“As you get older, you keep doing the same things you’ve always done,” Dr. Norman Simmons liked to say, “you just do them slower.”
Even in the best of circumstances – without suffering catastrophic illnesses such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s diseases – the body simply runs down. That’s just a fact of life. As each biological system begins to fail,
In a video interview, Luis Romero Guerra, M.D., talks about the magic of the human body.
The way in which the human body heals itself, or renews itself, or regenerates itself, is through its stem cells. Tissues, organs, and stem cells are found throughout the body. Organs and tissues that have sustained damage or that are being damaged for one reason or another make use of nearby stem cells.
The folks at CBS’s 60 Minutes have been up in arms the last couple of years about fraud being perpetrated in the name of stem cells. They are right to do so, of course, but their stridency and their unwillingness to report the many successes of these evolving techniques do a great disservice to the millions of people who can be benefitted by effectively applied stem cell therapies.
A forty-four-year-old man came to us with scleroderma in 2008. His disease had already progressed several years by then and his skin had become hardened almost like cardboard. He was unable to turn his head because of the tightness of his neck and speech was difficult because of tightness of his lips. He had only limited movement in his hands and fingers and complained of pain in his joints and back as well as depression.
Ever since the United States began tightening up travel for its citizens, patients from the U.S. have worried about getting treated because of the delays involved in getting a passport to leave the country. Some of that worry is misplaced. You don’t really need a passport to leave your own country and you don’t need a passport to visit Tijuana.
In the past, people with arthritis have had to resign themselves to it as being just another part of growing old. Traditional treatment emphasizes medications – anti-inflammatories and analgesics – to mask the symptoms. This lessens the amount of pain a patient experiences but it does not help the patient get better. In fact, the patient is usually condemned to taking medication for the rest of his or her life,
Medical science still doesn’t know what causes autism, which is a spectrum disorder of the brain that appears with varying severity in as much as one percent of the population, but we do know that the spectrum is associated with restricted flow of blood to the brain and with immune dysregulation.
The connection between autism and the immunological system has created a lot of interest within the regenerative medicine community.