Stem cell therapy for spinal cord injury is in it's infancy. We are only up to conducting Phase 1 trials - ie small trial to test the safety of the procedure. The long term effects and potential harm (eg the development of tumours or abnormal nervous system development, or autoimmune disease) are not known and we need data on this before giving any sort of go ahead to conduct larger trials that could examine the efficacy of such procedures.

It is way too early to start offering this as a treatment. Treatment should be confined to well designed and ethical clinical trials where we can find out how useful and safe stem cell transplant can be.

Companies do circumvent the normal development of a new treatment by offering to patients outside a clinical trial. this is happening already in countries like China. The treatments are very expensive, may be of poor quality and may be useless or even harmful to the patients. Without close monitoring this contributes nothing to our understanding of such a treatment.

For a review have a look at this NZ summary - this is not a peer reviewed review but does give an idea just how undeveloped the science is behind stem cell therapy for SCI

http://www.acc.co.nz/PRD_EXT_CSMP/gr...ctrb093425.pdf