Every day sick patients are asking how can stem cell therapy help them now.  These patients are most likely desperate for any help, as the current medicine or prognosis just isn’t cutting it.  And while one day there may be a viable answer of a yes, right now unfortunately, the field is just not there yet.  But, others do not share this view and are in fact offering to cure people’s diseases with stem cell treatments, a phenomenon known as stem cell tourism as most cases occur outside this country.  Below we discuss a little about this.

What are stem cell treatments?

As was mentioned, stem cell treatments have been developed as a way to intervene in the development of and potentially treat a whole host of illnesses and physical maladies. These include baldness, missing teeth, and blindness, as well as degenerative illnesses like Parkinson’s disease, type 1 diabetes mellitus, heart failure, and even cancer.

The majority of the advertised stem cell treatments utilize adult stem cells, normally harvested from the patient, and these stem cells are introduced into the damaged part of the body. The stem cells then self-renew within the damaged part, promoting growth of new tissues and subsequently replacing the diseased tissues. [Read more…]