Re: 鈥淪tem-cell 鈥榗ures鈥� touted,鈥� Sept.聽27.
As a board-certified specialist in regenerative medicine, I feel compelled to comment.
The use of the phrase 鈥渦nlicensed clinic鈥� is misleading. It implies that clinics can be licensed. They cannot.
Doctors, nurses, physician鈥檚 assistants and nurse practitioners 鈥� the people who practise medicine 鈥� are licensed. Buildings, corporations, partnerships, etc., do not practise medicine and therefore are not licensed. Saying that they are 鈥渦nlicensed鈥� is deceptive nonsense.
Similarly, the word 鈥渦nproven鈥� is used to give the impression that nobody has ever tested these treatments. This is patently false. If you search the PubMed medical research database for 鈥渟tem cell鈥� you will find 200,763 articles. Many of these are randomized, double-blind, controlled clinical studies 鈥� the gold standard of medical research.
The article is quick to mention one of the vanishingly few cases in which complications have been attributed to stem-cell therapy. But it ignores the thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of successful stem-cell procedures that have been performed in the past decade.
The most successful stem-cell therapies have been for osteoarthritis. Thousands of people can walk again without pain and have avoided the debilitating trauma of knee- or hip-replacement surgery because they received stem-cell treatments. And yet the complication rate of stem-cell therapy is so low as to be almost non-existent.
The sa国际传媒 does its readers a disservice by publishing such biased and poorly researched 鈥渟ensationalistic鈥� articles. Perhaps it even harms them by dissuading them from seeking appropriate health care.
Theodore E. Harrison, MD
North Saanich
