Slashdot Mirror
Consumer Guide To Stem Cell Clinics
Penguinsh- writes "Patients seeking stem cell treatments now have a guide to the various clinics purporting to offer such treatments. Not exactly a Zagat or Michelin, but much more objective information from qualified experts than was available before in one place. Created by the International Society for Stem Cell Research, the guide was the brainchild of a task force convened by former ISSCR President Irving Weissman of the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Research and Regenerative Medicine."
#1. Don't fucking go to one unless you want to be fleeced and risk death.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
FRY: Stem cells- aren't those controversial?
PROFESSOR: In your time, yes. Now we have adult stem cells, harvested from healthy adults, whom I killed for their stem cells!
I have some bad mental imagery associated with the phrase "Stem Cell Clinic".
Every time I hear that term, I think about the scenes in one of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "John Carter of Mars" books, where the antagonist is quite literally growing his army in vats, one glob of goo at a time.
Rooms full of vats, writhing and squirming as unformed body parts start to coalesce. An arm flailing out of the goo...an eye watching you from the corner of a vat, consciousness already apparent in it's solitary gaze.
For some odd reason, I also associate this mental imagery with what must surely go on in the kitchen of my old elementary school's cafeteria.
Being terminal might be an excuse for taking additional risks, but most (if not all) of the current "stem cell treatments" are just unfounded snake-oil designed to prey on desperate people, with not a single good reason to believe there is any chance it will make you better rather than worse. They might as well go for homeopathy or faith healing, except that those do NOT carry a risk of actually making things worse.
Mate,
If I had a kid who had a nasty and currently incurable disease, I'd most certainly risk jail, or even death myself to give them a shot. After it gets to the point of death, all bets are off. Seriously. How far would you go for someone you loved?
In this case, at least it brings some semblence of regulation to an industry that has arisen from an environment born from holier than thou moral beliefs infiltrating politics, rather than hard science.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck