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A miracle worker or a quack doctor?
Dr Huang
By Mata Press Service
Dylan Teske was born with an unknown chronic condition that caused him to have a lack of oxygen supply to his brain.
The Toronto boy’s arms were always stiff and held close to his body. Dylan also had trouble opening his hands for play.
Today, his mother Julie reports that Dylan is doing very well and that he has gained a lot of movement in his upper arms and shoulders.
"Before…he was unable to play or learn to feed himself properly. Now…he is able to reach and grab a lot more than before…. He even stretches in his sleep and moves a bit from side to side….he is also more active,” she writes on her blog.
"Before…he was unable to play or learn to feed himself properly. Now…he is able to reach and grab a lot more than before…. He even stretches in his sleep and moves a bit from side to side….he is also more active,” she writes on her blog.
Canadian Brian Knoblauch had Ataxia - a failure of muscular coordination - for 20 years and it got to a point where it was affecting his life.
The 48-year-old’s balance was off. In the morning when he woke up he would stumble around for the first ten to fifteen minutes. He had myopia. His skin was itchy all the time and he would scratch until it bled.
Today his balance was much better. He can walk more steadily. The cramps are gone. His skin no longer itched. And Brian has also stopped taking Paxil to suppress anxiety attacks.
Shannon Deering, 20, and her sister Erica, 17, were paralyzed in an August 2004 car crash in Ontario and they've spent every moment since trying to improve their mobility and get closer to the normal life they've been told is no longer a possibility.
In December, a doctor in China will place nasal cells from aborted fetuses into the damaged areas of their spinal cords. The hope is the cells will regenerate and increase the sisters' mobility.
Like Dylan, Brian and the Deerrings, hundreds of people around the world are placing their hopes in the “miracles” conjured by Dr. Huang Hongyun - a Chinese peasant turned surgeon.
The lame, the sick and the dying; young and old; some in wheelchairs for years and others are kept alive by respirators come to his Beijing clinic in search of one of the most controversial medical procedures on the planet - the injection of cells from aborted fetuses into the brains and spines of the sick.
For them Dr. Huang is the great hope who has stumbled on a modern scientific miracle.
Now a team of doctors which has finished the first independent, scientifically rigorous assessment of Huang's work are describing his work as disappointing, disturbing and scary, reports the Boston Globe.
Of seven spinal cord injury patients the doctors followed, none experienced significant improvements, and five suffered potentially dangerous complications. One man who went to Beijing with damage to his spinal cord returned with holes drilled in his head -- apparently Huang had placed cells in the man's brain, not his spinal cord.
The results are published in the journal Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair .
“This is extremely damning of Dr. Huang's work," said Dr. Kevin C. O'Connor , medical director of the spinal cord injury program at the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. “It is pretty scary stuff,” he told the paper.
In an e-mail exchange with a reporter, Huang refused to answer direct questions, but he accused the study's three authors, all leading spinal injury doctors, of being liars.
For years, scientists and doctors have been trying to make sense of Huang's work. Huang is a neurosurgeon, and he did research on the biology of fetal cells at Rutgers University and New York University before returning to China. Until now, however, there has never been a rigorous study of his treatments, with outside doctors carefully examining patients before and after -- considered a crucial test of any medical procedure.
Huang says he injects his patients with “olfactory ensheathing cells." These cells are thought to help nerves repair themselves by releasing growth factors. The cells have been shown to repair nerves in animals, but there is no evidence they help people.
Working at Chaoyang and West Hills (Xishan) hospitals, Huang's team extracts these cells from aborted fetuses and then opens up a hole in the patient's brain or spinal cord, injecting the cells. In presentations at scientific conferences, he has said he has helped many patients and has seen no serious side effects.
Dr. Bruce H. Dobkin, one of the authors of the study, said that he approached Huang after hearing a presentation at a Vancouver scientific conference. Huang began referring patients to Dobkin, who is medical director of the Neurologic Rehabilitation and Research Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, so that he could conduct extensive evaluations of the patients before and after the Beijing procedure.
Dobkin, who is also editor in chief of the journal that published the results, said that he attributes the improvements the patients noted to the power of the placebo effect, compounded by the pressure they feel to improve, having just spent what is reported to be more than $20,000 on the surgery.
One patient, Dobkin said, was able to walk but wanted help with a bladder problem, and Huang drilled a hole near her neck, exposing the spinal cord for an injection of cells.
“It is just nonsense,” Dobkin was quoted as saying. “That he would even agree to do this is really frightening to me.”
Dobkin said the patients suffered side effects that included meningitis, which is a dangerous inflammation of the tissue around the spinal cord or brain, as well pneumonia and gastrointestinal bleeding. Such side effects in a patient who is already quite sick can set off a cascade of medical problems, Dobkin said.
Huang's website includes profiles of patients he has treated for a wide variety of conditions. The conditions have different causes and different symptoms, yet Huang treats them all with the same cells.
Dobkin and others said there is no way to learn anything from what Huang is doing with his human guinea pigs.
In an interview with The Guardian, Dr. Huang said he promises nothing to his patients. He claims no miracle cure. He admits he cannot fully explain his results. All he knows, and all he tells his patients, is that his method often works, that the results speak for themselves. "Our results change thousands of years of traditional concepts," he says.
The conventional wisdoms that he claims to have turned on their heads are that chronic spinal injuries - injuries that can cause paraplegia or tetraplegia - can never be treated; and that it is almost impossible to stabilize the condition of patients with the wasting disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.
"Our results show that is wrong. It is not a miracle, but it is a big change." And in this cyber age - when many people trust the Internet more than their own doctors - this is proving to be enough, because the word on the web is that Huang's results are miraculous. Chat sites for paraplegics and ALS sufferers are buzzing with testimonies from former patients who say they are walking, talking and scratching their noses for the first time in years.
None of these claims has been proven to western scientific standards, but Huang's willingness to think the unthinkable in order to cure the incurable is inspiring hope; so much hope that patients are putting aside ethical qualms, paying tens of thousands of dollars and flying to Beijing to act as his guinea pigs.
Huang's former teacher, Professor Wise Young, the director of neurosurgery research laboratories at New York University & Bellevue medical centre, is equally supportive - and perplexed. "I've seen it with my own eyes; there's no doubt that it happens. The problem is, the results are too fast for regeneration, therefore the mechanism for early recovery is not known. So we are now working hard to try to understand the process in animals."
Huang said such tests are unethical because they involve cutting someone open and only pretending to treat them. "This would not be legal in China," he says. "Even if it was, I wouldn't do it. Double-blind trials only harm the patient."
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