Fight Aging!

It is interesting to note that the medical research community in highly regulated countries - the UK in this case - is still in the process of trialing adult stem cell therapies for heart damage:

The first part of the study will involve 300 patients whose hearts are failing because of heart disease or a previous heart attack.

A second arm will involve 200 patients whose hearts are failing specifically because of dilated cardiomyopathy - a heart muscle disorder.

And a final element will involve 200 patients who have just had a heart attack.

Some patients will have stem cells extracted from bone marrow in their hip and injected into their major coronary arteries or directly into their heart.

Others will receive injections of growth factor drugs to try to cause stem cells to spill out of their bone marrow and into their blood without the need for the operation.

You might recall that even trials of this sort of work were blocked in the US by the FDA until successful tests were conducted in South America. Meanwhile, today, the same class of stem cell treatment for heart disease discussed above is commercially, responsibly available to the paying public in Thailand.

Centralized, unaccountable, state regulation of medicine and medical research is simply incompatible with rapid, effective progress - it leads to greater levels of death and suffering than would otherwise be the case. Entities like the FDA and its overseas counterparts must be dismantled, and the process of accountability in medical research left to the free market in reviewing and rating concerns - i.e. those that will actually do a good, cost-effective job.

Technorati tags: stem cell research