It was very odd today to hear an NPR story by a British reporter talking about Doctor Who. Of course it was actually a story about Doctor Hu and his treatments in China of a large variety of problems with Stem Cell injections. Even though there is no known reason for the success, he is showing a surprising success rate with even those too young to have a positive placebo effect.
However, none of his work has been peer reviewed and it sounds much closer to a new form of quackery than science.
The NPR report focuses on a 7-month old girl born with optic nerve hypoplasia or ONH. There is no conventional cure for this as there was no proper development of the optic nerves. For $23,000 plus travel and expenses, they had infusions of umbilical cords stem cells injected. Apparently, some dramatic improvement has been shown. More shockingly a 5 year old underwent this treatment and has shown gradual improvement that was verified by a US eye specialist from the University of Florida.
The article is worth reading. Though it reminds me of some of the sensationalist story headlines from Heinlein’s “I will fear no Evil”
It says it all. Without correctly set-up and run clinical trials (at least Phase II) you cannot make any claims as to the benefit of a medical treatment.
Dr Hu is just preying on the desperation of people such as the parents of the blind baby, it’s pretty sickening.
I think characterizing it as “preying” is a little biased. Without clinical trials, nobody on this board is in a position to confirm or refute any such claims. All we can say is that under American law, making such claims is illegal, and that in most Western countries making such claims is unethical. If he’s allowed to make such claims under Chinese law, and he can demonstrate results, then as long as people understand the risks they should be allowed to enter into an experimental trial with him.
I agree, but in the meantime desperate people will go to him and he will have some successes. The case of the 5 now 6 year was interesting though. I don’t think placebo or chance makes much sense and either there is something to this procedure that is worthy of more research or there is more to the story of the kids ailment.
I’m not sure how you can rule out chance. It could be any number of factors upto and including spontaneous remission. Without rigorous statistical analysis there’s no way to be sure that this patient’s reported recovery isn’t just some weird one-off.
I’m involved in clinical trials and you sometimes get a really weird result that lies far beyond the normal range of responses (e.g. the patient with a terminal illness that hangs on for 20 years instead of 6 months etc), if we were allowed to report like Dr Hu we would have “cured” our target condition years ago and collected our Nobel prizes.
Also, if you treat a condition without specifying what the response criteria are beforehand, it’s very simple to call the slightest improvement a response.
Okay, but the American Doctor from the University seems to think that spontaneous remission was not an answer in this case.
I still think it smacks of quackery, but if this Dr. Kaushal is legit, then I would be hard put to argue with him. It sounds like you are disagreeing with him.
He’s made at least one conclusion according to the article, that whatever effect he’s observing (if there is one) is down to the stem cells and not some other cause.