Rick Perry’s Stem Cell Opportunity *Updated*
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story mistakenly claimed that Perry traveled outside of the country for his treatment. PJMedia regrets the error.
I am one of a growing number of Americans who find themselves increasingly frustrated with the low-tech surgical options available in this country for certain chronic medical conditions. To achieve an improved quality of life I’m willing to try experimental stem cell treatments. I’m in high-profile company: in early July Texas’ governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry underwent spinal fusion surgery. The procedure included an injection of his own, adult (autologous) stem cells.
Unfortunately for his fellow Americans whose lives would be greatly improved by access to sophisticated stem cell therapy, the mainstream media is treating Perry as it does every other American who bravely goes in search of adult stem cell treatment whether it takes place on US soil (as Perry’s did) or abroad: not like a pioneer, but a “medical tourist.” As we’ve seen before, the MSM botches all discussions of this important topic, grossly slacking in its duty to report medical advances fairly and accurately, wherever and however they occur.
Images courtesy Creation / ShutterStock
And so, recent weeks have seen a flurry of news stories frowning on Perry’s decision: “Doctors Question Perry’s stem cell back treatment” (AP) … “Doctors Wary of Perry’s Stem Cell Treatment” (The Boston Globe)… “Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s Stem Cell Surgery Worries Some…” (L.A. Times)… “Texas Gov. Rick Perry Received Experimental Stem Cell Treatment” (ABC News) … “Rick Perry’s Stem Cell Treatment Causes Medical, Legal Concerns” (Xinhua) … “Rick Perry’s Stem Cell Surgery Could Lead to Quackery” (International Business Times).
As is usually the case with any MSM discussion of stem cell regeneration therapy — especially high-profile cases like Perry’s — the tone of these articles is one of high anxiety and disapproval. Never mind that adult stem cells have been used successfully in countries other than the United States to improve the lives of people with multiple sclerosis and other debilitating diseases. The MSM may be counted on to ridicule and tsk-tsk stem cell success stories, dismissing them as “experimental” and “controversial” (read: dangerous) or outright “quackery.”
MSM news outlets don’t bother to be fair or balanced. They cannot bring themselves to admit that in the past five years more than 50,000 scientific studies on stem cells were published and posted in the National Institutes of Health medical library, according to America’s leading adult stem cell scientist, Dr. Christian Drapeau, MSc, author of Cracking the Stem Cell Code and Stem Cell Theory of Renewal. They don’t bother to float the suggestion that maybe, just maybe, stem cell regeneration therapy is not quackery at all.
No, the MSM is too busy quoting the ISSCR — the International Society for Stem Cell Research — whose members all support embryonic stem cell research and slam adult stem cell medicine. The ISSCR happens to be the MSM’s go-to quote factory. Here’s Dr. George Q. Daley of Children’s Hospital Boston and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, a past president of ISSCR, on the governor’s decision to undergo adult stem cell treatment, as quoted by AP:
As a highly influential person of power, Perry’s actions have the unfortunate potential to push desperate patients into the clinics of quacks. … I would never in a million years accept for one of my family members to undergo this.
Substituting opinion for facts, most of the recent articles on Perry’s procedure neglect to mention the names and exact locations of the hospitals that offer adult stem cell treatment — you’d think they would, just to start a guessing game — and Perry isn’t talking. Instead of making it hard for readers to find the doctors who could help them, the MSM should rather do a public service by featuring the facilities around the globe that are pioneering this health technology.
Perry knew exactly where to go. A longtime proponent of adult stem cell medicine, Perry urged the Texas Medical Board to consider enhancing the state’s position on adult stem cell research. In his 2009 State of the State address, Perry called for greater investment in the adult stem cell industry and displayed real leadership material:
Let’s get Texas in on the ground floor and invest in adult stem cell research, the one area of that field that is actually proven to expedite cures. Expertise in this emerging and increasingly promising field will not only bring healing to the suffering and create jobs for Texans, it will also establish an appropriate firewall protecting the unborn from exploitation.
It’s refreshing to hear a presidential candidate discuss this topic with such clarity. The MSM, on the other hand, spreads confusion about cell medicine, promoting the widespread misconception that all stem cells come from dead fetuses and treating all adult stem cell procedures like so many back-alley abortions — even if the patient is a right-wing Christian presidential candidate. In fact, the MSM studiously avoids the subject of stem cells — unless, that is, you’re talking embryonic stem cells.
These are the controversial cells, harvested from dead human fetuses, that most people presume to be the foundation of all cell medicine. For the MSM, embryonic stem cells are not quackery; they are cool, cutting-edge, sexy. They are headline-grabbers. They have the highly mediagenic property of “pluripotency” – i.e., the ability to morph into any type of cell in the body. Adult stem cells are proven more effective and less risky than embryonic cells. And yet, only embryonic stem cells and their supporters merit coverage in the MSM, despite the fact that fetal cells do not perform successfully in clinical trials, as adult stem cells do.
As we’ve seen before, pro-life doesn’t have to mean anti-science. The Vatican — which opposes embryonic stem cell research for the obvious reason that it involves the destruction of human fetuses — strongly supports adult stem cell research.
Gasper Furman / Shutterstock.com
The MSM is biased against compelling facts like these. Instead of hailing this moment in medical history as the first to see science and religion on the same page, the MSM remains queasy about reporting on non-embryonic stem cells that are pro-life. Doing so would blur a church-state line by promoting a medical therapy approved by religious entities and individuals.
But adult stem cells aren’t just ethically correct, as Perry points out; they are more therapeutically effective than embryonic cells which replicate indefinitely (not unlike cancer cells). There’s a wide generation gap between adult tissue and embryonic cells, as Dr. Fabio Solano, a Costa Rican physician, explains: “Adult stem cells play a natural role in repair of damaged tissue in the adult; in contrast, fetal stem cells do not properly ‘know’ how to communicate with adult tissue.” Plus, when harvested from the patient’s own fat, adult stem cells carry no risk of rejection.
Like so many patients who have experienced first-hand the healing power of adult stem cells, Perry has an opportunity — a divine calling, if you will — to become a medical evangelist, to speak out on behalf of Americans like himself who would also benefit from cellular medicine. Let’s hope he will make the most of it by 1) morally supporting his fellow Americans who also seek medical help that simply isn’t available in the United States; 2) putting pressure on the FDA to approve the medical use of adult stem cells, pronto; and 3) strategizing a viable plan for increasing employment opportunity by keeping American patient spending on U.S. shores.
What the governor has here is a rare opportunity to win new followers on both sides of the political fence. Voters on the Christian Right are an easy sell — it so happens that many Americans who travel abroad for stem cell therapy are, like Perry, devout Christian churchgoers — but I wager that even some agnostic Democrats would started taking “Governor Goodhair” seriously too, especially if they or their loved ones are coping with a chronic disease that can most efficiently be treated with adult stem cells.
I voted for Obama (I know, I know), but I’ll campaign for Perry if he makes a solemn promise to get adult stem cells approved by the FDA.
It seems like you’re missing the forest for the trees, here. The problem is not that the media is biased, but WHY the media is biased. This has to do with the politicization of science and the Left’s fundamental contempt for truth that gets in the way of their policies. Just as global warming quackery is an excuse for taxation and regulatory policies they like, and Darwinist quackery is mainly a weapon for undermining education in AMerica, the embryonic stem cell quackery is supported because they think it is politically useful. The ultimate idea is to legitimize abortion. The “media bias” follows, not leads, the political intentions of the Left.
Thank you for publishing this article, Julia. You’re damn right about why the MSM either frames Perry as a hypocrite over this topic or treats him with disdain because he went outside the other MSM- main stream medicine. Every major breakthrough that’s occurred with stem cell research has been the result of autologous adult stem cells. The MSM simply can’t come to terms with the fact that pro-lifers were right all along.
Not only is embryonic stem cell research immoral, it’s unnecessary. It just galls the MSM that this is true. So they either downplay the breakthroughs or (more often) conflate stem cell treatments that are occurring outside the US with the fact that embryonic stem cell research was banned by Bush (and lifted by Obama). But it isn’t THAT research that’s yielding the results!
I also don’t understand why people have to travel to get autologous stem cell treatments. There are all kinds of experimental treatments done in the US- surgeons do it all the time. I hope Perry does take this opportunity to clear the air regarding stem cells and ask the gov’t to get out of dictating medical care.
I hope that you will refrain from voting for Obama this time around, no matter who the GOP candidate turns out to be.
The MSM has been partly to blame for refusing to show us just how bizarre Obama truly is.
This video link was posted in another comments section in a PJM article which I read this a.m. It’s a good one.
There’s a much broader point here than that of Left Lies a la “Bush Banned Stem Cell Research”, which he didn’t.
As an American expat living his fifth decade abroad, I can certify reliably that American medicine stinks.
Despite the American pols’ egregious lies of “We have the best medicine in the world”, etc., I’ve had access to great docs and great drugs and great facilities worldwide — and think! — without insurance, and better and cheaper than the U.S., but more importantly, I had Access!
In visits home I’ve seen costs rise by 1000% while first time doctor visits have shrunk from an hour down to five minutes. Government regulations, in response to AARP-AMA-ABA and Insurers and EuroPharma lobbyists for example, have driven admininstrative support services wildly out of control to where the old doctor and his nurse routine has become doctor and his several nurses, physician and nurse practioners, “coordinators” and secretaries and third party billing companies. The FDA has choked well-proven and inexpensive drugs from entering the country to not compete with so-called American pharmaceutical giants, which really are Euro-monopolies operating locally, but your “leaders” will not tell you that.
Kind of reminds me of schools which had 10 to 1 teacher to administrator ratios when I was a boy, but degraded to ratios of the more than 10 to 1 administrators to teachers that we have today. And the “teachers” are more “social expeditors” than educators.
God bless Perry for going abroad for treatment and eschewing the American quacks and frauds. Just maybe he can get to the White House and reverse some of the damage done by the collectivists and pseudo altruists of the last half century.
Oh! And Americans: never forget you have the best medicine available in your world.
Thank you for explaining Perry’s procedure – I had not realized he had to travel outside the USA.
I thought it was bizarre that the msm was labelling Perry as anti-science after his operation even though this proves a serious interest in medical science. And, I have elsewhere noted that Perry obviously believes in the laws of physics or he would never have been a US Air Force pilot.
This article is WRONG….RICK PERRY DID NOT LEAVE TEXAS TO HAVE THIS OPERATION. HE HAD IT IN TEXAS. The author is either lying…or can’t research. IF she can’t do a better job than this…she shouldn’t be writing articles for PM.
This is a big fat lie. PERRY DID NOT LEAVE THE USA FOR THIS SURGERY. He had it in TEXAS. What’s wrong with this author…why are you lying?
The longer I watch this, the more convinced I get that Obamacare is a reactionary effort to protect the stakeholders in the status quo from the emerging customized medicine of genetic counselling and stem cell therapy. It will be much cheaper and more effective. I am visiting with an old woman who frets about knee replacement surgery at 75. Because such stem cell therapy is advertised on the radio by respected credentialled Florida hospitals I encouraged her to seek information. Sure enough, she will check out a clinic in Boca Raton.
Although she is democratic to the bone and automatically spouts lots of their class war rhetoric, she blythely asserts that they will not be able to supress advances that people want. iow, American deepdown. Competetion and transparency are the watch words of reform here and Florida looks lots more promising than Mass. Our new gov knows a lot more about health care cost control than any pol or federal bureaucrat. Consulting closely with gov Perry of TX the legislature cancelled 1100 regulations in one session. Casey bar the door on economic development in FL.
No, you underestimate the evil of these people. Socialized medicine isn’t about anything as trivial as mere money.
It’s about a motivator that is vastly more potent: power.
The money is a nice perk to these statists, but it is NOT what drives them.
That’s rather like saying that trains are more effective than watermelons at moving freight across the country.
I’m not aware of any successful therapies from embryonic stem cells. All the successes reported in the media have been from ADULT stem cells, a fact which is assiduously omitted by the MSM.
Embryonic cell therapy has managed to cure a few conditions, but at the cost of killing the patient with rampant cancer.
I believe that’s correct. And, keep in mind that embryonic stem cell research has gone on all over the world, including the US where labs were funded with private and state money (partially as a big “f**k you” to President Bush) and still nothing has come of it. Nada, zip, zero. But we’ll never see the MSM admit it. They’ll just quit talking about embryonic stem cells, just like they’ll eventually quit talking about anthropogenic global warming.
With some small risk of error, I have concluded that the MSM, in any controversial issue, particularly in a complex scientific or technical topic, is both technically ignorant, and biased. I look for key phases, give aways, e.g.”some critics say…”, the universal, “might be…”, or “may be…”. What follows is the author’s pet ideology, wholly lacking in facts. If any facts are given, they inevitably are one sided; key known facts are omitted. Example: “Government studies show that guns in the house are a leading cause of violent death for children.” What is wrong with these facts? From the same report: The children are 18, and the murders are due to drugs sales. I have been told by liberals that this is considered valid journalism. With the destruction of the news monopolies in MSM, this will surely die.
I have no expertise in the life sciences, but understand that adult stem cells work better than embryonic stem cells, that both are experimental, and that the latter is intertwined with the abortion debate. That some scientists have vested interests in government funding is an eternal given.
It will take effort to weed out the propaganda, but I will get a valid read on Gov. Perry. I did not vote for Obama after a similar prior effort.
Also, do an internet search on the experts they quote and find out where they’re employed and what else they’ve done. That’ll be an eye-opener for you. If they work at the Global Co-operative for International Peace and Alternative Sustainable Eco-Resources Council for Under-represented Youth and Genders , or any combination of the aforementioned words, you know they’re biased.
Listen to the heathen rage. Their problem ? The bleeping stem cell donor did not die ! As a people we must do our science , and practice our medicine within moral and ethical boundaries lest we end up doing and practicing them like Josef Megele did .
There is a BIG Problem with Adult Stem Cell therapy for the Let and the media – like OIl, it WORKS. The Left and Media are not about that, they are about stuff that does not work no matter how much “Wishin’ and Hopin’” they do. Despite the “Wishin’ and Hopin’” the American people are getting wise to them to the extent that comes next November, they will have their “Springfields” Dusted but good.
Dr. Shalit
The Book of Enoch warns against altering our germ line using stem cells or anything else. Read beyond wikipedia to understand this.
Guns Kill People Yet Curettes Don’t Kill Fetuses?
The gross hypocrisy of the liberal mentality is no better demonstrated by the seemingly-unrelated issues of gun control and abortion, both of which are strongly supported by libs even though the issues are antithetical: Control of guns is endorsed in the interests of preserving human life, abortion by definition destroys human life and is considered a virtual liberal sacrament.
Liberals can be awfully confusing.
Following yet another bloody weekend in New York City, the pro-abortion, imperial Mayor Michael Bloomberg trotted out the tired, old liberal mantra, regarding guns not abortions.
In reaction to 52 shootings in the city between Friday and Labor Day, including a shoot-out at the festive West Indian parade on Monday in Crown Heights that left 3 people dead, Bloomberg again resorted to the tried and true shibolleth that people don’t kill people, guns kill people.
He didn’t phrase his explanation of the mayhem in quite those terms since it’s been logically and statistically shown that guns aren’t the cause of gun violence and that people are the cause. It’s also been proven in Florida and other states that guns–in the hands of law-abiding people–actually deter criminals. Instead, the mayor invoked the more popular if less catchy line of the anti-gun lobby by blaming the shootings on illegal guns.
Memo to Bloomberg: Legal or illegal, firearms don’t usually discharge themselves.
None of this is meant to suggest that the ubiquity of weapons on the mean streets of New York, in predominantly black Crown Heights or anywhere else, isn’t a serious problem.
Nor is it meant to imply that accidents involving legal guns never happen. They do, although those occurrences are usually attributable to carelessness and are rarities even if the media blows them out of proportion when they do occur–in the interests of promoting gun safety–and the liberal agenda of denying Second Amendment rights to Americans.
The sad truth–as illustrated by New York City which has the most stringent gun possession laws in the nation and also has, per capita, the most illegal weapons in the nation and is undergoing a rapidly rising violent crime rate–is that “gun control” doesn’t work, except to the advantage of criminal elements.
Nevertheless, Bloomberg stuck to the liberal script and ignored reality by nasally intoning, This is ”what happens when elected officials in Washington fail to take the problem of illegal guns seriously.”
Those damned guns. They keep shooting and killing people, an implicit and ridiculous claim that serves to absolve the shooters and killers of individual responsibility for their actions.
The high priest of the liberal church and most-enthusiastically anti-gun and pro-abortion president in America’s history, President Barack Hussein Obama, has said little about guns or babies lately. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5372
i have a lady friend in calif. who i promised a slow dance to her but thats not possible because of her m.s why can,t this great country of hours make it possible for my beautiful friend and me have that dance.
Americans suffering from auto-immune and chronic diseases can improve their health and quality of life with stem cell therapies (adult stem cells and umbilical cord cells) which are used for patients in Europe, Asia and in some Latin American countries, where fortunately the FDA has not the legitimacy to enforce some of their regulations detrimentous to people´s health.