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Stem Cell Tourist Died From Treatment in Thailand |
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Written by Administrator
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Saturday, 19 June 2010 |
 Several news outlets report that a patient died after having received her own adult stem cells directly injected to her kidneys in an unnamed private Bangkok clinic. A postmortem revealed that the sites of injection had weird growths - 'tangled mixtures of blood vessels and bone marrow cells'. Researchers say the treatment almost certainly killed her.
At first glance, this sounded like another case of a desperate patient seeking a high risk unproven form of treatment. But upon further reading it was more like a bad clinic than a bad procedure. According to the article, patients with similar diseases who received blood stream injection of stem cells had significant improvements. This clinic on the contrary injected the stem cells directly into the kidney causing the stem cells to try to build new blood vessels and tissues inside the kidney.
As long as a patient is well informed of the risks she has a right to take those risks because after all it's her own life. But did the doctor inform her about ALL the risks? I think people need to be more cautious when dealing with wide crap unregulated clinics in a place not known for cutting edge science like Thailand.
I looked up clinicaltrials.gov for her condition, lupus nephritis, and found 19 active NIH-funded clinical trials. I would have taken my chance with any of those trials rathan than coming here any day.
The paper can be found here behind pay wall.
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thanks