NB: An edited version of this was in the Toronto Star yesterday but this is the original.
NEW DELHI: Inga MacVicar was four years old when she fell from a barn roof onto her feet and sustained serious, lifelong back injuries. That was 54 years ago, and since then, after a few more falls, the Penticton, B.C. resident had endured consistent physical pain. For the last eight years she has suffered from severe back pains, walked with the aid of crutches, and been wheelchair-bound for longer distances.
Not anymore, however. After doctors at home and elsewhere in Canada were unable to help her, attributing her increasing pain and muscle loss to multiple sclerosis, MacVicar began a worldwide web search for treatments abroad, finding hope some 7,000 miles away, in the bustling Indian capital city of New Delhi, where a young woman doctor has been breathing hope and life back into the atrophied or lifeless limbs of people like MacVicar.
What the doctor, 41 year-old Geeta Shroff did, was treat MacVicar over two separate stints in New Delhi with injections containing a secret cocktail of human embryonic stem cells between December 2007 and May 2008.
Today, MacVicar feels like a different person. “I’ve been able to pick up on my feet,” she exclaimed in an interview over the phone from Penticton. “I can walk normally, and the pain is gone form my back. My feet were purple and swollen and they’re not any more because my circulation is back.”
MacVicar is one four Canadians suffering from terminal or degenerating illnesses who have traveled halfway across the world to NuTech MediWorld in south Delhi in the hope that fresh stem cells injected into their bodies will cure their ailments by replacing those that are malfunctioning or supplementing those that are missing or dying.
Treatments using human embryonic stem cells haven’t been used anywhere in North America or Europe because scientists and doctors consider them to still be at the nascent stage of clinical trials. It is too early, they say, to know whether such treatments can lead to tumours and other complications in the long term. In Asia, too, few doctors have taken the bold step of trying to halt or improve the condition of patients whoa re terminally ill, or have been written off by western medical science.
But at NuTech MediWorld, the facility run by Dr. Geeta Shroff and her partnering anesthesiologist Dr. Ashish Verma, there is little patience for that view.
“I have a vision that [embryonic stem cell therapy] will become the first line of therapy for the so-called terminal illnesses,” said Shroff, who is young, poised and full of positive energy. “It should be available immediately.”
Shroff’s approach and the fact that she has been treating patients since 2002 has courted controversy particularly among scientists in the west who consider her approach to the as-yet clinically approved domain of stem cell research to be flippant.
“I think what she is doing is potentially dangerous…and I would have serious doubts about the quality and safety of the cells she is using,” wrote Dr. Stephen Minger, senior lecturer at the Stem Cell Biology Laboratory in King’s College, in London, in an email interview. “I think her clinic should be shut down immediately.”
In India, too, doctors have voiced their criticism based largely on Shroff’s refusal to publish her findings in journals of scientific repute so that peers in the scientific community can validate her discovery. No such claim for the cure of terminal illnesses is being advertised in North America or in Europe.
“There are no shortcuts in science,” said Dr. R K Mani, head of the Pulmonology Department at Fortis Hospital in New Delhi. “Everything must pass through the rigour of scientific scrutiny.”
Shroff said she took the condemned route escaping scientific scrutiny because she wanted to protect her research from theft, a potential outcome of sending scientific papers to international journals and scientific periodicals.
Recently she filed a patent application with the aim of protecting her discovery. It can be viewed on line on the website of the World Intellectual Property Organization.
“I am ready to write articles now that my work is protected,” she said. “I am working on it right now.”
Still, her skeptics aren’t awestruck.
“If she was a reputable clinician she would apply for clinical approval for her work within India like any other reputable clinician and carry out appropriate clinical trials to validate her claims,” said Minger.
In the meantime, Shroff has published a book containing 100 case studies of people she treated between 2002 and 2005 but these, too, are not acceptable proofs for the scientific community.
“Case-controlled studies are the lowest form of evidence in medicine,” argued Mani. “Why should it be any different for stem cell treatment?”
Repeated condemnation of Shroff’s work in the western community, however, hasn’t fazed Shroff’s patients, either in India or in Australia, Canada and the United States, who document amazing changes in their bodies since undergoing treatment with her. For them, her magic injections make her a sort of divine curer of maladies.
Take Amanda Boxtel, from Colorado, who last year, became the first American citizen to undergo treatment with Shroff, and who has documented her experiences on her website (www.amadaboxtel.com).
“I’ve been paralyzed for 16 years,” said 39-year old Amanda Boxtel, from Colorado, in a short promotional video for NuTech. “I’ve not shown any progress. Now I feel my ankles, I feel my toes. I’m the proud owner of gluts, of hamstrings, of quads, and I can pee on my own. I’m proud of it.”
Boxtel’s success story inspired a host of other women and men – many of them from Colorado – to also take the plunge, in the hope that they, too, could overcome their disability, or at least limit it.
One huge success is Leah Roland, 32, who broke her neck in a skiing accident 9 years ago and became an incomplete quadriplegic. Roland, who has a mind of steel, has tried all sorts of therapies, undergoing brutal hours of physiotherapy, acupuncture, gym work, and other treatments. “It’s with blood and tears that I’ve got here. No one can beat me down and make me lay down and go to sleep now.”
By the time Roland came to India for her first treatment in May this year, she was already walking with a cane. But she was bent over, her back crooked, her right hand rolled into a tight fist, and her right knee was constantly hyper extending.
Three months later, in mid-July, Roland is walking tall and straight with the aid of her multi-coloured cane that looks more like a candy stick. She can almost unfurl her right hand, and her knee isn’t hyper-extending anymore. What’s more, she is almost off the back medicine she has been taking for the last nine years.
“What Geeta is doing is amazing, and I’ll back in September for my next round of treatment,” said Roland, whose experiences are documented online at www.helpleahroland.com
Other success stories have been those of Australians Sonya Smith and Perry Cross. Smith, 45, has regained some strength in her legs and her story has inspired many to visit Shroff. Cross, who was once an upcoming Australian rugby star and became a complete quadriplegic on the field when he was 19, breathed for the first time on his own 14 years later, after a couple of months of treatment. He, too, will return.
It’s not a miracle cure, according to Shroff. It’s merely a discovery. “My therapy works because of the use of human embryonic stem cell lines, which have been grown, surplus fertilized egg from a single embryo.” Shroff obtained the embryo from her in-vitro-fertilization (IVF) program in 2000.
Interestingly, while embryonic stem cell research is also controversial because of resistance from the pro-life lobby, most of the women and men – a little fewer than 100 people – who have come to Geeta Shroff from overseas have found their communities to be extraordinarily supportive.
Ryan McLean (www.ryanmcleanfund.blogspot.com), a paraplegic from Colorado, who teaches at Cherry Creek High School in Denver, who has just started treatment with Shroff, even taught her 10th grade high school students about human embryonic stem cell research before coming to India. In papers discussing treatment using hESC only one of 140 students wrote, “It’s when you eat babies.”
Almost all of the people interviewed for this article held fundraisers in their communities to afford the cost of treatment, which ranges from $20,000 to $40,000 per treatment. They found incredible amount of support and love in their communities.
In Penticton, too, Inga and her husband Lorne MacVicar, hope to spread news of Shroff’s treatments to others in Canada. “I’m going to be in touch with the Rick Hansen Spinal Cord Research organization and let them know the results that we have seen,” said Lorne.
It’s not as if Shroff’s patients aren’t aware of criticism against their doctor; they just couldn’t care less. In June this year, Shroff and Verma were invited to present a paper at a conference in Las Vegas, Nevada hosted by and for doctors of Indian origin.
About nine of Shroff’s American patients traveled to Las Vegas to be in the audience and tell their stories. They did, and according to Amy Scher, a Lyme disease patient, who lives by the motto, ‘When life kicks your ass, kick back,’ doctors in the audience were stunned to hear their stories. (http://healthcarehacks.com/channel/the-india-story)
For MacVicar, Shroff is truly an angel, a Godsend.
“If I had to be a guinea pig, I was more than happy to be one. I don’t believe doctors really understand what is really going on here…[Geeta Shroff] is a forerunner in this. She has helped a lot of people, and if people would open up their eyes and ears she could help a lot more.”
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