A police officer who was paralyzed in a car accident is now doing better thanks to repair stem cell therapy.  Rickey Turner, had to go all the way  to China to get this stem cell therapy because it isn't yet approved in the USA (although it should be).  Is he walking again?  No, but the beauty of adult (repair) stem cell therapy for spinal cord injuries is that it is a very low risk procedure that has helped him (and others) in ways that people who aren't paralyzed have difficulty imagining.  Read on to see what I mean:

Quick results

Sitting at home in his electric wheelchair, Turner recalled a much different life before his brush with death in 2006.

Turner was seriously injured Aug. 29, 2006, while he was on patrol in Henderson. The wreck left him paralyzed.

"My left hand was sensitive to touch," Turner, a father of three, recalled. "My index and middle finger were hypersensitive on my left hand, and if I moved them, it shot a sharp pain up through my arm. If I had a spasm in my leg, it would send a pain like lava, and I would scream out in pain."

Turner also lost feeling in part of his arms and had no movement from his chest down to his legs. He also sustained irreversible injuries to his spinal cord. Doctors told him he would never walk again.

Turner said the pain from his condition caused him to withdraw as the Democratic nominee for Rusk County sheriff earlier this year.

But those prognoses since have changed.

In March, Turner traveled to Hangzhou, China to seek treatment at Xiaoshan Hospital. He received six injections of adult stem cells, harvested from umbilical cord blood, in his spinal cord in hopes that he would have the chance to move freely again.

Turner said he had to go to China to receive treatment because the spinal cord procedure has not been approved in the United States. Stem cells harvested from umbilical cord blood rehabilitates damaged nerves and improves motor functions, such as body movement and bowel control, according to the Beike Cell Medical Group that performed Turner's stem cell treatment and coordinated his trip.

The treatment worked.

"My mother was sitting with me that night, and I could touch my index and middle finger and didn't have the sharp pain," Turner said, recalling what happened after he received his fourth stem cell injection. "Then my finger began to move. My mother asked, 'Did you do that?' I told her, 'I think I did.' "

Turner said the doctors didn't expect any activity to occur for 75 days. It took three weeks.

"The doctors came in to check on me and couldn't believe it," Turner said. "They ran out of the room and came back in and started videotaping everything. My mother and I were crying because the last time I was able to move those fingers was before the wreck. It was really something."

Since his treatment, Turner has more mobility in his upper torso, has more strength and motion in his arms and can play-wrestle with his 4-year-old son Corbin Turner.

Click here to read the whole thing

Followers of this blog may know that I am the founder of the Repair Stem Cell Institute .  I formed this organization to get the word out that repair stem cells aka adult stem cells are the greatest medicine in the world today.  Millions of people with so called incurable diseases could be helped if they knew about the power of repair stem cells and if repair stem cells were available to them.

Today, my organization just came out with a press release.  The Repair Stem Cell Institute and our Scientific Advisory Board compiled the first ever set of  standards for stem cell treatment companies-

Here is more on this from myself:

"It's the responsibility of the RSCI and members of our SAB to establish
the industry's first standards of excellence at the highest level for RSC
treatment centers worldwide to meet and abide by," Mr. Margolis said. "We
must assure people seeking life-changing stem cell therapies that they can
expect to receive the best quality therapeutics from the facilities they
diligently research."
Along with licensing and certification, the RSCI stipulates stem cell
treatment centers must have a successful record of treating patients with Repair Stem Cells for a minimum of six months. The Repair Stem Cells must be either autologous (from the body of the patient) or from umbilical cords. Any other source must be clearly labeled "experimental" until there is a completed successful clinical trial using the experimental source of cells for the disease(s) being treated by the
treatment center. Also, the laboratory supplying the stem cells to the
treatment center must meet at least minimum recognized current Good
Manufacturing Procedure (cGMP) standards. That same laboratory must have over 100 successful RSC human implants to its credit. ("Successful" means having clearly improved the patient's quality of life.) For a complete listing of RSCI's standards of excellence, please visit http://www.repairstemcells.org .  Please go visit my site, especially if you or someone you know has some disease or condition that has diminished their quality of life- you may find the help  you need.

To read my full press release- click here

In Utah, they are about to begin a trial that will have patients with peripheral vascular disease treated with their own adult (repair) stem cells.  The trial will be offered to patients who are "no-option," that is, they can't do an angioplasty, they can't do a bypass, the only option left is amputation.  Well now, thanks to Repair Stem Cell Therapy, there is another option- getting stem cell treatment using a patient's own stem cells.

Here is part of the article-

Can stem cells save patients from amputation?  (I can save somebody a lot of work- YES!! THEY CAN!!!- DM)

August 11th, 2008 @ 6:14pm

By Ed Yeates

Utah doctors want to know if a patient's own stem cells might save them from amputation. (Memo to Utah Doctors- Yes, they can!!!- DM)

The University of Utah is starting a unique clinical trial using volunteer patients who are at a critical stage of their vascular disease.

Surgeons may have to amputate a limb for a number of reasons. Patients might be soldiers, or victims of an accident, or they might have what is called peripheral vascular disease. Diabetes, age, smoking, high cholesterol and genetics all play a role in how this disease blocks vessels going to the lower limbs. In critical stages, patients are at the end of their rope.

Stem cells from study volunteers will be brought to the University of Utah's cell therapy lab. There they'll be purified and concentrated. The cells will be drawn from the blood stream of patients who have been given a medication. That medication literally mobilizes the stem cells out of the bone marrow.

Once prepared in the lab, the concentrated cells go back to those same patients.

Dr. Kraiss said, "We're hopeful that taking a lot of these cells from the patient's own bone marrow and then injecting it into the areas where there's poor blood supply that these cells will basically manufacture new blood vessels."

Ok,  I have to be positive that this is a step in the right direction, albeit a tiny one and too slow for my (and millions of others suffering from Peripheral Vascular Disease) liking.  My goal at the Repair Stem Cell Institute is to make adult (repair) stem cell therapy available to all!

Click here to see the whole thing

It seems like everyday, they are finding a new way to use stem cell treatment.  Today, I have a story on repair (adult) stem cells being used for spinal fusion.  Chronic back pain affects millions of people around the world.  Sometimes, back surgery or "spinal fusion" is the only solution to their back pain.  Well, "spinal fusion" just got a lot easier thanks to stem cell therapy.  Quicker recovery time, less pain, and most likely a better outcome- what's not to like about repair stem cells?  Read on about this back patient, Leslie Mignona:

She decided on spinal fusion, which helps reduce nerve pain by stabilizing the spine.

But instead of the traditional approach, she opted for a new procedure using adult stem cells to fuse her spine together.

"I think it's extremely exciting," orthopedic surgeon Dr. Kam Momi said.

Momi said stem cells offer an alternative to traditional spine fusions, which are done using a patient's own bone.

"What we did was make a separate incision at the pelvis, scrape out bone from the inside of the pelvis, and pack that into the spine where we wanted it to go," Momi said.

With the new stem cell procedure, disc space is filled with a material called "Trinity." Trinity is a mixture of donated adult stem cells combined with crushed bone from a bone bank.

Once the material is in the spine, the cells go to work.

"They genetically turn on the switches to make bone cells, and eventually the bones fuse together," Momi said. (YES! Repair Stem Cells doing their job!- DM)

Recovery time is fast, lasting only about three months, compared to the year-long recovery associated with traditional fusions.

Click here to read the whole thing

While most of my stories focus on stem cell therapy in China, Thailand, Costa Rica, and the United States, we don't normally hear too much from our friends Down Under in Australia. Well, it turns out they are busy there too with adult stem cell therapy. In this successful trial, they treated patients who had non-healing bones with their own repair (adult) stem cells. Take a look at this:

A 36-YEAR-old man who suffered a badly broken leg that wouldn't heal is walking again without crutches after the successful trial of stem cells to repair non-healing bones.

A year after Anthony Giancola suffered a compound fracture of the leg in a motorcycle accident on New Year's Eve 2005, he was still unable to walk freely.

"I was 'egg shell walking' where I could only put light pressure on the ground," Mr Giancola said.

But within two weeks of being implanted with his own bone marrow stem cells from his pelvis in December 2006, the fracture was improving and he was able to attend a friend's wedding without crutches.

"There was no pain whatsoever and within two weeks I felt good," Mr Giancola said.

Eight of the 10 trial patients had complete unions in their fractures, including one man whose fracture had not knitted properly since his accident almost four years ago.

To read more about how repair stem cells heal broken bones, click here