Stem-cell treatments help thousands

Re: “Stem-cell ‘cures’ touted,” Sept. 27.

As a board-certified specialist in regenerative medicine, I feel compelled to comment.

The use of the phrase “unlicensed clinic” is misleading. It implies that clinics can be licensed. They cannot.

Doctors, nurses, physician’s assistants and nurse practitioners — the people who practise medicine — are licensed. Buildings, corporations, partnerships, etc., do not practise medicine and therefore are not licensed. Saying that they are “unlicensed” is deceptive nonsense.

Similarly, the word “unproven” is used to give the impression that nobody has ever tested these treatments. This is patently false. If you search the PubMed medical research database for “stem cell” you will find 200,763 articles. Many of these are randomized, double-blind, controlled clinical studies — the gold standard of medical research.

The article is quick to mention one of the vanishingly few cases in which complications have been attributed to stem-cell therapy. But it ignores the thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of successful stem-cell procedures that have been performed in the past decade.

The most successful stem-cell therapies have been for osteoarthritis. Thousands of people can walk again without pain and have avoided the debilitating trauma of knee- or hip-replacement surgery because they received stem-cell treatments. And yet the complication rate of stem-cell therapy is so low as to be almost non-existent.

The Times Colonist does its readers a disservice by publishing such biased and poorly researched “sensationalistic” articles. Perhaps it even harms them by dissuading them from seeking appropriate health care. Theodore E. Harrison, MD North Saanich