Now Princess Michael backs stem cell clinic in Bahamas
... but she tells Mail she wasn’t paid and did NOT get her private treatment free
PRINCESS Michael of Kent has been promoting a private medical clinic in the Bahamas – for free.
In a slick video the wife of the Queen’s cousin praised the ‘amazing’ stem cell treatment she had received.
Unlike other royals who have cashed in through commercial deals, she said she was not paid for the promotional video. The princess also said she paid in full for the ‘lifechanging’ treatment.
Her five-minute film emerged after the Daily Mail revealed this week how the Queen’s grandson, Peter Phillips, has been making money from his royal status by advertising milk in China.
Lady Kitty Spencer – the niece of Diana, Princess of Wales – was also found to be exploiting her royal connections to drum up sales for a rival brand of Chinese milk.
The revelations have shone a spotlight on how the Duke and Duchess of Sussex might fare as they embarked on their own money-making careers on the fringes of the Royal Family.
The video starring Princess Michael sees her having stem cell therapy to treat her stiff shoulder. The film, for the Okyanos Centre for Regenerative Medicine on Grand Bahama, mentions four times that she is a princess.
It charts her progress over six months, and at the end she tells the camera the ‘amazing’ treatment has ‘changed my life’.
Princess Michael is the wife of the Queen’s beloved first cousin Prince Michael of Kent.
Prince Michael, 77, works as a business consultant, offering advice to the construction, telecommunications, insurance, finance and tourism industries.
His 75-year-old wife has written books and earns money as a public speaker.
Princess Michael’s film for the Okyanos facility shows her walking to the Grand Bahama clinic along a white sandy beach.
Okyanos – the name comes from the Greek god of the river, Okeanos – is a private firm headquartered in Freeport in the Bahamas, which charges several thousand pounds for stem cell treatments. Until it closed recently due to hurricane damage, wealthy clients would fly in from the United States and around the world for bespoke stem cell treatments.
Stem cells are the human body’s raw material for repairing itself. They can self-renew or turn into a specific type of cell, such as blood or muscle cells, and offer huge potential for treating a range of conditions.
In Princess Michael’s case, she explains in the video: ‘ My shoulder pain was getting worse. I play a lot of tennis, a lot of quite hard tennis. For my age, it was probably too much for my right shoulder... I had worn out the cartilage.’
Her therapy involved removing stem cells from small deposits of fat in her body by liposuction, and reinjecting them into the bloodstream where they helped her wornaway cartilage regrow.
She says: ‘What I like about it really is that it’s my stem cells, going into my body, to make my body grow better, where it’s missing something.’
The video shows her having consultations with specialists at the gleaming clinic, and explains how the stem cells were used to ‘activate the body’s natural healing’.
Six months after the therapy, she was filmed lifting her arm to show how much further she could raise it than before.
She says on camera: ‘I’m extremely happy and extremely grateful to these stem cells. I started tennis again, and it’s going very well. I have no problem moving my arm. So I’m delighted. I’m very impressed that at Okyanos, you have doctors from all over – because this is the new thing.
‘I’m living proof. I think it’s amazing – I think stem cell is the future, there’s no doubt in my mind. It changed my life.’
Her spokesman, Simon Astaire, said last night: ‘She was not paid and appeared on screen because
‘Extremely happy and grateful’
she is genuinely impressed with their work.’ He said she paid in full for the treatment.
Mr Astaire added that the princess spoke about her shoulder when he saw her six weeks ago.
He said: ‘She spoke about that treatment and in a very passionate way. She was extremely pleased with it because it had really helped her.’ Princess Michael is known to make money on the lecture circuit, as well as through interior design work and several well-paid consultancies. She has also written a number of non-fiction books and a trilogy of novels. Accounts for Cantium Services, an umbrella firm she and her husband use for their commercial activities, show it has turned over £1.8 million in the past four years.
The records at Companies House show it made a gross profit of £462,038 last year, £416,348 in 2018, £497,634 in 2017 and £426,293 in 2016 – adding up to £1,802,313.
‘Devastation of Hurricane Dorian’
Okyanos used to be owned by an American biotechnology giant, Black Beret Life Sciences, based in Texas. But since it ‘permanently’ closed its doors last autumn following the devastation of Hurricane Dorian which flattened large swathes of the island, its current ownership is unclear.
The firm’s phone number is out of service and there was no response from its former spokesmen.
It is understood that Princess Michael’s video was filmed from the start of last year.