"Callers seeking treatment from StemGenex, a La Jolla medical clinic offering stem cell therapies for Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis and other serious ailments, were hoping to hear encouraging news. For many, that’s what they got.
"Plaintiffs allege in depositions filed in a federal court lawsuit that they were told the clinic had a 90% 'success rate' in treating its patients. Indeed, as they could tell from the StemGenex website or from promotional material sent them, the clinic had a 100% patient satisfaction rating. Hundreds of customers were treated from December 2013 through February 2017, according to a list the clinic provided to the plaintiffs. The clinic’s standard fee was $14,900 per treatment, not including travel.
"As it turned out, however, the success rate they cited was inaccurate, according to former executives. The 'patient satisfaction rating' had nothing to do with whether the treatments worked medically, the clinic’s co-founder and chief administrative officer, Rita Alexander, said in a deposition, but referred only to features such as the hotel accommodations the patients received. The 'rating' was the product of a questionnaire filled out by patients the day after their procedures, typically while they were still recovering from surgery and while a clinic employee stood by..."
"StemGenex also pondered a strong response to negative publicity it began to receive in 2016. The clinic sought advice from reputation management firms on how to suppress online criticism. According to an email exchange filed with the court, a California firm called the Reputation Group asked for $19,500 to try to force the removal from search indexes of at least three troubling online posts — two linking to a critical investigative news clip from San Diego Channel 10, and another posted by the state’s stem cell program, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) based on the Channel 10 report — or at least to make them show up less prominently in searches."
I don't know how they sleep at night, BUT I do have hopes for the legitimate clinical studies now underway in Japan and to be underway in about a year at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA. I have no doubt about the ethics and intelligence of Dr. Jeanne Loring.
Yes. It just seems so sensible to use my own skin cells and make them pluripotent rather than having someone else's cells transplanted. I think I google or search YouTube every other day regarding Dr. Loring. There are dozens of YouTube videos going back many years regarding her work in stem cell research.
Good post PD. I don't understand how they're allowed to make any claims at all for a therapy that is not FDA approved, much less assert success rates??
Big pharma won't care either. In 2016, in North America alone, they brought in $446,000,000,000. If every person on earth with Parkinson's was cured in the morning, they wouldn't know the difference. We are but a fly on the ass of an elephant.
(Not to put too fine a point on it, we are more like a hair on the ass of a fly on the ass of an elephant.)
The day when a group rejects its aims, as could be the case with Bigpharma, where they are more attentive to profits than to healing people; this group is destined to disappear, has always happened in human history. From the Phoenicians onwards.
I kind of get your point, Gio. It is the greed factor. Always wanting to increase profit even when you are already making an indecently high profit! When profit is the only goal, there is never enough and so then it becomes a matter of eliminating any competition that can be eliminated! With billions of dollars at stake, some companies know no limits in protecting what they believe to be rightfully their own and in the end create the circumstances for their own demise!
Much more powerful empires have disappeared, certainly not in one day, just for abandoning the principles and purposes on which they were built. They have already lost a lot of acceptance among people, their legal costs are skyrocketing, but , thanks also to good doctors, they still perform their function for now...
It's a curious phenomenon, the pattern of super-rich people to focus their life solely on becoming richer. Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, is now worth $150,000,000,000, but most of his employees, like those employed by the Walton family who are the major stockholders of Walmart, need food stamps to survive, so they knowingly allow taxpayers to subsidize their wealth by having us buy food for their employees.
Why don't they kick back and enjoy life or find joy in giving their money to medical research or reasonable gun control or climate change or anything that has redeeming value beyond their own self absorption??
Maybe there's something in caviar that causes such mental defects.
It is the man's impulse to "want to own everything". All of us have tried it once or twice in our lives, but someone makes it a reason for living until we believe we can get to the idea of empire in the mind of something powerful. Frankly I know more interesting games.
They will be as delighted as everyone else. They are people too, with as much risk as you have/had!
But, mainly, stem cells will not stop the progress of the disease, only (at the very best) replace dopamine producing cells in the brain to restore function...for the moment. If you have PD, something inside you will still be killing them off, until someone finds a cure for whatever it is that is killing those cells in the first place. Right?
Well, no, it will be a good thing, but only as part of a larger treatment plan. (Hopefully some kind of antibody or gene therapy? And they are working like gangbusters on that too.) It's not the holy grail in itself though. It ESPECIALLY isn't the cure-all promised by the stem-clinics popping up all over--the ones that promise miracles.
It's heartbreaking to see patients put out thousands of dollars on an unproven treatment, and even worse, if it ends up being a scam, robbing people of their money and hope for a cure, or at least, hope for a stop in progression of a dreaded disease, such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, ALS, MS, MSA, Huntington's etc.!
Can anyone confirm the authenticity of the German clinic as per below details? They use skin cells of the patient and grow/culture them in their laboratory and inject then in patients spinal cord. I had contacted them and they offered their treatment for 80K Euro. 4 time visit is required to their clinic
as you read many posts here, most are desperate for a "cure". Or at least better results from medication. Everyone latches on to anything that promises better quality of life. Correct research takes time and money and it is a "buyer beware" issue especially if it sounds too good to be true and has not been touted by the major news carriers.
We all want a cure. My husband died nearly 6 years ago and the research results and new drugs that have come out since then, give me hope for the future.
Any and all stem cell treatment to treat PD right now (that isn't research) is some kind of scam. That's pretty harsh, but it's true.
One way to tell: Are they differentiating the cells specifically into dopamine-producing cells in a laboratory before they give them to you? (This is not simple) Are they injecting the cells directly into the putamen of your brain, where you are missing them? (This is not simple either--it involves surgery I think with anesthesia. If they are NOT doing these things, how do you imagine the random stem cells will help you?
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