What is a cure?

One of the most troublesome words in regenerative medicine is “cure”. Pill-pushers and regulatory bureaucrats warn darkly than any practitioner in the field who would dare to use that word is guilty of fraud. And yet, more often than not, the word is used by patients whose treatments were successful.
To be fair, regenerative medicine does not cure any disease – it can only potentiate the body to heal itself by regenerating damaged cells. The amount of such potential can be unpredictable. Not only are stem-cell protocols different from one clinic to another – as doctors, our responsibility is to make our protocols as effective as possible – but patients’ bodies differ as well. Sometimes there is a lot of healing, sometimes not so much.
Success comes down to the patient’s expectations. Charles Dickens used financial terms to describe the effects of expectation in a famous line from David Copperfield. “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.”
Each patient has different expectations. An Australian patient with coronary artery disease came to ProgenCell for a course of three treatments after years of bypass surgeries and chronic medications, the effects of which did not live up to his hopes. He underwent one stem-cell procedure in Tijuana that reduced his symptoms, by his estimate, about thirty percent: not cured but noticeably improved. He returned four months later for his second procedure. He has been very satisfied with the results and continues to improve. He talks about his experiences in these two short videos:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgCTHWhtHhk]
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qihSA3sqCGI]