Now that the eight-year ban on government-funded stem cell research in the United States has been lifted, numerous policies and guidelines regulating this field are sure to come. Hopefully, these new laws will keep stem cell research productive and ethical. But even the most thorough regulations in this country cannot prevent desperate patients from seeking unapproved stem cell treatments elsewhere.
Many unscrupulous stem cell clinics in foreign countries offer supposedly breakthrough procedures without adequate research to back up their claims of safety or efficacy. At best, these treatments simply do not work, and the patient has spent tens of thousands of dollars for nothing. At worst, they may lead to potentially deadly side effects. These serious risks may be unforeseen due to lack of proper testing. Or, in the case of particularly nefarious companies, known risks may have been deliberately omitted or downplayed in the information provided to the patient.
This is a tricky issue to deal with. We cannot depend on foreign nations to ensure that research conducted there is ethical, so unfortunately, the responsibility must lie with the patient to make safe decisions regarding experimental treatments. We must focus on making patients aware of what constitutes reliable research. They should be informed of warning signs and red flags that likely indicate that a physician or clinic does not have the patient’s best interests at heart. And most of all, they should be reminded that if a treatment is illegal in the United States… well, there is probably a reason for that.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/323/5921/1564
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Hey Sara,
Thank you for such an insightful post. I really feel that the article post highlights one of the more urgent problems concerning stem cell research today. The media and scientific community certainly makes a huge deal about the potential rewards that can result from stem cells, but they often fail to strike home the fact that many of these cures are decades ahead of the present. Even when this detail is noted, it is often ignored by the members of the population that it affects the most: the deathly ill. Human psychology is a funny thing, and when things get desperate enough, there is a tendency to believe the impossible, that any chance is better than no chance at all. Thus, even with all the contradictory evidence staring back at them, these people will attempt even the most radical and unproven test trials.
It is a shame that there are individuals in this world that will take advantage of this very human weakness. Some of the treatments listed in your article are shams whose absurdities are compounded by the ridiculous prices asked for. Many of these cures are based on studies whose legitimacies are tenuous at best. Legal authorities should punish the people and companies that choose to profit by tossing artificial data in front of people largely blinded by desperation.
Unfortunately, this will probably never happen. The legal language would throw up a huge bureaucratic wall that will hamper the research that is scientific and genuinely wants to help sick patients. It could create bottlenecks in an approval-seeking system that is already many years long. And while the best solution for this problem is the one that you offered, that people need to look out for themselves, it is unfeasible in the sense that many of the people will lack the technical and scientific knowledge to make a conscious, informed decision. The only solution would be to rely on the scientific communities to come up with the regulations necessary to help patients make the right choice.
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