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The stem cell scammers

mindhacks.com

39 pointsgnosis9 comments

I have a family member who has passed away from Alzheimer's, and I'd like to weigh in. When you face late-stage Alzheimer's, you (and the people around you) really have one of two mindsets, realizing that conventional, already-tested treatments aren't likely going to cure you, or ensure your survival much longer:

1. Accept your fate; live out the remainder of your life the best you can before your loss of memory tears apart the very fabric of who you are.

2. Try unproven, religious, traditional, etc treatments that the rest of us would consider ridiculous, and hope for the best.

I think a very valid argument could be made for #1, but not everyone weighs life with the same set of values. While it may not entirely be wise to seek in-testing treatments, it should be understandable why some would do so.

The problem with #1 is that it won't be me, alone, whose life will be rent asunder. (Dementia is part of my condition, and though it is currently well-controlled, I am aware of a steady, gradual decline, the emotions that flare up out of frustration, and more than a little irrational thinking. I've watched my family and friends go through this before, too many times.)

My current hope is that when I've gotten too stupid to live, I'll do something so spectacularly stupid that the problem is largely self-correcting (and, if all goes well, wins me a Darwin on the way out). There is no comfortable way to lose a loved one, but some are far more damaging than others. I hate even the thought that the people who care about me will still care about and be hurt by me even when I am no longer myself in any real sense. I might not chase obvious quackery, but anything that's an experimental coin toss might not be out of the question,say, this time next year.

#2 is a super common alternative. A colleague of mine was suffering from late-stage lupus and was told he had X years to live. Well, X+10 years later and he continues to live (though dementia continued to get worse and he became less and less able to tackle basic life tasks), so he attributes these things to the Reiki healing techniques he's applied in his life despite being a normally very scientific person.

I can't begrudge a guy like that - whatever brings him comfort as he nears the end of his life is fine with me.

Anybody that goes to the Ukraine to have their brains infused with stem-cells is suffering from a lot more than just a fear of Alzheimers. The kind and number of complications that come to mind (assuming the treatment itself doesn't do anything at all) make it an absolute no-brainer (pun unavoidable).

And if it does something it likely isn't going to be positive. Desperate people are easy victims, if you know someone that is even considering something like this please do them a favour and talk them out of it before something bad happens.

While I find it deplorable, I don't find it surprising. There have been people offering crazy treatments pretty much since the beginning of time. The risks to patients are extreme, and the risk to science is that someone will have a bad outcome that is attributed to something that didn't cause it. That said, information is developed in these programs, and scientific or not that information can inform actual scientists. It was true of prisoners being experimented on in POW camps and it will be true of these poor folks in the Ukraine.

> That said, information is developed in these programs

That would not be my null hypothesis. This kind of work strikes me as unlikely to be done in a way that has scientific utility. It's quite possible that I'm just not thinking of a similar circumstance with a useful outcome, however.

Also, the use of knowledge gained from unethical research conducted as part of Nazi war crimes is a highly divisive topic.

I was thinking more US tests on prisoners [1] not the Nazis.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/health/research/02infect.h...

It seems incredible that anyone would believe stem cells to be so magical that they could heal psychiatric disorder, even less psychological ones. Are there any studies -even shoddy ones- that would even suggest that?

I'm not surprised that people who are desperate for a treatment would cling at anything for a bit of hope, but that seems like a bit of a stretch.

On the bright side , there are legitimate procedures that work. http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/ontario-man-s-sight-restored-wi...

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