Stemcell therapy

I don’t want to be a wet blanket, or throw a monkey wrench into anyone’s hopes, but we need to be realistic about the potential benefit of stem cell research and post-polio.

Polio is primarily a nerve disease, not a muscle disease. The muscles don’t work because of damage to motor nerves (anterior horn cells).

Let us speculate about a medical breakthrough that will allow stem cells to target anterior horn cells. Anterior horn cells are the primary target of the polio virus. The damage to these areas of the nerve pathway is what causes paralysis in polio.

In our speculation, we can hope for a complete reversal of the anterior horn cell damage that occurred during our polio onset. Now the nerve pathway is complete – your brain sends a signal to your quadriceps muscle, “Straighten my leg!”

But, unfortunately, that poor old quadriceps muscle has atrophied from thirty or forty years of little or no usefulness. No matter how much nerve impulse it receives, it just cannot respond. It is as if the brain has been calling the quadriceps all of these years, but the telephone line was down. Now, through stem cell therapy, the telephone line is back up. But the quadriceps hasn’t heard from the brain for so long that it died from a broken heart. We still can’t bring back the dead.

This answer is too simplistic, and there might be benefits to stem cell therapy at some point in the future. I haven't read any credible articles about successful therapy in post-polio. It is only an educated guess but, if science could target anterior horn cells with stem cell therapy, this would be a possible treatment for patients with recent polio. And any research is beneficial. Often the desired outcome will result in benefit to others, even if the research was not initially in that direction. Does this make sense?

If I wanted to try this, is it available in the US? If not, is Mexico a safe possibility? Any other place?