My Trip to Bangkok: Stem Cell Treatment [Comments]

Actually got it done through a friend of a friend in Mexico who is not a stem cell doctor - but they sourced the stem cells from www.cryovidastemcells.com and had them shipped in overnight. This lab seems to supply MSCs to many doctors and clinics all around Mexico (e.g., see this article https://focusonmexico.com/inside-look-lakeside-stem-cell-treatment-chapalamed/).

A glass vial of 100M cells from them arrived in a frozen styrofoam box and was just dripped into a regular IV over the course of 20 minutes.

This is my first try with stem cells - been planning to go to StemCells21 for a while now, but heard about this in Mexico recently through a friend, and figured worth a shot in case it works before spending that much money in Thailand.

Will post an update in a month or two.

 

It would be great to hear how you are again in the future. Some people in this thread took 8-12 months to really see good improvement.

It's hard to know how much improvement was due to the stem cells or just time too. Although some people had hearing issues for many years and got better soon after stem cell treatment.

 

What hearing problems do you have? Hearing loss/tinnitus/pain hyperacusis and/or loudness hyperacusis?

From the very few anecdotal bits I've read I found that hyperacusis can be best healed (somewhat) with stem cells as apposed to tinnitus or hearing loss but then it also heals naturally better than the others too.

What kind of stem cells did you get and how many? Also, what was the method of administration? IV?

Sorry for all the questions but it helps us a lot if you could answer, thanks.

I have several sports injuries I would be happy to have fixed by stem cells even if it doesn't help my hyperacusis or tinnitus. Really only want the pain hyperacusis to get better. I'm habituating to the tinnitus even though it's still extremely loud.

 

Hey guys, I think I'm doing stem cell treatment. From all I've researched, seems like it is a very harmless treatment that can have good health outcomes regardless of the tinnitus, so, why not.

But I'm not confident on StemCells21 being legit. The Energetic Scan thing is ridiculous. They look and sound really sketchy and scammy overall.

Is there any way to make sure they're treating me with actual mesenchymal stem cells, and not just injecting vitamins?

Off-topic: is there any way to download this thread whole? I'd like to process it with GPT-3 to find and summarize these reports.

 

"Energetic scan" - that's the only thing that gives me serious doubts about StemCells21.

 

The best thing you can go off is talking to people who went to the clinics. StemCells21 seems like one of the more legit ones really. 3 or 4 people reported about going there in this thread.

Some clinics that don't look like scams, are actually scams. I wouldn't base my assessment of them on the style of their website. Ask the clinics if you can contact any of their patients for feedback.

 

I'm curious to hear how this plays out.

I've read a few studies that showed that stem cells provided positive results for animals. Why aren't there more studies on treating humans for tinnitus with stem cells?

Also, what worries me are the FDA warnings about stem cell treatments in general.

"The only stem cell-based products that are FDA-approved for use in the United States consist of blood-forming stem cells (hematopoietic progenitor cells) derived from cord blood.

These products are approved for limited use in patients with disorders that affect the body system that is involved in the production of blood (called the “hematopoietic” system)."​

 

There was a court case recently in California where the judge ruled in favor of letting a clinic use adipose stem cells that were expanded.

Some clinics claim to use umbilical cord stem cells in the US which is not allowed by the FDA so it's hard to know if they are legit or not.

As to why there's not much research. It's down to funding. Who's going to pay for the funding?

No individual investor will fund it since you can't patent it so there's no financial incentive.

Plus, big pharma are lobbying hard against it because stem cells are a huge threat to their business.

 

Okay, at this point I don't think stem cells are worth it.

I've browsed quite many pages of this thread and I still couldn't find these people that supposedly got better after stem cell treatment. I've found one person that claimed it did nothing to him, and another person, the thread creator, AtTheEdgeOfScience, who has had very poor results, since he went through 2 different stem cell treatments and still had tinnitus years after. There are no peer reviewed studies with controls nor any sensible explanation on why it should work. To me, it makes no logical sense that stem cells would magically replace lost ear hair cells and attach damaged neurons. The "homing" excuse is nonsense, since there should be no "inflammation" on the cochlea after years of chronic tinnitus. Seems like stem cells most likely do nothing and the few reported improvements are almost certainly just placebo.

Honestly? I'm disappointed with humanity. We can do much better. It seems like there is an obsession on this (arguably small, starving) field to understand the neurological causes of tinnitus, and this obsession is taking away resources and funding from more promising, pragmatic approaches. I'm not saying the models are wrong, they're just irrelevant. There is strong evidence that most, if not all, tinnitus sufferers would be cured if their ear hair cells were intact again. Yet, for some reason, there seems to be an implicit assumption on the field that chronic tinnitus is definitely a brain disease. This assumption is not backed by any reasonable logic. The only sensible argument for it is that old research paper where patients still presented tinnitus after auditory nerve removal, but how is that surprising? If tinnitus is caused by lack of auditory nerve impulses, then removing the auditory nerves would logically do nothing.

 

Check out the slide at 8 minutes 15 seconds here:

Tinnitus: Ringing in the Brain | Josef...

There are observable changes in the brain from long term tinnitus, aka neuroplasticity. But the hope/assumption is that once the hair cells are regrown it will change itself back.

Personally I think stem cells show promise but the costs are eye watering for the lack of confidence in the outcome. Would I spend $30,000 if I knew it would cure myself? Without hesitation. Would I drop $30,000 on stem cells that maybe might have an improvement if I happen to pick the right clinic offering the cell type with the right administration method? Well that's why I haven't done it...

I hold out hope for Otonomy and Frequency Therapeutics treatments.

 

See, that's the problem right there. There are observable changes in the brain from playing guitar every day. Or learning a new language. Or getting married. Anything significant changes our brain. That's how it works, neurons are very plastic, that's how we learn, remember and change. Of course the brain will adapt once we have such damage on ear hair cells, in the same way it does when we lose a limb or an eye. That doesn't make these a brain issues. So yes, I agree and make a point that it is very likely that the brain will re-adapt once the physical problem is fixed. And severing auditory neurons doesn't count as a fix!

To be fair, I would actually perform a stem cell treatment right now if I didn't have to travel to literally the other side of the planet to do it, since it seems to be harmless and have some other clear health benefits (although I'd still worry about rejection risks, not sure it is a good idea to have foreign-DNA cells sticking around on the long term?). But I'd not have any hope that would change my tinnitus in any way. FX-322 seems like the only plausible quasi-solution at this point.

 

Two others who had good results are @undecided and @LJMD.

They both posted a lot in this thread.

So I think those are the only 3 people who went to StemCells21 (and who reported here) and all of them had good results. Obviously not conclusive evidence but do your own research.

 

Didn't @undecided ultimately say it did nothing to his tinnitus and that it was a waste of money, and that he wouldn't do it again? I may be misremembering. This thread is huge and we can't download it...

 

This is the last update by @undecided:

 

Went higher, went lower... definitely sounds like it had no effect at all to me, sadly. Sighs.

I wonder if we have any report from FX-322 on someone with tinnitus...

 

This is from his last post on the forum:

 

That does sound promising, really. Especially considering he had had tinnitus for 4 years before that. Seems like it's probably not a coincidence that he got better right at that time.

 

What does "quality of blood cells during mild exercise" mean?

 

After 7-8 months he experienced lasting improvements. He took advice from the clinic about water intake etc.

Maybe the stem cell treatment caused the improvement - and maybe not.

As we know - this condition can improve and the time lag between treatment and improvement here is 7-8 months - reducing the possibility of a causal link between the improvement and the treatment.

It sounds more promising than if he still had bad tinnitus. Yet it could be a coincidence.

 

Exercise is very good for you basically.

He had had tinnitus for 3 years before his treatment though so there is a higher chance that it's the treatment that helped.

Even if it was the stem cell treatment that helped him, doesn't mean that it'll just work for everyone.

 

I'd be willing to spend the money tomorrow, if the stem cells weren't just inserted into my body, but actually targeted to the hair cells that got blasted by all that noise. I'd be a bit of a lab rat, if the doctor was basing their approach on an approach that helped animals in a documented study.

If I could write the future, I'd have Dr. Shore's device reduce tinnitus dramatically, then a year or two down the road have either stem cells or the Frequency Therapeutics thing regrow a few hairs.

Are any of these places actually targeting the ears? Or, is everyone just pumping in some stem cells and marketing them like they are some sort of cure-all supplement? Like, what separates these stem cell clinics from someone saying that CBD oil cures everything?

 

It's a typical Asian money making scam. No evidence. Should this be moved to Alternative Treatments as it does not have any good scientific data behind it?

 

There's multiple stem cell types, and multiple injection methods. They can be injected into stomach fat, IV drip into the blood stream, into the lower lumbar spinal fluid for brain/CNS access, or injury site like the knee joint or the ear.

The different types of cells include adipose (from fat), umbilical cord, fetal, neural, haematopoietic and exosomes (not technically a stem cell, but derived).

To add another layer of complexity, these types can further be categorised into pluripotent (strong but carry a cancer risk), multipontent, induced-pluripotent, and omnipotent. In addition, the more a stem cell is replicated/divided, the weaker it gets. So now you have to consider cell type, quantity, injection method, and quality.

That's a lot of combinations needing a lot of research for a lot of conditions. And some of them can't be legally researched or given to patients, at least in America, which greatly hinders progress.

They are different to CBD oil because some combinations of these are legal and do have a lot of evidence for successful treatments. Sickle cell anaemia can be cured with them. Long term joint/tendon damage can be healed. Unfortunately for us there is no reliable evidence for tinnitus, so all we have to go on are anecdotes.

Lastly, since tinnitus is caused by different things for different people, that makes it even more uncertain. For example, maybe adipose stem cells injected into the ear are successful for someone whose tinnitus is caused by hair cell damage. But that won't necessarily work for someone whose tinnitus is caused by auditory nerve damage. Maybe you need fetal cells injected by IV or the CNS for that... And neither of those will work for someone whose is caused by TMJ. So 2 sufferers could go to the same clinic and get different results, but that's not necessarily because the stem cells don't work.

 

StemCells21 do target hearing with injections around the ear.

Some clinics say that when they treat for some other main issue, that the patient reports that their tinnitus is better.

 

There is one clinical trial done on 11 children with hearing loss. They got umbilical cord stem cells and I think half of them recovered a lot of their hearing.

I found another paper that stated NGF injections around the ear recovered some hearing too and that's similar to stem cells.

There is a large amount of research done on stem cells in general and it can treat many things.

@Tem explained a lot of the issues above very well.

Finding the right clinic seems to be the most difficult thing. Some are scams and others are health hazards. There are for sure some clinics that are legit though.

Personally, I do think StemCells21 are legit. The lead doctor has been involved in a lot of peer reviewed research on stem cells over the years. You can look at the other doctors' history on LinkedIn too.

 

Hey @SmallRonnie, I’m not sure what country you are from but I found one in Florida, US. They are legit and have been doing stem cell therapy for tinnitus and hearing loss. Link below:

https://www.browardentaesthetics.com/services/ent/stem-cell-for-hearing-loss-and-tinnitus/

Trying to find people for feedback.

 

Thanks. I'm based in Ireland. I have seen these. They use adipose stem cells which are the weaker type. Personally, I would only want to try umbilical cord stem cells since those are stronger.

The best stem cell treatment in my mind would be a clinic who does intratympanic injections with quality umbilical cord stem cells. Nobody does this. Closest thing to it is StemCells21 who do local injections around the outside of the ear.

IV administration could be enough for some people too though but there are a huge amount of variables in both a person's tinnitus and the available treatment.

 

Does StemCells21 do treatment where stem cells are injected directly to the CNS? Is the IV administration the way to do it?

And what about exosomes? Some say they are more potent than stem cells.

There are no clinics in Europe at all for stem cells or exosomes?

 

StemCells21 also do intrathecal injections for other issues if that's what you mean, but that would not usually help with tinnitus. It might help in very specific circumstances. They don't do exosomes. Show me a paper that says exosomes are better than stem cells.

There is a stem cell clinic in Ukraine. There are 2 threads discussing stem cell clinics and another thread talking about exosomes. The answers to your questions are there.

There's a clinic in Germany doing exosomes called Anova but the price is like €20k and only about 20B cells IV which is way too low a dose, especially for that price.

 

My tinnitus is somatosensory. I might have thalamocortical dysrhythmia - just my guess, I haven't been diagnosed with it.

It started with a very clogged ear for 2 months, from an external ear canal fungus which was treated in days. For some reason my ear remained very clogged for weeks, I received no treatment for it. My bilateral tinnitus started only when my ear was unclogging itself, even though only one ear had been clogged.

I have normal hearing, there was no dry inflammation, no infection, no history of noise exposure or anything else.

I think my auriculotemporal nerve with its branches on 5 and 7 cranial nerves were affected. My muscles never came back to normal in my bad ear. That sensory stimulation and receiving fewer sounds in the left ear for weeks just resulted in bad brain plasticity. So my tinnitus is neurological, coming from the brain, fluctuating between full head tinnitus and some times all the way up to the ears, auditory cortex.

I've been thinking long and hard about stem cells. Could they reverse the bad plasticity and rewire the brain? So the electrical signals are properly sent again. Maybe the intrathecal injections would help with this?