AFTER 13 YEARS OF BAD MEDICINE FOR HIS MS, PITTSBURGH MAN OUTSMARTS HIS DOCTORS
John Orsingher says he feels "great" just three weeks after receiving stem-cell treatments for his multiple sclerosis.
But the Export man realizes a there's still a battle ahead in the fight against the condition he has had for about 13 years.
"It seems like my eyesight came back. I feel a lot better," Orsingher said last week in the Export Laundromat, which he owns. "I'm moving around more ... I'm not all worked up, I feel great right now. I still can't walk (very well), but I feel good."
Orsingher went to Latin America with his wife, Lisa, on Oct. 27 for treatments not available in the United States. To come up with the $30,000 for the treatment and various assorted extra costs, fundraisers were held.
Multiple sclerosis -- commonly called MS -- affects the ability of nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord to communicate with each other. It often progresses to physical and cognitive disability.
No American doctor has a clue on how to improve the lives of MS patients, but to a man (or woman) they will lie and tell their patients stem cells don’t work. “Take these pills,” they say, not knowing whether they work or which side effect will hurt the patient! For proof by real experts, see our Lab Rat section about John Ioannidis as reported by Atlantic Monthly in our newsletter:http://www.repairstemcells.org/newsletters/NL111210.htm
Orsingher, 48, had been taking various medications to slow the progression of MS. One of them, Tysabri, was effective, but side effects were too damaging. Others left him sick. That led him to seek alternative methods.
A stem-cell transplant infuses healthy cells into the body. According to New Scientist magazine, the treatment works by resetting a patient's immune system to reverse some of the disability.
Lisa Orsingher said she has noticed an improvement in her husband. (Don has often said, “Don’t ask the patient, ask the spouse if you want to know how the stem cell patient is really doing!”)
"He definitely has better eyesight," she said. "He's not sleeping 20 hours a day. He's up. He's active. He's moving. He doesn't seem to be as depressed. ... He said he has spots on his left foot he never felt before, maybe there's some feeling coming back. As for anything negative, there's nothing. I'm sure he's hoping everything would be coming back quicker, but he has to wait."
A second treatment is recommended in about six months at a cost of about $12,500. He said he should have the money thanks to fundraisers and donations.
"I'm going to take some money out of my 401(k) to cover whatever they don't cover," he said.
Donations still are being taken at S&T Bank in Murrysville.
Orsingher did say he hasn't felt the need to take much medication since his return to the United States. He does take some pain medication and muscle relaxers.
"I actually cut back on most of that," Orsingher said. "I'm trying to wean myself off all that slowly."
He is continuing therapy and stretching exercises and rides a stationary bike.
The couple is glad they made the trip.
"(We have) no regrets, no regrets at all," Lisa Orsingher said. "He may need a little more, but I'm sure he's willing to go again."
Her goal is to have her husband, who is using a walker, take her for a stroll on the beach.
"That's what we're still shooting for," she said.
MOUNTAIN CLIMBER’S OWN STEM CELLS SAVE HIS ANKLE FOR POSSIBLE TENTH CLIMB OF MT. EVEREST
What is subjected to more weight and is injured more than any other joint in our body? Our ankles are. When an injury, sprain, or break does not heal right, the problem creeps up years later in the form of arthritis.
A new procedure using stem cells from the patient's own body is regenerating joints and giving people more mobility.
His resume includes conquering mount McKinley 40 times, Mount Kilimanjaro 20 times and Mount Everest nine times, and a broken ankle from 30 years ago created his biggest barrier yet.
He said, "It's getting to the point where I'm limping."
The cartilage in between his subtalar joint right below the ankle was gone.
Dr. S. Robert Rozbruch, Chief at Limb Lengthening and Complex Reconstruction Service Hospital for Special Surgery, said, "The conventional treatment for that is to fuse the subtalar joint which means make it stiff."
That is not an option for Vern, so doctors tried a new approach. Implant a fixator for three months that pulls apart the joint. Then, inject stem cells in the new four-millimeter space where cartilage will regenerate.
Dr. Rozbruch said, "We used stem cells derived from his pelvis."
Dr. Rozbruch has done 100 of these procedures on ankle joints. So far, 90 percent of patients are relieved of pain and do not need fusions.
He said, "Basically you see a reversal of arthritis."
You can see the difference between the ankle joint before the procedure, which has no space between the bones, and after...
"Look at the difference you can see a space, there's about three millimeters of cartilage compared to nothing," said Dr. Rozbruch.
"With this new technique I'll have a foot than can go 20, 30 years," said Vern.
Vern is a climbing king who was not going to let pain prevent him from his next adventure. This is the first time ever the procedure was done in the joint below the ankle.
Vern's next trip is an expedition across the South Pole in November.
Doctors say the cartilage continues to regenerate years after the procedure. If it does not work, patients can still have a fusion.
Chemotherapy fails as usual, but with three months to live:
Leukemia child completely cured with cord blood stem cells—her own!
BERLIN, November 26, 2010 - Doctors associated with a German umbilical cord blood bank say that they have cured a child’s leukemia completely using an infusion of stem cells from umbilical cord blood.
The procedure was reportedly performed in 2005 on a four-year-old girl whose chemotherapy treatment had failed and who had a prognosis of only three months to live. The procedure was possible because the parents had decided to preserve their child’s umbilical cord blood at the time of birth.
After continuous monitoring of the child for five years now, with no sign of leukemia cells in her blood, doctors say that they have confirmed that the treatment worked.
“Seventy-five months have passed and we can speak of a cure with certainty,” said Eberhard Lampeter of Vita 34.
According to the Chilean newspaper La Tercera, this is the first case in the world of a child cured of leukemia by her own stem cells. In most cases the child’s umbilical cord blood is not available, and the stem cells of close family members must be used.
The new treatment is the latest in a long string of hundreds of successes in the science of stem cell treatments that use mature cells rather than embryonic stem cells. Embryonic stem cell treatments, which destroy a human life, have never been proven effective in any medical treatment to date. Treatments with mature stem cells do not cause harm to the donor of the cells.
Stem cell pioneer Dr. Colin McGuckin recently
told LifeSiteNews that, despite amazing success with umbilical cord blood treatments, it remains difficult to obtain funding for research because of the “cult of celebrity” in science, which rewards controversial research over research that is truly effective in saving lives.
“People aren’t talking about cord blood because it’s not controversial,” McGuckin told LSN. “Consequently, it does not make headlines and therefore researchers who want to use the cells from cord blood do not receive funding.”
LOUISVILLE, KY (WAVE) - In-house stem cell therapy - another medical first for Kentucky. The first in-house stem cell processing system is being used to treat animals here in Kentucky and humans could soon benefit.
The company that developed this breakthrough technology is headquartered in Nicholasville, Kentucky. And so far the results of the therapy are impressive.
Getting stem cells from your own fat used to require waiting weeks for the cells to be processed, until now.
Cooper, a 7-year-old Golden Retriever, had a torn ACL in both sides of his hinds - or knees.
He had fat-derived stem cell therapy at the Finchville animal clinic several weeks ago. Fat was removed from his side, and his own stem cells extracted from the fat. Then his own stem cells were injected into the damaged area to grow new tissue.
That's not new - what is new is the process that is used to extract the stem cells. A new high tech kit, that is used to process the cells on site, without having to send the tissue off to a lab for processing.
This technique saves more cells, is more affordable, and is showing an amazing outcome.
The Adipose Stem Cell Processing kit is made by a company whose national headquarters is in Nicholasville, Kentucky. Jeremy Delk is the managing director of Medivet.
"What we've done is developed the world's first in house stem cell procedure kit - it allows veterinarians to do this procedure in house on the same day," said Delk.
The process is working so well in dogs, that vets are now using it in horses.
And in the near future, medical doctors could use it to treat humans.
Dr. Cathy White, the veterinarian at the Finchville Animal Clinic says she is pleased with how well the therapy is working on the first dog to undergo the procedure, and says it won't be long before the process is used in human therapy.
"What a wonderful thing to be able to know that in a few years, it's gonna be humans in a few years. Now people getting knee replacements, getting hip replacements, this is going to be the modality of the future. There's no questions about it.", says White.
END OF ARTICLE
COMMENT BY DON MARGOLIS
Treating dogs won't hurt Pharma's profits. But treating humans will. Dr. White won't have any trouble giving her animals the best cutting edge treatments available, but she is a bit too optimistic about humans.
Pharma controls the FDA and the entire medical system. Keeping stem cells which work (adult stem cells derived from the patient) out of that system is the future of the corrupt, profits-only medical system we all live in, NOT human treatments.
So when your doctor says "there is nothing we can do," for YOUR chronic disease, 90% of the time stem cells could help you, but he will tell you otherwise. And their profits will continue to soar.
Our dogs and horses will continue to benefit from the very latest science while millions of heart and diabetes patients are sentenced to useless pills and an early grave.
Don Margolis, Chairman
Repair Stem Cell Institute
Working with Minnesota’s Dr. Doris Taylor, the western world’s only true stem cell pioneer, it is now possible to rescue organs from the trash heap and make them suitable for transplant.
Madrid---Nov 1, 2010 Twelve years ago, Dr. Doris Taylor proved to a disbelieving world, through a landmark animal study at Duke University, that Adult Stem Cells (ASC) could repair the hearts of dying patients. Within an astonishing four years, clinical trials around the world proved her right for humans.
But then Pharma, in 2003, realized how much ASC could destroy its strangle-hold on western medicine, and created the “Embryonic Hoax” as a vehicle to keep ASC away from the millions who could use them today. Controlling with its purse-strings the majority of stem cell scientists, almost every academic institution, and certainly most of the West’s major media, the hoax became “true” as the Big Lie of the 21st century, and North America became a hopeless cause for stem cells which actually help people.
But that did not deter Spain’s Dr. Fernández Avilés from his goal, which only Dr. Taylor could make possible in such a short time; and today the collaboration is ready to begin working its magic:
- Take a donor organ which cannot help the patient.
- “Empty” that organ of its original stem cells.
- Replace those with the patient’s ASC, and
- In a few months it is ready for transplant without cancer-causing immune-suppressing drugs which every transplant demands today.
Not bad for a heart or a liver or a kidney otherwise destined for the hazardous waste heap of the hospital!
Spain, a world leader in human organ transplants, is now also THE pioneer in the creation of bioartificial organs with stem cells implanted into patients after the opening on Tuesday in Madrid of the first laboratory in the world dedicated to the growth of artificial organs for human transplant. The laboratory will "empty" human hearts or other human organs unsuitable for transplantation and recolonize their cell content with the patient's stem cells, allowing the organs to grow anew, ready for transplant back into the new body, said its developer,Dr. Francisco Fernández Avilés, head of the Gregorio Maranon hospital cardiology wing, where the center is based. The lab, opened this Tuesday, is the "world's first laboratory for bioartificial organs to produce adult stem cell transplants," said the Minister of Science and Innovation, Cristina Garmendia. The creation of artificial organs is a "third way" that is added to human organ transplantation and implantation of artificial organs, said Rafael Matesanz, director of the National Transplant Organization (ONT).
Transplantation of such organs could become a daily reality in "between five and ten years" according to Dr Fernández Avilés, "and is the solution to two problems." One is the lack of suitable organ donors and the other the "rejection" of the transplanted organ by the patient, because the freshly "grown" organs are inert and "have no immune response capability with less than 5% of original DNA" he said.
The aim of the laboratory is "to create a parent bank, in which organs can be stored for months, on which new bodies can be built to suit individual patients.” The bodies or "matrixes" which are emptied cannot be directly used for transplants because the deceased donor "either died from a cardiac arrest or old age" according Matesanz and this is a way of using organs that would otherwise not be used.
The opening of the laboratory has been possible thanks to the work of the Gregorio Marañón in transplantation and regenerative medicine and its collaboration with the ONT and the University of Minnesota (USA) and director of cardiac repair, Dr. Doris Taylor, who has investigated the procedure using the hearts of mice.
So far, the cardiology unit of the Gregorio Marañón has "applied the elimination of cells" to eight hearts that have successfully become viable organs using the patient's stem cells.
And by late 2010 they want to install a heart from a donor using regenerated cells. Moreover, "as it advances, the arrays could arise not only from humans but using animal organs" said Dr. Fernández Avilés.
The implementation of the laboratory- in which the hospital has invested 600,000 euros and where ten people will work, is also based on Spain's leadership in organ donation and transplantation.
Spain is a world leader in organ donation for transplants since 1991 and has "the best model for transplant in the world", according to Fernández Avilés. In 2009, Spain made 4,028 donor transplants, a new record for the country.
Furthermore, Spain is part of the so called 'G-4' of regenerative medicine, along with the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom and is "among the ten powers higher quality biomedical world," according to the Minister for Science and Innovation.
Except the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom are fully controlled by Big Pharma and wasting billions on something which is not needed and which will never work to improve human lives before 2050. Sort of like spending billions researching propeller-driven aircraft and ignoring jet engine science.