When he was at the University of Florida two years ago, Shalesh Kaushal (now chief of ophthalmology at the University of Massachusetts med school)
invited eight of these families to come in for free examinations. Kaushal was curious about the Chinese stem cell treatment and its effects. And he wanted to be able to advise other families asking him about the treatment.
“They’re incredibly sweet families – salt of the earth people,” says ophthalmologist Shakesh Kaushal of the University of Massachusetts. “Just really nice young couples who had a child with a significant eye problem.” To pay for the trip and the tens of thousands of dollars in treatment fees, they’d held bake sales, golf tournaments, and community appeals.
Kaushal examined the children’s retinas and did MRI scans of their brains. The results were disappointing. “There didn’t seem to be any ostensible benefit from the stem-cell infusion,” he says. “In all of them, as far as we could tell.”
Kaushal and his wife also took the children to a pancake house for breakfast.
“I watched all of the kids, and so did my wife,” he says. “And they all struggled to find their food. That means you can’t take a fork and cut a piece of pancake and get it to your mouth. It was heart-wrenching.”
Some of the parents acknowledged the Chinese stem cell treatment had done no good. Others were sure it had. (See accompanying box.)
Kaushal says it’s possible the optic nerve in some children had improved on its own. That can happen. Another likely factor is these parents’ strong desire to believe the treatment had helped their child to see.
“For something that was such a stupendous effort to do – to raise all this money, to get over to China and get this treatment – you might imagine that there is certain psychological expectations of the treatment,” Kaushal says. “Even more than that, emotional.”
Kaushal subsequently invited officials from the Chinese stem cell clinic to the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he was then based. The clinic’s CEO gave a presentation to medical faculty there.
“Their data were not compelling,” Kaushal says. “They never actually collated their data on a particular disease and systematically analyzed the pre- and post-stem cell treatment effects. They said the proof of their treatment is the wide-ranging anecdotal observations in these patients.”
That’s a big warning sign for patients contemplating stem cell therapy. “Anecdotes don’t tell us whether or not a therapy is really effective,” says Daley, the Boston stem cell expert. “We’ve learned time and time again that wishful thinking can cloud rigorous scientific interpretation.”