I have had some trouble with pinched nerves. Long story short, we un-pinched it, or so we believe. I’m feeling much better, thank you very much, but I do still get a certain amount of my old nerve symptoms. The un-pinching was pretty good, but only a partial cure.
Doc thinks the trauma from the pinching over time damaged my nerve, and what’s left of the symptoms is a result of this damage, not ongoing pinching. The proposed solution is obvious enough- reverse the damage, put an end to the symptoms.
How that is achieved is something I hadn’t heard of: exosomes. Being new to the subject, I have no idea if this is the ideal link to share about it, but it does cover some of the basics:
I’m neither a huge proponent of this nor a skeptic- like I said, I’ve never heard of it. I have some trepidation that maybe this is merely something somebody wants to sell me. If stem cell therapy at first seemed ‘beguilingly simple’ but then turned out to be a bust, well, this is presented as a kind of mini-panacea, too. The article has a bit of a sales-pitch tone IMHO. Is it too good to be true?
Or, is this the fruit of stem cell research and I am about to be the lucky recipient? Doc says they’ve personally used exosome therapy on patients with more severe versions of my condition and seen good results (eg wheelchair to golf course). They say this is “not experimental” FWIW, though results are not guaranteed.
What do I know about exosomes? Hardly anything. My question for the dope is about as general as it gets: What can anybody tell me about this? I’m not asking for advice on whether I should follow through with this plan. However, if somebody knows of research that this will cause me to grow a 3rd eye a decade from now, or if there has been some kind of scandal or controversy around this subject, I’ll make my own judgment.
I am not at all an expert on the subject. In fact, I had not heard of exosomes before your post.
But I was intrigued and did a little reading on the subject. From what I gather, exosomes hold some promise for the future, but no actual therapies exist as yet.
And they would be years away, given the need to first generate the knowledge of how they work, then creating an actual therapeutic agent, then running clinical trials to prove efficacy and safety. I am curious about your doctor telling you that they have personally used such a therapy. This seems contrary to everything I am reading.
“…a fair number of research groups are working towards treatments for various tissue types and age-related conditions. As a class, exosome therapies seem about as promising as early stem cell therapies, based on the results to date in animal models, and are arguably more easily controlled and managed than cells. Just considering the logistics of manufacture and storage, the costs should be significantly lower. Scientists are working their way up from mice to larger animal models, and the first human clinical trials for various conditions are on the near horizon.”
I’m not sure what “near horizon” means here, but I doubt FDA approved therapies will be around sooner than a decade or so.
And, to be realistic, lots of things seem exciting at first but then fizzle out for various reasons such as practicality. What we know about stuff like this is far, far outweighed by what we don’t yet know.
Exosomes may be just the thing to cure conditions such as you have, but they also may not. Sorry to throw cold water on your hopes.
It’s not cold water, I just know very little of this subject and thought the mega-mind that is the dope might have some answers.
There are a few things to consider. I was actually interacting with a doctor’s assistant, who was playing telephone between me and this super busy doctor. I have met personally with this doctor several times before, and have been helped quite a lot by them.
The last treatment I got was a different thing, and it turns out I had never properly understood just quite what it is that was done. I was reasonably close I guess. I did know enough to assess the potential (low) risks, it just wasn’t quite what I thought it was. It got results. Anyway, I may misunderstand what is being proposed again, although the literature I took home with me was definitely focused on exosome therapy.
There was definitely a tale about this being done on someone else, someone who was brought in via wheelchair though probably more through pain or numbness than paralysis. Anyway, this ‘regenerative therapy’ took its effect over 6 or 9 months such that the patient was walking around doing 9 holes of golf.
I actually don’t have much info on what it is that is being proposed. It is a printout from exopharm, probably somewhere on the set of pages in the link I posted. “Exosomes 101: Meet the exosomes” from Jun 2, 2017. It does not appear in a casual google search.
The idea is that I get an injection of exosomes, and it reverses my nerve damage. I’m not in that bad of shape. The idea is to go from 75% healed to most of the way.
This doctor is Quite respected and as I have said, has gotten me nothing but positive results. But some of this is a head-scratcher. There is actually a sort of a “deal” involved- I scheduled the procedure in part because I exist in an eternal time crunch so I grabbed a date that could work when I had the chance. I would research the procedure and if I found anything I thought was too alarming, I could pull the plug on the whole thing. This was my idea and it is fine with them.
Here is one of three references in the literature I took home if you are interested.
I may have been a bit too skeptical in my initial reply.
While the link you provided in your 2nd post is talking about how to make sure clinical trials are effective, it does not indicate that clinical trials are underway. However, some of the papers in the “Related Articles” on that page do seem to indicate that clinical trials are currently underway for some therapies using exosomes. And they seem to be for a pretty wide range of conditions.
That’s actually pretty exciting. And it is possible that your doctor is involved in one of these clinical trials. In that case, you would be participating also, as a test subject. There are positives and negatives to that, so make sure you discuss it thoroughly with the doctor before giving your final consent.