Does stem cell therapy always work?
Reading the recent media on Stem cells, it’s easy to see why many patients would consider stem cell therapy the modern equivalent of the “fountain of youth”. As a result, many patients belive magical things can happen if their stem cells are used for treatment. The ISSCR has criticized many international stem cell clinics for only touting their case reports of successes without also discussing their treatment failures. I have blogged on the fact that we don’t have a 100% success rate and that we spend allot of time trying to see if patients are a good fit for our type of stem cell therapy. Our last look (a few days ago) at our prospective grading system (where we review films to determine if the patient is or isn’t a GOOD, FAIR, or POOR candidate) shows that we tell about twice as many people that they are FAIR candidates and twice as many that they are POOR candidates for every one person we classify as a GOOD candidate. This means that only about 20-25% of patients are told they are
