Stem cell tourism

Stem cell tourism is a term recently coined to describe a growing practice among patients to pay large sums of money to private clinics for often unproven stem cell therapies. Patients can be desperate because conventional medicine has failed to provide a solution for their particular condition. For diseases affecting children, emotions may run particularly high: the children themselves cannot make properly informed decisions, so parents face the additional conflict of wanting the best for them, while, at the same time, having to protect them from undue risk. Advertisements for these clinics, often outside the patient’s own country, claim that stem cell treatment can benefit or cure complaints ranging from diabetes, stroke, paralysis caused by spinal cord injury, cerebral palsy, and Lou Gehrig’s disease, to wrinkles in skin and age-related hair loss in men.