Im unsure if this is allowed on this sub, I checked the rules, but im still not sure. If it's not, feel free to ignore

I wanted to do my own research on this topic, but hopefully, with reliable sources, im just never sure where to look. If anyone knows where I can find a study or has a link to one, I would really appreciate it 🫶

Buddy of mine, same age, mid sixties, had a stroke a year and a half ago. His wife doesn't fly anymore and his kids work, I'm retired, so I went. Clinic was Swiss Medica, Belgrade. I'd searched what happens during a stem cell treatment program before we left and still had no picture of it, so here's the hallway version.

Day one is nothing. Someone met us at the airport. Room in the same complex as the treatment side, across a courtyard, and that matters when one of you has a cane. Forms. Blood. A woman with a clipboard and a stopwatch had him walk up and down a corridor twice. He was wiped out by two in the afternoon. I found the coffee machine.

Days two through seven were the same shape. Morning was therapy, and I mean work, someone making him use the arm he'd quit using, then a break, then a block on some machine I couldn't name. The cells were an IV on two of the days, he barely noticed, and one day a thing in his back he noticed plenty and I didn't watch. Afternoons more therapy. By six he was done and by eight asleep. I read three books and learned the tram.

About a week all in. He was less grumpy by the end, and also somebody made him do things every day for a week, so make of that what you want. The doctor at the end talked about the next months.

If you've been the plus one for anything like this, what did you wish you'd brought? tl;dr books. And a second charger.

An old friend sent me two clinic quotes for his mum's knee because I work in a university biology lab. Technician, I keep other people's cell lines alive, so this is roughly my area and roughly not.

One quote said SVF, from a sports clinic near her that I'm not naming because he'd know it was me posting. The other said culture-expanded mesenchymal cells from a donor. He'd googled the difference between SVF and mesenchymal stem cell therapy and read the two quotes as two prices for the same thing. They're not.

SVF is fat out, spun, injected back the same day. What goes in is a mix. Immune cells, cells from vessel walls, fibroblasts, and somewhere between a few percent and a third stromal cells depending who's counting, with the actual progenitors at the small end of that. Nobody grows anything. Upside, it's her own tissue, no freezing, no weeks of culture. Downside, they can count how many cells went in but not how many were the useful ones.

Cultured cells are the other route. Start from a donor sample, usually cord or placenta from a bank, grow it out until the mesenchymal cells take over the dish, freeze it, thaw it, sometimes grow it a bit more, check what it is, then it goes in. Upside, a defined population and a real count. Downside, someone else's cells, every extra round in culture ages them, and the checks tell you what the cells are. Whether they do anything is a different test and nobody showed me one.

The second quote was from Swiss Medica, which is the Belgrade one. Same place lists SVF too, this quote just wasn't for that. It spells out cord tissue from a bank, expanded and checked in their own lab before use, so at least the quote says what it is.

What I couldn't tell him is which fork matters more for a knee, own versus donor or same day versus grown. The papers I could find don't settle it either.

She hasn't picked. She might not. Did anyone get told why one and not the other?

a friend with COPD posted one of those best countries for stem cell therapy medical tourism 2026 lists in our grp chat and i replied before anyone asked me to since i work in cold chain. temperature controlled biologics, vaccines mostly, some cell products and half my week is QA explaining what a two hour excursion did to a batch
the list was mexico, turkey, thailand, colombia, panama. ranked on price and flight times and wether theres a regulator. two of the lists he sent were written by clinics, you can see it in the footer
country matters for exactly one thing and its the regulator. who licenses the lab, who inspects it, who gets told when something goes wrong. for half that list i couldn't answer it in an evening. for serbia i got as far as a health ministry and a tissue and cell law, and no licence number on anyones page, theirs included
what the lists never touch is what happens to the cells between the freezer and his arm. QA sees ninety odd percent alive at thaw on a good day and calls anything much under that a bad batch, but the count keeps dropping for hours after, and the survivors are sluggish for about a day. in a dish they recover. in a patient they might not get the day, after an infusion most of them sit in the lungs and are cleared inside roughly that long anyway. and alive isnt the same as working, thats a separate test almost nobody publishes
the one he is looking at is swiss medica, belgrade. their lab page says the lab is on site, that viability is checked by flow cytometry before use, and that cells are normally kept in a cryobank and only sometimes used fresh. so they answer where and whether anyone counts. the page says grow, check, store and activate, and activate is doing a lot of work in that sentence. not how long between thaw and infusion. not whether the cells get recovery time first. thats the one i want answered
he asked which country then. i said wrong question. he said thats not an answer and hes not wrong.

Please help support

We will be in Los Algodones around Thanksgiving for our son. We will spend 1.5 day there (one night) in Mexico. Few questions:

1. Would you recommend to take taxi (or Uber) from Los Algodones to Mexicali for a small trip after treatment? Or is it going to be a huge hassle?

2. Any great Mexican restaurants or food truck in Mexicali?

Our group is not outdoor people (lolz) so hiking or any dessert visit they won't do.

Kinda pricey u/100.00/order

We went to IRM for my husband’s chronic fibromyalgia. While we were there, he received stem cells three ways:
- intravenously,
- directly into the carpal tunnel area,
- and directly into his spine.

We stayed for 5 days.

Once we got back to NY, his pain started increasing day by day. The injection sites were getting more inflamed, and nothing was improving. We reached out to IRM and they told us this was “normal” and that he should take prednisone.

Three weeks after returning home, my husband couldn’t take the pain anymore. He couldn’t sit, stand, or walk. We went to urgent care, and they told us to go straight to the hospital.

At the hospital, they ran MRIs and CT scans. The imaging showed osteomyelitis of his sacrum and an abscess. We immediately notified IRM and even sent them the imaging. They kept insisting that he didn’t have that — that it was just inflammation from the stem cells — and again told us to give him prednisone.

Meanwhile, the hospital started him on antibiotics, but his infection kept getting worse. They took a culture, and it came back as NTM mycobacteria abscessus. As soon as I sent IRM the culture results, they stopped responding.

He was switched to targeted antibiotics, but still no improvement. His legs and penis started going numb, and the pain was unbearable. The doctors decided he needed surgery.

He had surgery two days ago. They found a lot of pus and dead tissue from the infection. They had to go through his back, and then he needed an abdominal surgery to drain the pus from the front.

I reached out to IRM again — and they’re still giving me the same dismissive behavior and zero accountability. denying they did not cause this. SAVE YOURSELF THE PAIN AND GO SOMEWHERE ELSE.

I live in Virginia. I am looking for someone who specializes in the foot & ankle since it is so complex.

However, I have a huge bone spur on my talus (has grown back 3 times). I’m wondering if I need to visit a surgeon who can remove the spur then have stem cell injections to stimulate healing and cartilage growth.

Does anyone know a foot & ankle specialist in the United States who is good? I’d love to not have to travel internationally. The information on which clinics are reputable and worth it is very confusing.

I've been reading up on stem cell therapy for severe burnout and broken sleep lately. I'm heading to seoul soon and learned that same-day blood-derived stem cell IVs (the ones without multi-week cell culturing) are pretty accessible there.

Has anyone actually tried this in seoul specifically for sleep restoration or jet lag? I'm looking for genuine medical clinics (preferably internal medicine) rather than aesthetic factory places.

Any insights or recommendations would be super helpful!

Are there any stem cell biologists, medical doctors, or physician-scientists—or anyone similarly qualified—whom I could interview regarding the ethical concerns surrounding stem cell research and therapy? Time zone is UTC+8

I won't post it on any platforms, this is strictly for academic purposes only. Thank you so much.

Has anyone had success in improving their erectile dysfunction with exosomes or PRFM? If so, what clinic did you go to and how must was treatment?

34 years old female with good blood work(only high cholesterol) and I have mostly joint issues ever since I delivered my baby which is now a toddler years ago. I actually had a pelvic floor dysfunction due to traumatic childbirth and I had messed in my pelvic up really bad. So basically it's a muscle balance that has caused me tons of issues. So I do have a lot of problems. Anyways I'm interested in getting stem cells or prp. I have many regenerative places near me not so far away. Yeah it is few hours away, like around 2 to 3 hours away which is not so bad. But I'm willing to travel in order to have my joints better. Anyone has dealt with this or have done stem cells to hip issues

I just had a consult for stem cell injections to stimulate hair regrowth in my crown and beard with NovaStem.

I know that this will not create new follicles that aren't there, but i'm told it CAN thicken and restimulate growth in thin or thinning follicles.

Has anyone had any results or experiences with this? Or know anyone who has?

I got stem cells in my shoulder, and it’s been almost 5 weeks.

My shoulder has been aching really bad, the clinic said this is normal as my body is “regenerating”

Has anyone had a similar experience?

Thanks!

I’m trying to separate solid progress from hype. What do you think is the biggest hurdle, whether it’s safety, immune rejection, scale or cost? And how do you tell a credible research program from an overhyped one?

If you cite a study or trial, please link it so we can all read further. I’m after research discussion, not individual treatment advice.

We have a meeting scheduled with this company to discuss our son entering a trial (for T1D). Is there any downside to this, is there any safety risk? Would doing this now in any way keep us from doing other therapies (or this again when it's more advanced) later? Can anyone knowledgeable give me any insight into this?

I coordinate clinical trials. Not a doctor, I book the visits, chase signatures and read the protocol so nobody else has to. My neighbour knows this. So on Saturday she told me over the fence that her husband's booked a stem cell programme in Belgrade for his MS, and then waited.

I said "oh right" and went back inside. Been chewing on it since.

What I'd have said if she'd asked an actual question. There are two things called stem cell therapy in MS and they've got almost nothing to do with each other. One is the transplant, where they take your own blood stem cells out, hit the immune system with chemo and put them back. Hospital medicine, randomised trials behind it in relapsing MS, and brutal. The other is mesenchymal cells, by drip or lumbar puncture or both, and that's what the clinics abroad do. There are trials for that too, small phase 2s, results all over the place, the biggest one missed its MRI endpoint. Nothing at phase 3.

The place she named is Swiss Medica, an inpatient place in Belgrade with its own lab, the Swiss part is where the company started. Their MS page splits the two properly, I'll give them that, and then says tissue repair further down, which is a bigger claim than those trials carry.

The bit that actually bothers me is this. She said "progressive" and that's why the transplant was never offered. But what decides whether either route makes sense isn't progressive versus relapsing, it's whether there's still activity, relapses or new lesions on MRI. The transplant people want activity, and they also want you young enough, early enough and still walking. Even the clinic's own criteria say active secondary progressive, with inflammation. If his scans are quiet, neither one is really for him, including the one he's booked.

I don't know his scans. I'm not sure she does.

So do I go round and say that, or is that not my place?

Friends of ours are looking at stem cell therapy for autism for their son. I was on the video call with them mostly since I was in their kitchen when it started and they wanted a third person who'd remember what was said. Not my kid, not my call and I'm not describing him

I expected a pitch. It wasn't one. That's somehow harder to write about.

The clinic, Swiss Medica in Belgrade, had already gone through his forms before the doctor came on and that's where the age and weight thing had come up, roughly three to ten yr olds and a minimum of 15 kilos, so he'd been through that gate before anyone said hello. The doctor said early on that it doesn't cure autism, plainly and once, then talked about what families tend to report, mostly sleep and digestion and gave a figure of about 80 percent of their families reporting improvement in at least one of the things they follow up on. Their own numbers. Price was 19,700 to 25,000 euros depending on the program and insurance doesn't cover it in most cases, not in theirs

I got my questions in. What if nothing's different at six months, and got a re check and then a careful version of "then it didn't work for him" which I respected and didn't love. What the risks were on the day and got infusion reactions mostly mild. How they'd know if anything had changed at all and got their follow up calls, a check up visit if we wanted one and what we noticed ourselves. That last one is the one I keep turning over

Afterwards I went looking for trials. The two properly blinded ones I found, one with cord blood and one with cord tissue cells like these, both came out with nothing against placebo. I don't know what to do with that next to an 80 percent

They came off that call more sure than they went in. I came off it less sure. Still don't know which of us is the problem.

I help run a neuro support group, not a professional, got roped in yrs ago and never got out. MS and parkinsons mostly, a few after strokes. my actual job on a tuesday is chairs and biscuits and stopping the whatsapp eating itself
about twice a yr the whatsapp does this. someone posts a video. then a link. then "has anyone looked into stem cell treatment for neurological disorders" becuase thats what you type when you dont know what disease to type. then it goes quiet for a month and then you find out someone went
two people from our group went to Swiss medica in Belgrade last yr. they were there for about a week each. i know that much, i drove one of them to the airport
and neither of them has said a word in the group since. not good, not bad, nothing. i dont think its secrecy, i think saying anything in a room full of people with your disease feels like either selling it or crushing someone so they say nothing and the chat gets the video and the link and never the bit after
i’m thinking of asking them to come on a tuesday and just talk, not recommend, just what the week was like and what since. and I'm scared of it turning into a pitch and equally scared of a pile on
if you run one of these, have you done that? how did you stop it going either way?