It is only in the last couple of years that clinical trials have started for autologous stem cell therapies in the US. Or, to put it another way, for some time now unelected and largely unaccountable employees of the US government have forbidden US residents - on pain of criminal prosecution - from offering or making their own decisions about a medical technology commercially available elsewhere in the world. All the while, these bureaucrats impose vast costs on medical development concerns by insisting on largely pointless trials, continuing far past any reasonable trade-off between risk and reward, thereby greatly postponing the commercial introduction of these technologies in the US.

Do you have responsibility for, or even the ability to make your own medical choices? Not according to people in positions of power at the FDA. Regulation in medicine has largely become an exercise undertaken for its own sake, as is the end result of any centralization of power. No-one's interests are being served save for those of the career bureaucrats in charge of forbidding new things. Everyone else gets to suffer due to the ball and chain shackled to medical progress, and due to being forbidden the basic, fundamental freedom to choose how to treat their own medical conditions.

But back to the science, what little of it is presently permitted to proceed.

An autologous therapy is one in which stem cells are taken from the patient, multiplied many times over in cell cultures, and then returned en mass to spur regeneration that the body would normally not accomplish on its own. Here, Scientific American updates us on an ongoing trial:

The first person to receive a new cardiac stem cell treatment in a U.S. Food and Drug Administration clinical trial is doing well, it was announced last week. ... Jones, whose heart tissue is permanently scarred and weakened by two previous heart attacks, suffers from congestive heart failure

...

The new approach, using a patient's adult stem cells to regenerate healthy heart tissue, is currently in phase I clinical trials to test for safety. The procedure consists of removing healthy heart tissue from the patient, purifying the stem cells from the material, and allowing the stem cell population to grow. Once ready, the stem cells are reintroduced into the scarred region of the heart using a minimally invasive technique.

Since the re-injection of his own stem cells on July 17, Jones' heart has increased its ability to pump blood by about 5 percent. Jones commented in the University of Louisville School of Medicine press release that he felt so good he might "even start jogging again."

The doctors will continue monitoring Jones every few months for the next two years to measure his recovery. There are currently 13 more patients going through the phase I trial, and the researchers hope to eventually test a total of 20 patients.

Now ask yourself, why can't anyone with heart disease and the necessary funds just up and do the research on the treatment and choose to try this within the borders of the US? Because a faceless bureaucrat has decided that it is forbidden, and that anyone who offers this treatment must be jailed. Welcome to the land of the free.

Posted by Reason