Its a nightmare story: Three women pay tens of thousands of dollars to a South Florida clinic for unproven stem cell therapy, only to end up blindcritics warn that theres a large and growing problem with patients being promised revolutionary stem cell therapy, only to find theyve wasted their moneyor worse.

Yet clinics around the world offer unregulated procedures, typically using fat cells that are removed from the patients body, treated, and injected back into itthe process that blinded the three women in South Florida.

And indeed, the confusion over what we actually can do with stem cells led the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) last year to issue guidelines cautioning researchers against letting their work be misrepresented in the public eye.

Intertwined with that issue, though, is the lack of regulation that allows clinics to exploit patients ignoranceBecause the procedure extracts cells from the patients own body and only puts them through minimal treatment before reinjecting them somewhere else, the FDA does not consider it a drug treatment. Its outside the agencys purview.

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post:Stem Cell Clinics Are Ruining Peoples Lives

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Stem cell clinics accused of promising more than they can deliver, and worse - Genetic Literacy Project