Injections of Hope

Another mother whose developmentally disabled child received Rader's injections, Dianne Caprio of Monterey, Calif., said: "There was no follow-up at all. He never called us. He did nothing but collect money." Caprio said her daughter Courtney received two rounds of injections, one in the Bahamas and one at Rader's clinic in the Dominican Republic. "Initially we thought we saw some improvements, but nothing really substantial," Caprio said. "Looking back, it might have been wishful thinking. I think he's just preying on desperate people." Rader provided notes that show the Caprio family originally thought they saw some initial improvement in Courtney. The notes detail several phone calls from Rader's office to the family to arrange more cell injections.

The government of the Bahamas closed Rader's clinic in 2000 after a critical television report. He moved to the Dominican Republic, where he meets and injects patients on weekends. In a phone interview, Rader said he gets his product from a lab in the republic of Georgia, where technicians extract stem cells from the brains and livers of aborted fetuses. Rader claimed in an interview to have injected more than 1,000 people with such cells since 1997.

Rader recruits patients from his Malibu office and via the Web site of his company, Medra Inc. Earlier in his career, he operated eating disorder clinics and reported medical news for a television station in Los Angeles.

During four hours of phone interviews, Rader described himself as a misunderstood pioneer. He said that he has tried to educate several physicians about the benefits of stem cell injections but that they refuse to accept that he has helped patients. Rader said his treatments have reversed Down syndrome, stopped intractable seizures in children, cured AIDS in at least two patients and boosted the immune systems of cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. "If I'm telling the truth, it will change the face of medicine," he said.

Rader is not interested in talking to the FDA about conducting fully documented clinical studies. He said that if he opens his work to scrutiny, the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry will squelch him. "I trust no one," he said.

Short on Science?

Quackwatch, a Web site devoted to outing doctors practicing unsafe and unproven medicine, highlighted Rader and other overseas stem cell providers in 2006. "Their theories and methods are simplistic; their treatments may have adverse effects; they offer no credible outcome data; and their promises go far beyond what is now possible," wrote the site's founder, Stephen Barrett.

Rader dismissed the criticism, questioning Barrett's credibility. He and other stem cell providers point to testimonials, posting videos and blogs from patients who say they've improved. Research from Harvard University and elsewhere on patient decision making shows this to be smart marketing: Patients pay far more attention to stories than to statistics.

But when determining whether a medical intervention really works, "testimonials mean absolutely nothing," said Snyder, the Burnham Institute researcher. "They're worthless."

One reason: They don't allow for the possibility of spontaneous recovery. A 2007 study in the journal Spinal Cord found that "almost all" spinal cord injury patients spontaneously regain some feeling and movement.

And then there's the placebo effect: If the brain thinks it's getting a treatment, the body often feels better. Medical journals are littered with descriptions of drugs and other interventions that displayed initial promise only to wilt under the rigors of placebo-controlled studies, where some patients get the intervention and some get a sugar pill or other non-treatment.

Clinical trials in Parkinson's disease offer perhaps the most stunning demonstration of the placebo effect. In the trials, doctors transplanted fetal cells into the brains of some Parkinson's patients, hoping the cells would make the brain messenger dopamine, which diminishes with the disease. Other patients got holes drilled in their heads but no cells. Over a year, both groups showed some improvements, according to a 2004 report in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Further, of the patients who did not receive the cells, those who thought they had fared better than those who thought they had not.

In other words, believing makes the "medicine" work.