This came in the other day, text and punctuation (cringe) unchanged:
i have been a patient of geeta shroff and i know she is a fraud and a manipulator of desprate people she is just trying to make as much money as possible with no regard as to the dangers of this kind of experimental therapy.
i hope anybody who is thinking of going to that shithole thinks and thinks again because YOU WILL REGRET IT ,because when you get home from the treatment you will be financially, mentally, emotionally and physically broken DO NOT BELEIVE HER LIES SHE IS A CON !!!!!
That's from the Internet fringes of
Care Cure. The quote was posted last week by a scribe called Regretfull. If you want to see the original, go
here, it's on page 45 of "Reports of Patients Treated by Dr. Geeta Shroff, India (Human Embryonic Stem Cells)."
As you will learn if you slog your way in to the discussion, Dr. Shroff runs a cure clinic in India. She takes on people with a long list of ailments including spinal cord injury, extracts $30,000 a visit, and then injects them with an embryonic stem cell line of her own cooking. There are those among us who are positively charmed by her. See
Amanda Boxtel's cure travelogue.
But Western rationalists take off on Shroff because she hasn't shared the recipe. Nor has she shared data and outcome results in any way close to the manner of the scientific or medical professional. All we get is patient testimony on the Internet. Your job, then, is to take Amanda and Regretfull and sift out what sounds right. And ask yourself, do you really want to experiment with your own coin, and your own body, in Delhi?
That isn't the only active and amusing crack in the stem cell tourism façade. Another Care Cure writer has challenged the veracity of Ricci Kilgore's testimony about her embryonic stem cell recovery in the Dominican Republic.
From Page 18 of a thread called "
Ricci Kilgore (found a cure)":
"Medra is a Scam and Ricci is a liar, by Lisa French, My friend and I have been trying to expose Dr Rader. Our goal is to shut down Medra. National attention would ruin Rader."
Ricci, who is no stranger here and can be seen on p. 186 of the Paralysis Resource Guide, and in two
Reeve PRC videos (scroll down to skiing and horseback riding), is an incomplete para who walks with canes. She's from Reno but living in the San Diego area now; she is on the US Olympic adaptive ski team development squad, married to a Navy guy. She's a nice kid, sincere as heck and from the photo on Facebook, she's a newly minted mom. Congratulations Ricci, now saddle up a horse called acrimony.
Ricci tells the story of getting immediate recovery after getting hooked up with Dr. William Rader's stem cells at the Medra clinic, operating in the Dominican. Now come her challengers who discovered some old news clips from the time of her injury leading them to conclude Ricci may have already gotten tons of recovery back - long before she became the perfect poster girl for the perfect grift.
Rader, whose company is based in a house overlooking the Pacific in Malibu, California, is a psychiatrist and former owner of a chain of eating disorder clinics in LA. He was once married to All In the Family's Sally Struthers, which is meaningless except perhaps to boost his Hollywood bona fides. He's not real warm to the glow of the media (go
here) but aggressively sticks to his story about the healing power of stem cells. He apparently got into the stem cell biz even before 1998, when human embryonic cells were identified. He had a clinic in the Bahamas that got shut down in 2000, thus the move to DR. He claims to have cured Alzheimer's and AIDS.
For the sake of fairness, here's
Ricci's response to some of this recent hoopla.
But wait, there's more. This also came out last week, accusing Medra of fraud, threats and intimidation. The scam is international (send money to an offshore bank before Rader will bring you to the Dominican for stem cells harvested from the Ukraine). Even Ricci's husband and her new-age uncle back in Reno get drawn in. See this unfold on a website called
RipOff Report. Bodie, from Parkville, Maryland, writes:
The web of interconnected fraud that has been uncovered is beyond
belief. Dr Rader probably found Ricci through her so called uncle Dr
James Forsythe, a homeopathic
aka oncologist , who works with her mother Valerie Kilgore at the
century Wellness Clinic in Reno Nevada. Dr Forsythe worked with Dr.
Albert Scheller, Rader's chief scientist.
This is how I believe Medra found the perfect spinal cord patient that miraculously walked.
We're not talking about the accuracy and fairness of the New Yorker magazine here but all this noise might make you think, twice, about doing business with Shroff or Rader. The least you could do is ask them to clear the record for you: Are all those cure touts really on the payroll?
One more item to make the point that the wheels may fall off the stem cell tourism racket: Police in Hungary last week arrested four people they suspect of running an illegal stem cell clinic in Budapest. Ye gods! The cops say the treatments were unproven, based on stem cells taken from embryos or aborted fetuses, and cost as much as $25,000 per person. Read it
here.
Mad
