Americans flocking to India for stem cell therapy
Wednesday May 30, 2012 08:29:20 AM,
IANS
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Washington: A growing
number of Americans are travelling to India to seek treatment for
rare diseases through India's experimental embryonic stem cell
therapy, according to an investigative report.
Among them Cash Burnaman, a 6-year-old South Carolina boy, who
travelled with his parents to India seeking treatment for a rare
genetic condition that has left him developmentally disabled, CNN
reported.
"Cash is mute. He walks with the aid of braces. To battle his
incurable condition, which is so rare it doesn't have a name, Cash
has had to take an artificial growth hormone for most of his
life," it said.
His divorced parents, Josh Burnaman and Stephanie Krolick, have
paid tens of thousands of dollars to have Cash undergo
experimental injections of human embryonic stem cells at New
Delhi's NuTech Mediworld run by Dr. Geeta Shroff, a retired
obstetrician and self-taught embryonic stem cell practitioner.
Shroff first treated Cash -- who presents symptoms similar to Down
Syndrome -- in 2010. "I am helping improve their quality of life,"
she told CNN.
After five weeks of treatment, Cash and his parents returned home
to the US. That's when Cash began walking with the aid of braces
for the first time.
For four or five weeks of treatment, Shroff says she has charged
87 American patients an average of $25,000.
But doctors cited by CNN said all that work and hope and money
Cash's supporters have funnelled into his experimental therapy
likely will have no medical benefits.
"There is zero evidence for what she (Shroff ) is doing being
effective," Rutgers University's Dr. Wise Young, a leading US
neuroscientist, was quoted as saying.
"It's concerning no matter how you look at it," said CNN chief
medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. "Frankly it's the complete
wrong way of going about this sort of science."
A leading Indian neurosurgeon, Dr. P.N. Tandon, cited by CNN
agreed there was zero medical evidence of the effectiveness of
embryonic stem cell therapy like that provided at NuTech Mediworld
But inside her clinic, surrounded by patients, Shroff disagreed.
"Success," she told CNN, "is defined differently by various groups
of people within that therapy mode. So as of right now, almost
everyone -- greater than 90 percent -- have had success."
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