Cell Therapy

WHAT IS CELL THERAPY?
The basic theory behind cell therapy was stated best by Paracelsus, a 16th-century physician who wrote: “Heart heals the heart, lung heals lung, spleen heals spleen; like cures like.” Paracelsus and many other early physicians believed that the best way to treat illness was to use living tissue to rebuild and revitalize ailing or aging tissue.
Modern orthodox medicine lost sight of this method, so it now uses chemicals to interrupt or override living processes. While chemicals and drugs work only until they are broken down by the body’s metabolic processes, cell therapy has a long-term effect, because it stimulates the body’s own healing and revitalizing powers.
Doctors who practice cell therapy believe that cell therapy acts like an organ transplant and actually makes the old cells to “act younger.” This biological “lesson” is not quickly forgotten by the cells.
In Europe, the effectiveness of cell therapy is widely accepted. In West Germany, for example, more than 5,000 German physicians regularly administer cell therapy injections. A great proportion of those injections are funded by the West German social security system. Several million patients the world over have received cell therapy injections since the mid-1950’s.
Swiss physician Paul Niehans discovered the beneficial effects of live cell therapy quite by accident. In 1931, Niehans was summoned by a colleague who had accidentally removed a patient’s parathyroid glands during the course of thyroid surgery.
So vital are these glands to life that there was little chance that the woman could survive the day without them. A successful transplant was the only chance the surgeon had of saving her. So Niehans, who had a reputation for therapeutically transplanting organs and glands, was called in.
On his way to the hospital, Niehans stopped off at the abattoir, where the animals he used in his revitalization experiments were slaughtered. He obtained fresh parathyroid glands from a steer and proceeded to the hospital, fully intending to perform a parathyroid transplant.
However, when Niehans arrived, one look at the patient- who was violently convulsing -told him that there was simply not enough time to perform the operation. The woman would not survive long enough.
But Niehans had an idea. He used a surgical knife to slice the steer’s parathyroid glands into finer and finer pieces, taking care not to mash the individual cells. He then mixed the pieces in a saline solution and loaded it into a large hypodermic needle. To the shock and dismay of his colleagues, Niehans injected the mixture into the fatally ill woman.
Immediately, her convulsions ceased. Her condition improved- and continued improving. To everyone’s surprise, including Niehan’s, she recovered. Niehans wrote, many years later, “I thought the effect would be short-lived, just like the effect of an injection of hormones, and that I should have to repeat the injection. But to my great surprise, the injection of fresh cells not only failed to provoke a reaction but the effect lasted, and longer than any synthetic hormone, any implant or any surgical graft.”
Longer indeed. The woman went on to live another 30 years, well into her 90s.
Thus was born cell therapy. At his Clinique La Prairie in Montreaux, Switzerland, Dr. Niehans went on to administer live cell injections to thousands and thousands of patients, including many of the crowned heads, presidents, Pope Pius XII, and several Hollywood stars.
WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT FROM CELL THERAPY?
Dr. Niehans stated the ultimate aim of cell therapy in this way: “What I am striving after is not only to give more years to life but especially to give more life to years.” Niehan’s aim was to “make all the organs struck by old age capable once more of functioning properly and, at the same time, bring fresh strength to the whole body by revitalization of the sex glands.”
The problem that cell therapy is designed to solve include the following:
-general loss of vitality,
-physical and mental exhaustion,
-convalescence after illness,
-premature aging,
-signs of deterioration of the brain, heart, kidneys, lungs, liver, and digestive organs,
-lack of drive and declining mental efficiency,
-weakness of the immune system,
HOW IS IT PROMOTED FOR USE?
In cell therapy, live or freeze-dried cells or pieces of cells from the healthy organs, fetuses, or embryos of animals such as sheep or cows are injected into patients. This is supposed to repair cellular damage and heal sick or failing organs. Cell therapy is promoted as an alternative therapy for cancer, arthritis, heart disease, Down syndrome, and Parkinson disease.
Cell therapy is also marketed to counter the effects of aging, reverse degenerative diseases, improve general health, increase vitality and stamina, and enhance sexual function. Some practitioners have proposed using cell therapy to treat AIDS patients.
The theory behind cell therapy is that the healthy animal cells injected into the body can find their way to weak or damaged organs of the same type and stimulate the body’s own healing process. The choice of the type of cells to use depends on which organ is having the problem. For instance, a patient with a diseased liver may receive injections of animal liver cells. Most cell therapists today use cells taken from taken from the tissue of animal embryos.
Supporters assert that after the cells are injected into the body, they are transported directly to where they are most needed. They claim that embryonic and fetal animal tissue contains therapeutic agents that can repair damage and stimulate the immune system, thereby helping cells in the body heal.
The alternative treatment cell therapy is very different from some forms of proven therapy that use live human cells. Bone marrow transplants infuse blood stem cells—from the patient or a carefully matched donor—after the patient’s own bone marrow cells have been destroyed. Studies have shown that bone marrow transplants are effective in helping to treat several types of cancer.
In another accepted procedure, damaged knee cartilage can be repaired by taking cartilage cells from the patient’s knee, carefully growing them in the laboratory, and then injecting them back into the joint. Approaches involving transplants of other types of human stem cells are being studied as a possible way to replace damaged nerve or heart muscle cells, but these approaches are still experimental.
WHAT DOES IT INVOLVE?
First, healthy live cells are harvested from the organs of juvenile or adult live animals, animal embryos, or animal fetuses. These cells may be taken from the brain, pituitary gland, thyroid gland, thymus gland, liver, kidney, pancreas, spleen, heart, ovaries, testicles, or even from whole embryos. Patients might receive one or several types of animal cells. Some cell therapists inject fresh cells into their patients.
Others freeze them first, which kills the cells, and they may filter out some of the cell components. Frozen cell extracts have a longer “shelf life” and can be screened for disease. Fresh cells cannot be screened. A course of cell therapy to address a specific disease might require several injections over a short period of time, whereas cell therapy designed to treat the effects of aging and “increase vitality” may involve injections received over many months.
Animal cell extracts are also sold in pill form as dietary supplements, usually called glandular supplements. These, too, allegedly travel to organs of the same kind in the body to promote healing.
arthritis and other degenerative diseases of the connective tissue,
-underfunction of the endocrine glands,
-disturbances of menopause,
-Parkinsonism,
-chronic pain, migraine, headaches, neuralgia, back pain, sciatica,
-atherosclerosis of the brain, heart, and peripheral circulation.
Cell therapy successfully revitalizes and extends youth. Cell therapists see their patients’ skin tone and complexion improve, their vitality increase, their youthful optimism and energy return, and various other infirmities of aging much improve.
Dr. Niehaus used cell therapy for alot more than youth extension. He used live cell injections not only to regenerate diseased or aged organs but also to stimulate development of underdeveloped or retarded organs. In fact, Niehans’s successful treatment of dwarfism provided him with some of his earliest notoriety in the United States.
The basic therapeutic effect of cell therapy was described Dr. Niehans as “organotropic cellular regeneration in the impaired organs.” In other words, the therapy stimulated the disease and aging-damaged organs to regenerate. This restoration usually takes anywhere from three to six months after the injections. Any immediate effect, explained Niehans, would have to be caused by hormones, not cellular regeneration.
Doctors who use cell therapy have reported that atherosclerosis patients also benefit. In a study performed on laboratory rats, cell therapy increased the residual pliability of aorta tissue to the extent that when stretched, it returned to its original shape much faster. This is a characteristic of younger tissue.
Experiments on connective tissue have shown that cell therapy can increase the strength and pliability of this important structural element of the body. The youthful appearance of your skin is determined in large part by the health of your connective tissue. But that’s not all.
How youthfully your joints, muscles, and blood vessels function also depends on the condition of your connective tissue. Since the success of several cosmetic surgery operations depends upon the strength and elasticity of the skin, a course of cell therapy before rejuvenating surgery is a good idea for older patients whose skin has lost its elasticity.
HOW DOES CELL THERAPY WORK?
Let’s be aware that cell therapy is practiced every day all over the world. Blood transfusion and the transfusion of various other blood components, such as red blood cells, white blood cells, blood platelets, is actually a form of cell therapy where the acceptance has been uniformly widespread. Less commonly, implant of the cells of the thymus have been utilized -essentially without as much as the wink of the eye of the medical authorities.
It is in Niehans cell therapy, where cells of various organs of the body are being injected into a human being, where there is a problem, particularly in the United States and Canada. All other civilized countries of the world accept cell therapy. Cell therapy is actually an implantation by injection of xenogenic (of animal origin) fetal or juvenile suspensions of cells or tissues in physiological solution.
No one knows exactly how cell therapy works. Basically, cell therapy is transplanting an organ; but instead of actually transplanting an organ, you are transplanting the cells of an organ. The transplanted cells then somehow bring about the revitalization of their corresponding organs.
We do not know all that there is yet to know about cell therapy. But we do know that the implantation by injection has the following advantages over conventional procedure of surgical transplant:
1. Implantation of cells by injection brings about a rapid dispersion of the cell material all over the body.
2. The cells are not injured due to lack of blood supplies during the dispersion, which is very commonly the reason for the death of cells after the organ transplant.
3. Since the cells are injected in the form of suspension, a rapid incorporation into the metabolic processes of the body occurs.
4. Organs that are impossible to transplant (such as the brain or some of the endocrine glands) or very difficult to transplant (such as kidneys, heart, or liver) can be implanted in the form of cells very easily.
5. Fetal tissues, with their higher biological potencies, are implanted in the recipient and used at various sites in the body. The recipient organism itself controls and carries out a selective incorporation of the various fetal cells.
Transplanting an entire organ is impractical, for several reasons. Your immune system might reject any transplanted organ. And who is going to risk trading an “old” organ or gland that is nonetheless functioning for a “new” one that might totally fail if the transplant doesn’t work? Thus, organ transplants today are limited to hopeless situations only.
If the body’s immune system rejects entire transplanted organs, is there also the possibility that it will reject the individual cells?
Very little. The fact is that the body usually accepts the individual cells injected during cell therapy. Again, we don’t know exactly why.
Perhaps this is so because cell therapy uses embryonic cells, whose immunological makeup is still incomplete. Whatever the reason, we do know the cells do somehow get by the body’s immune system.
But that’s not all. Not only do they get into the body, they also go straight to their corresponding organs. Liver cells go to the liver, spleen cells go to the spleen, sex gland cells go to the sex glands, and so on. Scientific studies, in which these glandular substances were tagged with radioisotopes before injection, have proved that the injected (and ingested) cells do find their way to the specific corresponding organ.
Once the cells have found their way to the target organs or glands, do they have the power to do any good?
The answer to that appears to be Yes, too. Independent studies by cellular biologists have discovered that a single cell from a specific organ contains the information needed to rebuild the entire organ or gland.
Scientists extracted kidney, skin, and liver cells from chick embryos. After processing them in much the same way the cells are processed for cell therapy, they were reinjected into the membrane of an egg. The cells developed into their specific organs.
Other independent research by scientists who were not cell therapists, and who were not investigating cell therapy, has arrived at many of the same conclusions used to explain cell therapy.
First of all, they have established that embryonic tissue has the greatest growth stimulating effect. This makes sense. Young living things always contain more “life force” than mature ones.
Secondly, they have confirmed that the growth stimulating effect of live cells is definitely organ specific but not species specific. This means that liver cells will only stimulate the growth of liver cells, but they will do so no matter what animal the cells come from.
Finally, it has been demonstrated that unwanted, or unnecessary, cells are rejected without doing harm to the body.
Two major theories explain how cells bring about revitalization of ailing or aging organ. One theory says that the genetic information contained in the RNA and DNA of the “old” cells is defective, because of either age or disease. Perhaps the old cells’ genetic codes have developed gaps or incorrect bits of information. If you remember my discussion of aging, this cellular genetic misinformation causes the cells to reproduce inefficiently. The new cells do not look or function as well as they should.
Along comes the fresh, young cells, with their fresh genetic information contained in their DNA and RNA. This theory says that the new cells carry the correct genetic message to the old cells. The new cells replace the misinformation with the proper, original genetic codes. The mistakes are corrected and the gaps filled. Once the correct information is in place, the organ or gland begins to function correctly -as if it, too, were as “young” as the donor cells.
The second theory is simpler. It explains the aging of the cells in much the same way: As we age, our cells gradually lose their ability to function precisely as they were intended. This theory, however, does not bother with genetic codes. It says that the mere presence of the fresh cells stimulates secretions that activate the aging or diseased cells to get back on the track and function properly.
The implantation provides the recipient organisms with a great number of biochemical substrates and enzymes that are found in very high concentrations and unique composition in the fetal and juvenile cells and tissues.
There are many things we don’t know about biochemical engineering. Perhaps we shall not know exactly how cell therapy works until cellular biologists unlock all the secrets of the cell.
Reprinted with permission, FOREVER YOUNG
E. Michael Molnar, M.D. 1985, p.p. 79-91