Review: Caveat lector (and emptor)!
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 04 23, 2014
This is a long assay or a short monograph attempting to explain the why's and how's of using stem cells to treat practically ALL human disease, but particularly those related to skeleto-muscular disorders. My main exception to the authors title, especially the words SOLUTION and HEAL, lies in the fact that the title is patently wrong. He makes experimental attempts to develop therapies into hard facts, thus raising vain hopes in people whose suffering would make them grab any straw to get better.The only therapy that works (most of the time), helps more patients than it kills, and is approved by medical authorities, is allogeneic or transplantation (requiring life-long immunosuppression of the recipient) of bone-marrow stem cells, nowadays harvested from the blood stream after enrichment through induction by colony growth  factors - a procedure that by itself is quite fraught with side-effects. It should be stressed that the cells harvested and injected into a patient are multipotent rather than pluripotent. Unlike embryonic stem cells that can turn into any specialized tissue cell, these are already set on the pathway towards blood cells and cannot be used for other purposes, such as osteoarthritis (see comment below). They are used in patients with serious blood diseases (leukemias, lymphomas, aplastic anemia, etc.), or advanced cancer patients, where the original cells have been depleted by disease or by treatment. Autologous transplantation (while aso approved by authorities and does not cause immune responses in the recipient) assumes one can separate cancer cells from healthy ones, which is uncertain - at best. All other treatments are EXPERIMENTAL. The best known are attempts to rectify heart disease by injecting stem cells. The whole field was very excited by the apparent success, mostly reported in several relatively large studies. The interest in these approaches waned as it became clear that the promising results cannot be reproduced. Recently, a very detailed critical analysis appeared in the International Journal of Cardiology, Volume 168, Issue 4, 9 October 2013, Pages 3381–3403. It discovered more than 200 very serious discrepancies among the studies that could be attributed to ignorance of the researchers, their patent negligence, or downright fraud. The authors of the critique were very gentle and tried to avoid the last conclusion. In any case, the results of this approach to a fatal disease are questionable at best. The same goes for non-lethal (though admittedly very painful) disorders, such as osteoarthritis. There is a number of studies with promising results, but the issue is far from resolved and approval as a standard therapy is far far away. There is also a serious problem how cells that are programmed towards developing into blood cells can repair bone, cartiledge, muscle and synovial fluid. As a general comment, stem cells are extremely difficult to maintain in the undifferentiated state, they are extremely difficult to stimulate towards the desired tissue type, and they are dangerous because they can form emryonic tumors - teratomas (yes, even autologous transplants).Reading Mr. Wilhide's pamphlet may convince the uninitiated that the solution to their suffering is just a phonecall away, but nothing could be further from the truth. On the other hand, there are many clinics and doctors (or pretenders), who would gladly exchange hope for hard cash. By the way, FDA may be slow, conservative, overprotective -  but it is not evil.