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Health-Thailand-Stem Cell Therapy
Health-Thailand-Stem Cell Therapy, Heart patients head to Bangkok for life-saving stem cell treatment (by Nareerat Wiriyapong…AFP News) |
BANGKOK, Feb 13, 2007 (AFP) - After years of suffering from congestive heart failure that caused him seven heart attacks Douglas Rice from the US state of Washington was told that he had three months
to live.
But he turned down an artificial heart offered by American doctors.
"I did not want one. I did not want to be alive like a machine," the semi-retired entrepreneur told AFP.
Instead he decided to fly to Bangkok for experimental stem cell therapy that came with a price tag of 30 thousand dollars.
"I did not hesitate at all. You use your own blood, your own stem cells, and then they go back to your
own body. I don't see any danger at all," he said.
Rice, 61, is among a growing number of people from around the world who are seeking out medical treatments that are unavailable in their home countries.
The stem cell treatment he received is available only in Thailand, which has no regulations governing such experimental treatments that offer enormous promise but can also stir up equally enormous controversy.
This particular procedure avoids the contentious debate over medical research with embryonic stem cells, in which a human embryo is usually destroyed to collect the cells, which have the potential to grow into any kind of tissue.
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