Renewable resources
A few weeks ago, my husband and I were enjoying our weekly Sunday ritual: drinking our morning coffee while perusing the newspaper and watching CBS Sunday Morning. Sandwiched in between the typical op-ed and biography portions of the show was a short piece titled "Medicine's Cutting Edge." Obviously, my interest was piqued. The story looked at researchers using healthy cells from both pigs and humans to regenerate damaged tissue and organs inside the body -- and even to re-grow severed limbs on the outside. The results left both my husband and me amazed. But the more I thought about it that day, the more familiar the story sounded to me. So I went back through the Nutrition & Healing archives, and, sure enough, I found that Dr. Wright had written about a very similar subject several years ago, in the March 2005 issue. In that article, Dr. Wright talked about embryonic stem cell research and how, despite the controversy surrounding it, use of stem cells could someday make possible exactly what the researchers in the CBS Sunday Morning piece are doing today: re- growing and re-generating damaged organs, tissues, and limbs. In his article, Dr. Wright also acknowledged something that CBS didn't dwell on: that these sorts of advancements are still likely to be out of reach for most people for a very long time -- if not technologically speaking, then certainly financially so. But that doesn't mean the healing potential of cells is off-limits. In his 2005 Nutrition & Healing article, Dr. Wright discussed the use of a line of treatment referred to as "cell therapy." Like some of the research being done today, cell therapy uses specific cells from pigs to help heal and regenerate human systems that aren't operating up to par. The therapy has been used successfully to treat a vast array of conditions, from arthritis to depression to hypertension. And the overall anti-aging effects are almost as amazing as the things featured in the CBS Sunday Morning piece. Unlike those technological advances, though, this sort of cell therapy IS available today - - to anyone willing to invest some time tracking it down. While there are clinics in the U.S. that offer it (including the Tahoma Clinic), the therapy isn't typically one that's widely advertised, so you may need to do some research before you find a source. In the meantime, you can read more about the benefits of cell therapy from the March 2005 Nutrition & Healing issue by visiting www.wrightnewsletter.com and logging on to the Archives with the username and password listed on page 8 of your most recent newsletter. Source: "Medicine's cutting edge," CBS Sunday Morning (transcript available from www.cbsnews.com), 3/23/08 | 
