I was contacted last week by a woman who's mother is suffering from macular degeneration. She wrote, because she had seen my article about the Mexican "stem cell" clinic in Algodones Mexico. In 2005, my wife of 20 years was dying of cancer. In desperation, she decided to go this clinic and I decided to go along to see how this operated. The story of that trip is elsewhere here on this blog (see one of the first posts). The woman was wondering if there was anything she could do to stop her mother from being defrauded out of her money. Her mother is not rich, and apparently can't even pay for the out of pocket expenses for medical treatment beyond what her insurance will pay. So this supposed "treatment" will drain away even more of her limited funds.
In 2005, the clinic charged my wife about $15k for shots of what was supposed to be human embryonic stems cells. The treatment was theoretically going to inject stem cells into her cancer site and the cells would miraculously convert the cancerous cells into healthy cells. The clinic has since apparently lowered it's prices to $2000 an injection. However, as I remember, the original 'bait' was that the injection of lamb's stem cells was what was offered for $2k, and that if you wanted the more 'effective' human embryo stem cells, that was much much higher. We were told that the ability to procure human stem cells was much more difficult, and expensive.
This is the classic 'bait and switch' routine employed by salesmen everywhere. Get you in the door with a low entry price, and convince you that you need to spend more. The shot this clinic gives, is very likely to be nothing more than steroids, since the reaction for my wife, who had not been on steroids (though her doctor was urging her to), was so immediate and dramatic,and wore off so quickly, that it seemed very odd. By the time we were driving home the next day, her pain was back at full strength. In talking with medical professionals after this trip, they all agreed that it sounded very much like the reactions that people suffering from cancer have after taking steroids. To be clear,my wife died in September 2005 after receiving no benefits from taking these shots. Her uncle, and his brother, both suffering from other illnesses, also died within months of the treatment. They too, like my wife, experienced an overnight 'high' of pain relief that quickly wore off. Again, the kind of relief that steroids achieve by reducing swelling around infection sites, or so I'm told by doctors.
Hope springs eternal from those with diseases that have no cure, and in one way that's good. However, it lowers resistance to believing that people can be bad to good people. It is natural to want to feel that there is some magic potion out there that will cure your ills, and that "big pharma" or some other big government and big business wants to hide this treatment from you.
I reminded the woman to tell her mother that this border town of Algodones Mexico is along a border that is controlled by Mexican gangs in one of the most out of control situations on the planet.Many Mexican border towns are already "failed states". Why would Algodones, where the profits from the clinics and pharmacies hawking inexpensive drugs that are claimed to be identical to the ones we buy here at such high prices, why would this town be exempt from the rampant extortion of the drug gangs? The answer is likely that Algodones is a cash cow. That the drug gangs could already run the city, for their profit. It's so easy to take desperate Americans who have cash in hand, and milk them for their money. Why kill the golden goose by having a gang war over the profits?
A friend who is a local doctor on the State medical board, told me that they often run tests on foreign drugs. He said that in his experience most Mexican bought drugs from towns like this are frauds. Either outright or that the content of the medication is substantially lower than expected. These are not 'our' drugs being sold in Mexico. They are clones, which are very hard to detect, as they look like the real thing.
To be clear, I am not an apologist for our medical system. While I know very dedicated and competent medical people, our system is driven by profit. We have handed our medical treatment over to corporations who will pay their executives millions of dollars from their corporate profits. Yet we expect that we will have better care for all people than a system that takes the profits out. Wishful thinking at best. This is not theory. The proof is in the reality that many countries that we compete against in the world market, have government run medical systems that are giving better care than we do at much lower costs. Canada, Japan, England, Taiwan, Germany, and more all do a better, lower cost job than we do. To call my $800 a month medical insurance payments anything other than a tax is absurd. The argument that we will have 'death boards' under a government run system is also disingenuous. We already have death boards, and they are run by your insurance company, behind closed doors. The bureaucrats running our medical insurance companies routinely decide who gets treatment and who doesn't. Who dies and who doesn't. In a government run system we would at least be able to ask for transparency, and accountability.
Ultimately, I told the woman that if her mother was convinced that this miracle cure was going to work, had the money, and was of 'sound mind and body', there really was nothing that anyone could do to stop her. It's heartbreaking, but people with a belief, however irrational, will stop at nothing to follow it.
