quite good and you will not have any bad reactions to it. Many doctors don't have the skills to do the bone marrow so they preach about how painful it is but that is just not true. In 50% of the cases there is little or no pain and in the others the pain is enough to require a little iv valium and so the patient sleeps right through the whole procedure. If you are older and sedentary then your bone marrow can be revitalized by a series of bone marrow stimulants so that your bone marrow will have 5-10 times more stem cells than you had before the stimulant (Neupogen). This makes the treatment as effective as if you were a young person.

Fat stem cells are more of a problem since there are many more variables. First the operation is more involved and you injure the subcutaneous tissues of your abdomen when this is done so in general you may not be able to have another fat stem cell procedure from the same area since scar tissue develops in those areas. In addition the enzymes that are being used are not FDA approved and you may get a bad product or the enzymes may not be washed out well enough. This happened in Florida a couple of years ago when the fat stem cells were injected into 3 patient's eyes and they were blinded by these contaminants. The amount of fat taken from your body can vary from 10 ml to 200 ml so this is something that will alter the results you are looking for.

Read the company and doctor's information very carefully. Some websites talk about all manners of stem cells but when you get past all of that they are using amniotic cell extracts or amniotic membranes and inferring these are stem cells. They are not. Amniotic stem cells are very hard to isolate and the ones that are good are few in number so in general if someone tells you that they have pure amniotic stem cells they are not telling the truth. Ask for a flow cytometer printout and if they can provide that at least the lab has modern equipment but they will not be able to isolate and sell pure amniotic stem cells without charging at least five times more than what they say the price is. In general none of the labs selling stem cells in this country isolate and grow pure stem cells since they know that this is illegal according to the FDA. They are trying to make money and will not make and sell pure stem cells since this costs more in terms of time, energy, equipment and lab techs and it would be one more thing that the FDA could get them for. Grinding up and selling umbilical cord and related tissues is cheap and easy to do. Why bother with anything else?