中国関連AP通信China Offers Unproven Medical Treatments
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iz2c_1G5VsHQxkQo_fAeLr8Mq5FgD8TVSHM00
AP通信
China Offers Unproven Medical Treatments
By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN and ALAN SCHER ZAGIER
BEIJING (AP) — They're paralyzed from diving accidents and car crashes, disabled by Parkinson's, or blind. With few options available at home in America, they search the Internet for experimental treatments — and often land on Web sites promoting stem cell treatments in China.
They mortgage their houses and their hometowns hold fundraisers as they scrape together the tens of thousands of dollars needed for travel and the hope for a miracle cure.
A number of these medical tourists claim some success when they return home:
Jim Savage, a Houston man with paralysis from a spinal cord injury, says he can move his right arm. Penny Thomas of Hawaii says her Parkinson's tremors are mostly gone. The parents of 6-year-old Rylea Barlett of Missouri, born with an optical defect, say she can see.
But documentation is mostly lacking, and Western doctors warn that patients are serving as guinea pigs in a country that isn't doing the rigorous lab and human tests that are needed to prove a treatment is safe and effective.
Noting the lack of evidence, three Western doctors, undertook their own limited study. It involved seven patients with spinal cord injuries who chose to get fetal brain tissue injections at one hospital in China. The study reported "no clinically useful improvements" — even though most patients believed they were better. Five developed complications such as meningitis.
Experts in the West have theories about why some people think they've improved when the evidence is thin. Some are often getting intensive physical therapy, along with the mysterious injections; the placebo effect may also be a factor.
