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Stem cell therapy in Thailand: ten years of doing it on myself

I had my first stem cell treatment in Bangkok ten years ago, and I still have them now. This is the long version: why I started, what I actually felt, what I insisted on before anyone put cells into my arm, what the people who message me come in with, and the parts nobody warned me about. Joints, face and hair each have their own page — the links are at the bottom.

 

Why I started

I’d been a heavy smoker all my adult life. I wasn’t sick. No diagnosis, no symptoms. I thought I was a healthy man getting older.

 

Someone who loves me wanted to preserve me, and asked me to do it. I said yes. I just thought I’d try it. I didn’t expect anything, because I thought I was healthy.

 

What happened the first time

I felt it in my lungs almost straight away. I could breathe all the way in.

 

Then my nose. For years it had been blocked, and I hadn’t been smelling much — I’d stopped noticing that too. Afterwards it was clear, and smell felt normal again.

 

I never knew my lungs and nose had gone. It happened slowly, and I adjusted to it. You don’t miss what leaves you slowly. I found out what I’d lost by getting a piece of it back.

 

I quit smoking after that first round.

 

And that’s where my first-time story ends: lungs and nose. The explanation I was given is that the cells go where the body is asking for repair — the word for it is homing — so what one person notices depends on what needed fixing in them. I was fine is not the same sentence as you’ll be fine.

 

What stem cells are — the explanation I was given

I’m not the one to explain biology, so this is the explanation I was given, as close as I can get it.

 

You were born with a repair crew. Cut your finger and nobody has to tell your body what to do. Stem cells nearby and in your bloodstream move to the injury, multiply, and take the skin back through the stages of healing. It goes on all day, quietly: cartilage in a knee after sport, kidney cells damaged by something you ate, lung cells damaged by smoke.

 

The crew gets old with you. A cut on a baby in the womb heals without a scar. A cut on you now may scar, and the older you are, the slower it heals. The explanation I was given is that your own stem cells lose their ability to renew and repair as you age — a 2017 review by Ahmed and colleagues, Effect of aging on stem cells, in the World Journal of Experimental Medicine, covers this. That is why the cells I have come from umbilical cord tissue, from the first day of a life, and not from me.

 

Think of a house. The way it was put to me: your body is a house built of bricks. For the first twenty years a brick falls here and there and you don’t notice. Later more fall, usually in one room first, until that room stops working. Adding a brick when the house is young, you hardly notice the difference. Adding it when one room is failing, you notice that room. Adding one brick when the whole house has come down isn’t enough. That picture explains two things I’ve seen for ten years: healthy people often notice less, and a single round doesn’t rebuild everything.

 

How they’re said to work. Mostly by the signals they send rather than by becoming new tissue. The explanation I was given lists calming inflammation where there’s damage, supporting new blood vessels so tissue gets a blood supply again, releasing antioxidant substances, being able to become bone, cartilage, fat or nerve cells, and in some cases fusing with worn-out cells. Damaged tissue sends out signals, and those signals are what the cells follow.

 

Which cells. There are embryonic stem cells, adult stem cells, and stem cells made in a lab from ordinary cells (iPSCs). Mine are neither embryonic nor lab-made. They’re mesenchymal stem cells from umbilical cord tissue, the jelly inside the cord called Wharton’s jelly. The tumour question comes up a lot and it has its own page: Safety questions I get asked.

 

Yours or a donor’s. Using your own cells is called autologous; using a donor’s is allogeneic. Your own cells are the same age you are. And there’s a difference between cells taken out of your own fat or bone marrow and put straight back the same day, and cells that are grown and expanded in a lab. With lab-grown cells, the number can be counted and the batch can be tested before it goes anywhere near you.

 

Why a donor’s cells aren’t rejected. The explanation I was given is that these cells don’t carry the markers your immune system uses to spot a stranger, so there’s no tissue matching and no anti-rejection drugs.

 

It’s living medicine. It only works while the cells are alive. Which brings me to my rule.

 

What I insisted on

The rule the whole clinic runs on is that we don’t offer anything we haven’t tried on ourselves first. For the cells I went further, and set one rule myself: fresh, never frozen. The cells are grown for each person and given fresh on the day. They haven’t been frozen at any stage.

 

The explanation I was given: frozen cord tissue gives lower cell counts, poorer recovery and slower growth, a share of cells die in freezing and thawing, and frozen cells have been linked with more reactions during transfusion. Put simply — would you rather eat a prime piece of fresh steak, or one that’s been in the freezer?

 

The rest of the list, and why each thing is on it:

  • Umbilical cord tissue. The youngest, most concentrated source of these cells. The cord is normally thrown away after birth, so nothing is taken from mother or baby, and there’s no ethical problem to argue about.

  • Collected at caesarean births. A sterile operating room, so nothing gets in during collection.

  • Donor mothers are chosen carefully. Under thirty, not in their teens. No high-risk pregnancy, including being very over- or underweight or having an underlying condition. No direct family history of metabolic syndrome such as heart disease and diabetes, genetic disease or cancer. Full-term, healthy babies only — no premature or overdue births. Donors stay anonymous; that’s the rule for this kind of work.

  • Xeno-free. Nothing from animals goes into the culture. Think of it as a vegan diet for the cells.

  • No phenol red. People ask me why the bag isn’t pink. Phenol red is a dye most labs add to the culture to show acidity. The explanation I was given is that it can interfere with the lab’s tests and may harm cells with long exposure, so it’s left out. That’s why the solution is clear.

  • Low-oxygen culture. The cells naturally live in low-oxygen spots in the body. Growing them the same way is said to keep them closer to how they are in the body and to help them survive once they’re in.

  • Early passages only. Every time cells are split and grown again is called a passage. Only early passages are used, before the cells start to age or drift.

  • A Lab class 100 laboratory. A clean-room standard used for making purified injectable medicines.

  • Checked before every infusion. A viability test, so the number of living cells is what it’s supposed to be. Screening for bacteria and viruses. Flow cytometry, a test that confirms the cells really are the stem cells they’re meant to be.

  • A certificate of analysis for every case, before the infusion.

 

Ten years on

I still have IV stem cells, in rounds. My face too.

 

Ten years hasn’t been a story of finding out I was wrong. It’s been a story of seeing more, because I’m around people who’ve had stem cells all the time. One person came for their general health and a scar they’d had for years disappeared. They hadn’t asked for that and hadn’t expected it.

 

The other thing I’ve learned: the healthier you are, the less you notice. When the house is in good shape, a new brick doesn’t change much you can feel. The explanation I was given is that it’s still doing something, but I’d rather tell you plainly that some healthy people come out of it feeling not very different. The earlier the better is how the doctors put it.

 

What people come to me with

Most people who message me aren’t ill. They’re where I was: healthy, getting older, curious.

 

Others come with something that has worn them down for years. Back, neck and joint pain. Nerve pain and numbness in the feet. Breathing that never came back after a lung problem. Type 2 diabetes. High blood pressure. Stomach and gut trouble. Skin rashes. The long tail of an infection. A stroke some years ago. Autoimmune conditions — I’m asked about lupus and MS. Some men ask about sexual health, and that’s one I have no personal experience of.

 

A lot of them bring someone: a mother, a father, a sister, a partner. Many have researched for months before they write to me. One man told me the reviews looked too good to be real, and he came anyway to find out.

 

What they tell me about afterwards, most often: pain, energy, sleep, mood and a clearer head, breathing, skin.

 

I can’t tell you what it will do for any of those, and I won’t. Here is what I’ve actually seen. Some people notice a change within a day or two. Many within the first week. Others at a month. One man felt nothing for two weeks, something on day seventeen that disappeared the next day, a dull warm ache into the third month, and then little or no pain. Another wrote back at five weeks with a list: lungs clearer, nerves in his feet maybe a fifth better, hands maybe a tenth, lower back not at all. Someone two years after a stroke told me at one month that nothing much had changed. An elderly mother went through a painful stretch before her hip settled, and her hand still hadn’t changed at two months.

 

The honest reviews are the ones written months later, not days later. What matters most is realistic expectations.

 

What nobody tells you first

There are two clocks. When something is nerve-related, change can come fast, within hours to three days. Structural repair — discs, cartilage, tendons — runs on months, and can still be moving at month three. My back story is on Stem cells for joints.

 

Don’t bring a fresh injury, if you can help it. The explanation I was given is that the cells follow inflammation, so a sprained ankle the week before can pull them away from what you came for. One of the doctors saw it happen the other way round: a patient with an inflamed, red face watched that exact area go redder within fifteen minutes of the drip starting. Usually the cells go somewhere nobody can see; that time it was on the surface.

 

Everyone’s result is different — not as a disclaimer, but because the cells go where each body is asking for repair, and no two bodies ask for the same thing.

 

The day itself

An IV session takes about 45 to 60 minutes and it’s a drip, not surgery. The doctors give everyone the same short list. The week before: no smoking, no alcohol, no hard training, enough sleep, lighter food, no coffee or energy drinks on the day, and tell them if you’re coming down with a cold or you’re on blood thinners. The week after: no fried food for three days, stay away from crowds, eat protein, drink water, and no training for the first week, then ease back in the second — the explanation being that the cells should be repairing what’s there, not chasing a new injury. Some people run a low temperature for a day or feel sleepy afterwards.

 

The full version, hour by hour, is on What to expect on the day.

 

Safety, and who the doctors say no to

I know of someone who had stem cells somewhere else, had a reaction that put them in intensive care, and never walked again. The risk isn’t in the needle or the chair. It’s in everything that comes before them.

 

The doctors turn people away, or ask them to wait, if they have an active infection, if they have active cancer (stem cells are not a cancer treatment; after being declared cancer-free is a different conversation), if they’re pregnant or gave birth less than six months ago, if an autoimmune condition is flaring and not under control — and if what they’re hoping for is something no treatment can give them.

 

More on this, including the cancer question: Safety questions I get asked.

 

Questions people ask me

Will you use my own blood to make my stem cells?
No. The cells come from donated umbilical cord tissue. My own would be as old as I am. And no, they don’t come from sheep — I’ve never understood why anyone would want sheep cells in them.

 

I’m already fairly healthy. Will it fine-tune me?
That’s exactly what I thought ten years ago, and it’s why the lungs surprised me. But healthy people usually notice less, not more. See the house and the bricks above.

 

Other places offer far more cells, with anti-rejection drugs and extra drips thrown in. What’s the difference?
The explanation I was given: much of the research is done on people who are critically ill, who get very high doses because the research needs a clear result, and those doses get copied. When cells have been frozen, a share of them die, and the way to cope with that is to carpet-bomb the body with large numbers — and then the body has to clear out the dead ones. Good cells don’t need huge numbers or anti-rejection drugs. I’d rather go in with a hundred well-trained young soldiers than a thousand starving ones.

 

Is stem cell therapy approved?
It depends on the country. Some uses are approved for specific conditions, and most are still being studied. In the United States it isn’t FDA-approved for most uses.

 

Can it cure a disease?
It isn’t a cure. Some people improve, some improve partly, and some don’t notice much. There’s no cure for ageing either.

 

Does it need surgery?
The IV is a drip. For joints it’s an injection into the joint, done by an orthopaedic surgeon — that’s on the joints page.

 

Are there ethical concerns?
The cords would otherwise be thrown away after birth. Nothing is taken from the mother or the baby that they need.

 

Can I train afterwards?
The doctors’ answer is not in the first week, and ease back in during the second.

 

Where to read next

 

If you want to talk it through, message me. I’ll tell you what I’ve seen — the good parts and the unfinished ones.

 

Message me on WhatsApp →

—

I’m George. Thirty years in business, then ten years trying this whole field on myself before offering it to anyone else.

This is where I write down what I use, what I stopped using, and what I’d never do again. More about me →

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