The biggest problem with incurable conditions is that they’re incurable. Standard treatments for such cases usually obligate the patients to spend the rest of their lives taking drugs that don’t make them better and often produce unpleasant side-effects.
Conventional wisdom has a saying about this sort of thing. “If you keep doing what you’ve been doing,
Parkinson’s disease is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that often impairs speech and other motor functions. Its symptoms include muscle rigidity, tremors, and the slowing of physical movement to a total loss of physical movement in the worst cases. Secondary symptoms may include autonomic, cognitive, and linguistic impairment. Parkinson’s disease is chronic,
Retinitis pigmentosa is the name given to a group of genetic, usually hereditary, disorders of the retina. (The retina is the part of the eye that converts light to nerve impulses.) About one in 3500 people suffer from retinitis pigmentosa throughout the world. It is a progressive disease ending in tunnel vision or complete blindness and for which there is no known cure.
One of the usual complications of diabetes is the breakdown of the blood vessels that feed the retina, which is the part of the eye that processes images. Retinopathy occurs when blood leaks out of those vessels into the eye, causing blurred vision and ultimately blindness. Eighty percent of all patients who have suffered from diabetes for ten years develop diabetic retinopathy as a consequence.
As interesting as the theory behind stem cell therapy might be, its results are what is most important. We’d like to share with you some of our case-histories. These two deal with arthritis.
A seventy-four-year-old woman, a doctor who retired to Baja California, presented at ProgenCell with metabolic disorder and rheumatoid arthritis.
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.