[Edwina Lee (OP)]

I've just received a stem cell therapy advert on Facebook offering stem cell therapy in Thailand.
What interests me most at the moment is osteoarthritis.

Clearly cell therapy is of intense interests to researchers & patients, but the field needs patients monitoring and understanding.  How do we guard against the many rogue clinics which are bound to home in on offering patients fake therapies?

How do we check these clinics? Can we use this discussion to accumulate useful knowledge?

[note that Thailand & India governments have big ambitions in developing medical tourism, so we should expect to hear a lot more from them in the future. Having massive numbers of potential rich patients and low labour costs, they are in a gold mine for medical tourism]

[Edwina Lee (OP)]

Example offer from a Thailand Clinic:-
www.stemcells21.com

[note that it offers 2 target countries: UK & Pakistan   -   hmmmmm ]
[the list of Conditions Treated is mouth watering]

[Edwina Lee (OP)]

This looks like a good place to start looking at stem cells science and therapy.
https://www.closerlookatstemcells.org/

[Edwina Lee (OP)]

Hopefully, this stem cell discovery to regenerate cartilage will become a widely available treatment one day
2020-08-17 https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/08/Researchers-find-method-to-regrow-cartilage-in-the-joints.html

[Edwina Lee (OP)]

Hmmm going back to 2017 University of Hong Kong.

Researcher Barbara Pui Chan
https://www.ke.hku.hk/story/innovation/new-cartilage-regeneration-technology

[Edwina Lee (OP)]

Some stem cell therapy clinics are already treating the knee with stem cells.

I guess NHS Consultants could be the port of call about these stem cell treatments.

For example:-
https://www.theregenerativeclinic.co.uk/body-areas/knee/

[evan_au]

The stem cells need to come from your own body, otherwise they will be destroyed by your immune system.

There have been some successes in converting one kind of cell into another kind of cell in the lab.
- But doing it reliably is a challenge
- Implanting the cells where wanted needed is somewhat straightforward
- Regenerating the damaged target tissue is another challenge
- At present, few of these myriad options have been submitted to a regulatory authority, let alone approved.

So until a procedure has been tested and approved in clinical trials, it's not worth your money to fly to Thailand, India or Pakistan (even assuming retail air travel resumes sometime in the next year or so)