Chapter 9 - Stem Cell Tourism

Abstract

This chapter discusses stem cell tourism, 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. Advertisements for these clinics, often outside the patient's own country, claim that stem cell treatment can benefit or cure complaints that range from diabetes, stroke, paralysis caused by spinal cord injury, and Lou Gehrig's disease, to wrinkles in skin and age-related hair loss in men. The stem cells in these clinics may be autologous and derived from patients' own bone marrow or from another source and be based on infusion or injection of umbilical cord blood from donors immediately after birth. Donors in this case are likely to have been paid for donation and their health history may be unknown; this conceivably entails a risk. Polarization of public and political opinion of the field by the ethical issues associated with human embryonic stem cell research has contributed to interest in adult stem cell sources for therapy. Human embryonic stem cell research is often defended because of its potential use in future cell transplantation. If there were equivalent human stem cell alternatives then it would be more difficult to justify the use of human embryos to derive stem cells. iPS cells may change this aversion to pluripotent stem cells on ethical grounds in the foreseeable future.