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Stem Cell Tourists Take Costa Rica Off the Agenda
An anonymous reader writes "Stem cell tourism is a booming and troubling industry, in which clinics in places like Mexico, China, and India offer rich tourists experimental stem-cell-based treatments, none of which have been approved by the FDA here in the US. (Check out some of these creepy sites that offer treatments for everything from autism to MS, and even the 'very common ailment called aging.') But in one positive development, Costa Rica just shut down its top stem cell clinic. Said the country's health minister, 'This isn't allowed in any serious country in the world.'"
In 1974, I released The Book Which Tells The Truth, which described my contact with the Elohim, the extra-terrestrials who created us scientifically in their laboratories, and who were mistaken for 'God' or 'gods' by our primitive ancestors, who were too ignorant to understand the truth. At the time, it was the public's enthusiasm for the 'UFO phenomenon' that made my books and the conferences I held around the world a success.
Nevertheless, when I explained that we would soon be able to do the same thing ourselves and live forever, thanks to cloning, many laughed. However, their laughter was tinged with the empty sound of those who have always been too shortsighted to see beyond their noses and foresee the fall of their own paradigms.
Which website will you pick to clone you? I think I'm going for the one that gave me some propaganda on a religion surrounding the Elohim. Sounds like they know what they're up to. Or maybe you've got advanced AIDS (one of the many treatable conditions which conveniently have no other cures) How does it work? Well, they just shoot you up with a bunch of stem cells. No, I'm serious:
Stem Cell Therapy, SCT, is a treatment that provides stem cells in the appropriate location to assist the body where it needs to heal and regenerate its existing cells.
Depending on the conditions, stem cells can be delivered through the blood stream or directly to the organ to treat. It isn’t understood yet how stem cell communicates with the body to determine and travel to sites of need but results have been observed showing stem cells located near the damage area and dividing there generating new differentiated healthy cells.
It's a process which many leading scientists suspect might be a miracle! And you know, if it doesn't work, you just didn't present the stem cells the right conditions and we just need you to pay for a trip back and more saline ... er therapy injections. Maybe you have a supressive person in your life who has been telling you that we are a scam and that's why the stem cell therapy didn't work? Anyone else reminded of Professor Farnsworth's trip to GeneWorks S.K.G. from Three Hundred Big Boys?
My work here is dung.
Now what am I going to do with a round trip to Costa Rica? Botox and Liposuction? I can get that right here!
I need trepanation like I need a hole in the head.
In other news, the health minister is no longer invited to any parties hosted by Costa Rica's total joke neighbours.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Human trials before approval on people who have the money to fund it... it might be incredibly dangerous and questionable ethically but these people who get these treatments pay themselves and take all the risks. Why not study them instead of stop them?
will always take advantage of the desperate. 60 Minutes did a piece on this same topic in April about a guy living in the US who scams people the same way, a real upstanding citizen. Kudos to Costa Rica for shutting their clinic down.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/16/60minutes/main6402854.shtml
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
How many of these various offshore stem-cell shops fall into the following categories?
1. Scientists/research MDs whose interpretation of risk/reward tradeoffs differs from that of the FDA. In this category I would put more or less orthodox researchers who are of the position that the risks of stem cell use(cancer, infection, immune responses, etc.) are either just not that serious compared to the potential benefits and/or are the individual's choice to make.
2. Sincere cranks. In this category would go the various flavors of nutter who have gone straight off the deep end in terms of actual research about what stem cells are capable of, and how to make them do it; but are fully sincere in their belief that stem cells are the magic bullet against autism or aging, or whatever they are selling them as.
3. Cynical hucksters: All the research seriousness of the above; but without the slightly wild-eyed sincerity. However, they know that lying to desperate sick people is both easy and lucrative.
Are there some charlatans out there? Of course. Are there also legitimate treatments that the U.S. FDA just doesn't recognize yet? Of course. Why is it a good thing to take away people's freedom to decide for themselves which is which? Experts are frequently wrong. If people have the money to pay for treatments -- even if some of us think they're bad ideas -- why do we have the right to tell them what they can do with their money? It's arrogant to make that decision for them.
Most of these people are cranks or con-artists. Some of these stem-cell clinics are not even using actual stem cells. However, we should keep in mind that none of this is a reason to not think that stem cells will not in the future be a viable method of disease treatment. Also, while the comment in the top-post about aging is in quotation marks, in the long run, it is good to view aging as a disease. Aging is not a good thing and is the root cause of many different problems. Unfortunately, aging is not a single disease but rather caused by a variety of different things which we don't fully understand. However, regarding aging as something to be eventually cured is a productive attitude.
During the 1800s there were tons of miracle cures and tonics. Mostly, they were just over priced booze, but some could do real harm. Then the FDA came along in 1906 and put an end to most of it. The FDA (even in its weakened state) makes me laugh at those who tell horror stories about government intervention in health care.
"I'm not a quack, I'm a mad scientist! There's a difference." - Dr. Cockroach
'creepy sites' ? Perhaps, but what if it works?
As long as the people going to such clinics are willing volunteers, and understand the risks and/or unknowns, what's the problem? That they might speedup research by going ahead with human trials, before a lengthy approval process is passed? As long as those volunteers carry the biggest risk themselves, I don't care.
Any treatment should be judged on its merits IMHO, and support/funding based on real-life results, not on what politicians or critics think of it. If anything, 'serious countries' should send some researchers over to those clinics to check those results. And be happy if they're good. Because whatever you think of treatments like this, if it's new/never tried before on humans, it's relevant to see whatever happens.
The one place where stem cell treatment seems to have good scientific basis - joint repair, where stem cells are centrifuged out of fat cells and injected into the joint - is stuck in FDA human trials hell in the US.
It works great in a number of animals, and is available for dogs and horses (at least) via vets.
People? Nope. Go fish.
This is not medicine. I'm a huge proponent of embryonic stem cell research - that is not what these places are. Even in the linked pages, they don't call themselves real medicine - more like 1950's utopian therapy centers, complete with watercolor art and messages of "the promise of eternal life." I've seen cryonics center websites that are far, far more ethical and honest about the product they provide. The second website even puts its own title in quotes ('"the clinic"') to avoid being as actionable about their claims.
These sites are all about offering dubiously vague claims about what folks are saying about stem cells, then offering even more dubious treatments while standing behind the mystique of being a persecuted 'forbidden' super-technique. That would be fine if they were specific about what they were attempting, and if they could point to legitimate and active partners they were involved with in order to advance the science - but they're just namedropping the science to get the flim-flam magic appeal.
There's an endless series of variants of this style of bullshit. Take a look at these sites for just the tip of the iceburg in terms of keeping an eye on it:
Science Based Medicine
The JREF Website ($1 million verifiable reward for any evidence of the paranormal.)
Ryan Fenton
All this "stem cell magic cure" stuff reminds me of the book "Charlatan" about Dr. John R. Brinkley. He used to graft goat testicles onto his patients to "refresh their male virility." In the early 20th century, he charged $700 for his services, when that was about 3/4 of the average person's yearly income. He was also not a trained surgeon and he killed and maimed many people on the operating table due to botched jobs or infections.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
It's reasonable to believe that stem cells have healing properties, since that's exactly what your own body uses its own stem cells for.
It's reasonable to investigate stem cells as a treatment, and to experiment to determine under what conditions they have an effect, and what unwanted side-effects the therapy may have.
It's not reasonable to write them off as quackery just because quacks have jumped past the investigation and into using them as therapy.
No serious country does that.
...are serious business.
While many of the current stem cell clinics overseas do fall into the snake oil category one should not cast out the baby with the bathwater. If one understands the following probable guidelines, then one may be able to navigate the field.
1) Non-autologous (non-self) stem cells are likely to be extremely problematic for therapeutic purposes because there have been a number of reports showing that the immune system will eliminate those cells over time (without immune system suppression). If you view them as "organ transplants" from other individuals which require drug protocols to suppress Natural Killer Cells and other arms of the immune system with significant probabilities of rejection then therapies which involve non-self embryonic stem cells or non-self iPSC cells might be useful. But they are never going to be a "good" solution. (This means that the debate over "embryonic stem cells" which blocked a significant amount of progress in stem cell research in the U.S. over 8 years was useless "noise".)
2) Autologous (self) stem cell therapies *are* useful. One already effectively uses them in cases of storing sperm, eggs, blood and skin for future use. There have been common uses for decades such as for blood storage before a major surgery, growing skin grafts for burn victims breast reconstruction surgery, etc. Common heart bypass operations are another example of transplanting tissue from one region of the body to another. There has been a "Holy Grail" search to obtain embryonic or totipotent stem cells over the last decade due to the press/hype that they can "grow into any tissue". While we have the knowledge to do this for some tissues we do not have it for many more. Indeed one doesn't need totipotent cells for most therapies. Partially differentiated stem cells which are very close to the target tissue types will work as well, perhaps even better, than totipotent undifferentiated cells.
3) While injecting stem cells into the blood and hoping that they end up in the right place and will do the right thing works in some cases (e.g. bone marrow transplants) it is *not* likely to work for most applications of stem cells. Each type of therapy where stem cells may be used is going to have to be a precise tissue specific (heart, brain, lung, hair follicle, joint, tendon, muscle, blood vessel, skin, etc.) therapeutic protocol. That is why one is likely to see dozens of companies with specific expertise and not "one size fits all" solutions. There isn't going to be a "magic bullet" -- therapies are largely going to have to replicate, typically through cell culture in a laboratory, many of the natural processes which occur during fetal development in order for therapies to be effective.
4) There are on the order of 2300+ clinical trials in stem cells going on around the world (according to the NIH clinical trials database). Some of them are likely to be useless. But some of them might be quite useful.
5) There are companies in the U.S. that are doing autologous stem cell therapies with a fair amount of success. Three that I'm aware of are VetStem, Regenexx and BioHeart.
6) There has not been a widespread understanding yet within the stem cell R&D and therapy communities that stem cells *do* age. Simply, stem cells accumulate mutations in their genetic code with age which will cause them to function less well if sourced from elderly individuals compared with young individuals. [Everyone should have cryopreserved pools of stem cells when they were 10-15 years old.] So a stem cell therapy that might work very well in a young individual (say 20-30) may not work as well (or at all) in an older individual (say 60-70). There are methods that may be used to address this problem (disclaimer: I am the author of a pending patent on one of these methods) but they have yet to be put into practice by *any* stem cell clinic to the best of my knowledge.
So one can "dis" current stem cell therapies as being snake oil, often with some basis for the feelings, but you should
There are real risks here. If you are talking something that is no risk then ok, more or less let people go to it provided they aren't misrepresenting it. However medical treatments carry risks. Even well tested, established ones carry risks. Wild, untested, nutball ones carry more risks and worse, unknown risks. With proper medicine the doctor can do two very important things:
1) Tell you what the risks are, so you can weigh them against the benefits. You can know what could happen and how likely it is to happen. You can then make an informed decision as to if it is worth it.
2) Monitor you for signs of the risks, and let you know what to look for. Many times the risks can be mitigated, so long as you are aware what to look for and deal with them.
As an example, when I was a kid I went on Acutane to treat my Acne. It is a heavy hitter medicine with rare, but serious side effects. Namely, it can shut your liver down. However, despite that, it is generally worth the risk. Reason is that the liver problems can be picked up early with a blood test, and medicine discontinued, treatment started, and you are generally fine. So while on it I had my blood taken every other week.
However, the reason they knew to do that was extensive testing and trials before it went on the market. They had a wealth of data that showed that this could result, and they had a remediation strategy ready. Still wasn't perfectly safe, but was pretty safe and I was aware of the risks. Had it been untested, well then maybe my liver would have just shut down and I'd have not known until I had frank symptoms, when it was far too late.
Medicine carries real risks at the best of times. You certainly don't want it done half-assed.
I wonder if this will have any effect on Rush Limbaugh's decision to move to Costa Rica.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
and they are preying on medical ignorance to extract money from the desperate. this is criminal, clearly
it's not about freedom, it's about a scam. it is not compatible with any sense of morality to watch someone lie to people, then take their money from them based on the lies
we are not all islands in the sea with the compendium of all human knowledge at our fingertips and solid fortitude of will when faced with a mortal disease. we are weak. i am, you are. we need help. and we have help: we are communities, and we depend upon each other to look after each other
so enough with the fucking libertarian fundamentalism: when you begin defending outright scam artists, you know something about libertarianism has failed as a coherent philosophy
individual freedoms matter. also, communities matter. find the fucking balance and enough with the libertarian fundamentalism please
fundamentalism is all about taking one concept and extending it far into absurdity, in outright disregard of equally coherent, valid, and important concepts about human existence. such as COMMUNITY GOOD. another such ridiculous evil fundamentalist idiocy would be called communism: saying community good trumps all, including individual liberty. obviously, communism is stupid and evil... to the SAME MIRROR IMAGE EXTENT as libertarianism, by taking individual liberty to the opposite of ridiculous extremes and completely disregarding the EQUALLY VALID CONCEPT OF COMMUNITY GOOD
real, coherent moral philosophy is about finding a BALANCE between competing concepts: altruism and selfishness. failure comes when you ignore altruism, or you ignore selfishness. BALANCE THEM IN YOUR MIND: community good and individual liberty. that really is the truth, to a greater degree than you understand the truth, if you are a libertarian fundamentalist. wake the fuck up
i am really fucking sick of stridently loud obviously ignorant libertarian fundamentalists. they are doing genuine damage to my country and our world, just as much as damage as communism did. ENOUGH!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"Stem Cell Tourists Take Costa Rica Off the Agenda"
Really did people seeking rip-off and dangerous stem cell treatments decide the Costa Rica was just not cool enough any more? No, exactly the oppisite, Costa Rica decided to no longer offer rip-off and dangerous stem cell treatments.
like as in "Costa Rica takes Stem Cell Tourism Off the Agenda"
I hate being the grammar nazi but really, English, do any of you people here speak it?
A bit of skepticism is warranted when one of the people involved claims to get his data from aliens.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
for my Microsoft. Boo hoo ...
The part I found disturbing on the stemaid site was that they claimed you could have embryonic stem cells for $15,000, but autologous embryonic stem-cells for $80,000.
Yes, they said "autologous" and "embryonic" together. That, and the reference to the Rael book make me think there is something ethically aberrant going on here in terms of how they obtain said stem cells, and that they either don't realize about the Hayflick limit and Dolly the sheep's premature senesence, or they consider it acceptable risk or cost/benefit. It really makes me wonder what else they're into.
-- Terry
This is a matter of contract enforcement. These clinics are claiming things that are patently untrue. The only thing that injecting yourself with stem cells will give you is a teratoma, a particularly nasty form of cancer with hair and teeth inside it. Making false claims is not okay. Scamming people is not okay, nobody wants to be scammed, nobody wants to be lied to, and nobody wants hair and teeth growing out of their innards.
Joe Scammed does not want to be scammed, he wants a cure. These clinics are not selling cures, they are selling hairy, toothy cancer, labeled as a cure. Your argument is laughable. But at least it is novel. I don't think I've ever heard anyone seriously argue for the 'right' to be taken advantage of. Did anyone ask for that? Do YOU even want that?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Is that really all bad? Charlatans over the centuries have provided a very valuable commodity: Hope. The people who go on these pilgrimages have basically been told "You're fucked" by the prevailing medical establishment, but refuse to accept it. So by closing down these clinics we're basically saying "Dammit, we told you you're fucked, be still and die!" Should we really enforce a strict separation of health care and religion (in the very broadest sense of the word) especially when we know that there is such a thing as a very powerful placebo effect? If somebody terminally ill wants to spend their money on this or on a big donation to a charity or church or whatever because it gives them hope it's perfectly fine with me.
(Besides, who know what might work: "Mom, Dr Fleming told me to eat mold..." :-)
is often fraud itself"
wow, just wow
how can someone become so fucking deluded?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What do I care if what I do has been approved by the US?
Can you give us some examples?
I'm not doubting you, I'm just curious which ones come to mind.
Here's a non-life-threatening example: in the mid-90s, fresh out of college and armed with my new developer's salary, I got my eyes operated on to fix the horrible vision I'd had since childhood. The procedure was something known as ALK, and the outcome was a hideous, star-spangled fun-house mirror perspective on the world every time I opened my eyes. The procedure known as LASIK, now common, became available in the US about a year later as an experimental procedure via a single type of laser approved for off-label use by the FDA. I was told the laser's primary use was etching circuit boards. At that time, LASIK was practiced in many other parts of the world using far more modern devices made specifically for eye surgery, operated by surgeons with much more experience than anyone in the US.
So I did a lot of research, flew to the nation of Colombia, got my eyes fixed with LASIK despite the severe complication of my FDA-approved ALK surgery, and obtained perfect vision - three years before LASIK was finally approved by the FDA. I still send the Colombian doctor a Christmas card every year. This is obviously not an example of a major health issue, but I don't know how you assign a value to three years of good vision vs. three years of near blindness. For me, it was beyond price.
The FDA serves a very necessary purpose and saves lives. But they are cautious to a fault, and their caution costs patients time and - in the worst cases - lives. In the case of experimental treatments by large, reputable pharmaceutical firms, informed adult patients should be able to sign waivers of liability and obtain treatment, FDA-approved or not.
what the hell does that have to do with the notion of the common good?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Let sure, let morality get in the way of everything.
as opposed to the lie "everyone should be completely selfish and ignore the common good and no, everything will not become like haiti, i promise"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it