News & Blog

I hesitate to provide the website address for the Bangkok clinic, but do so to draw attention to a trick they and many other such clinics use. View it here, but please don’t believe the claims on the site. Note how similar the Bangkok clinic’s website looks to the Reeve Foundation’s? I’m guessing that’s no coincidence. If it looks the same, it must be officially connected to the legitimate research.

It’s not.

What is offered by Unique Access Medical in Bangkok is a combination of procedures that have not yet been validated through the clinical research process, meaning they have not been proven to be safe or to work. Curiously, under the “Research” tab on their website, they summarize Drs Harkema’s research and even bold the following:

“This suggests that these interventions could be a viable clinical approach for functional recovery after severe paralysis.” 

This is an accurate statement – note the “could be a viable clinical approach.” They seem to acknowledge that it isn’t yet a viable clinical approach, but they are nonetheless willing to overlook this and take your money for performing the treatment, anyway. This is wrong.

Contrast this to what is stated on the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation’s The Big Idea website (which, to be clear, is part of a campaign to generate funding for the next phase of research into epidural stimulation):

“Is it a cure? Not yet. The next step is to fund a new study with 36 additional participants – men and women of a range of ages and diverse backgrounds – to prove beyond a doubt that this therapy is viable. This will allow us to expedite epidural stimulation to the clinic.”

To drive home the point, the Christopher and Dana Reeve’s Foundation has created a section on its sight to clarify that the “treatments” offered by oversees clinics are not the same as the research they are funding http://www.reevebigidea.org/the-research#off-shore. They state:

The Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation is aware that there are companies and clinics in other parts of the world that offer epidural stimulation alone or in combination with other interventions (i.e. stem cell transplants). Narratives, advertisements and patient testimonials on their websites and in their social media suggest that their “therapies” are the equivalent of the epidural stimulation studies being done at the University of Louisville, funded in part by the Reeve Foundation, and reported extensively in peer reviewed academic journals. These medical treatments are not the same.

The Reeve Foundation’s epidural stimulation clinical research initiative (The Big Idea) will have US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for a very specific research protocol and patient population. The study builds on several decades of basic science discoveries and will extend those findings through a rigorous and rationally designed human trial. It will follow the FDA-approved protocol in order to meet the safety and effectiveness requirements needed to gain FDA approval for epidural stimulation as a therapy for spinal cord injury.

This statement is intended to clarify what may be confusing or misleading information in the public domain. The Reeve Foundation is committed to conveying accurate information to our community, donors and all interested parties and to ensuring their safety and well-being.

It is “best practice” (yes, that’s sarcastic) for unscrupulous and illegitimate clinics to share compelling “treatment” success stories. The Bangkok clinic is no different. They share 2. While I sincerely hope all of those that who forked over however many thousands of dollars for the procedure did experience some benefit beyond what they would have naturally regained or regained through physical rehab alone, we just can’t determine what lead to their improvements (if they actually improved at all). Was it spontaneous recovery? The stem cells? The epidural stimulation? The rehab? Placebo? False or incomplete reporting? We just don’t know because the procedures did not follow a clinical trials protocol and the claims are not supported by acceptable, peer-reviewed evidence.

It is noteworthy that the Bangkok clinic is offering a combination of unproven therapies. Stem cells are still a hot item and the epidural stimulation is the new hot topic. The pre-clinical evidence for stem cells in the treatment of SCI has created intrigue and hope (but is it really strong enough to move to human trials?) and epidural stimulation has showed unexpected (and as yet unexplained) results in very early clinical research, so what better than to combine them? Surely, the combination research evidence for the two together must create a case that overcomes the lack of demonstrated treatment efficacy for either one on their own.

While a combination of interventions for functional recovery after SCI will most likely be required for the success of validated therapies sometime in the distant future, they haven’t been shown to be effective now, and most likely won’t be in the near future.  As Body of Evidence’s Jonathan Jarry explains in his video, Gauntlet, very few early research findings survive the gauntlet from bench science to human clinical trials. Not because of lack of interest or funding, but because what can be shown to work in a petri dish may not work in a rat, or, if it does work in a rat, may not work in humans. Very few experimental treatments make it to the next stage.

As Jarry explains in the description of the video, “Biomedical research has devised an amazing gauntlet to reduce the risk that an early research finding will turn out to be a dud. Of course, the charlatans simply bypass this system.” Just as Unique Access Medical and so many other charlatans running overseas clinics have.

With every high-profile advance in SCI research will come a new, unproven treatment provided by predatory clinics looking to make a tidy profit off of people who are understandably desperate enough to believe the false hope on offer. For spinal cord injury, this has been going on for well over the past 25 years (anyone remember embryonic shark cell implantation at the International Spinal Cord Regeneration Center in Tijuana, Mexico?). It will continue. Which means we must remain vigilant and critical of those offering risky, expensive treatments that have no evidence to support their validity.

This is, after all, not a principled academic argument. Real people are being taken advantage of. Real people are being preyed upon.

* Note that I have singled out Unique Access Medical in this blog but there are many, many others offering similar “treatments.” I focused on Unique Access Medical because they emailed me directly to help market their clinic to SCI BC members. This was a mistake on their part – they obviously hadn’t done their research into my position on overseas cure treatments. But I guess research isn’t really their strong point.