NEW YORK, Aug. 30 (UPI) -- An increasing number of U.S. residents are traveling to foreign clinics for alternative treatments using their own stem cells.
While such treatment is largely unavailable and still in experimental and research phases in the United States, sites in Argentina, Mexico, Portugal, China and the Caribbean offer to extract patients' stem cells and regrow them into whatever is missing or amiss, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
For example, people suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease can pay more than $100,000 to the Regina Mater clinic in Buenos Aires for stem cell therapy. People with spinal cord injuries are going to Chaoyang Hospital in Beijing for help. Doctors there transplant nerve cells from human fetuses into the spinal cords of customers who can pay their $20,000 fee.
The growing stream of stem cell tourists is driven by constant media chatter about the purported unlimited potential of stem cell therapies, observers said.
Stephen Barrett, a retired psychiatrist who tracks scientific frauds on his Web site, Quackwatch.org, isn't surprised that people already are offering miracle stem cell cures.
"It's a general characteristic that quackery stands in the shadow of science," he told the newspaper.
