An Aug. 16 WorldNetDaily article by Bob Unruh reads a lot like a press release for a Colorado clinic that was shut down by the Food and Drug Administration:
Obamacare has landed in Denver, where doctors at a pain-management clinic have been told they must stop treating patients with a successful process that extracts their own adult stem cells, cultivates them and then reinjects them to stimulate growth in damaged limbs.
The word of the dispute comes from Dr. Christopher Centeno of the Centeno Schultz clinic, whose Regenexx, or Regenerative Sciences Inc., has been successfully treating patients with the process for several years.
Centeno confirms his work provides a much less costly and significantly more convenient alternative to knee or hip joint replacement surgeries, which sometimes require a year or more of recuperation.
But the Food and Drug Administration, in the wake of the adoption of President Obama’s plan to nationalize health-care decision making, has ordered the company to halt, because the federal agency views the process as making “drugs.”
But Unruh offers no proof, beyond a company representative claiming it, that the shutdown of the clinic has anything whatsoever to do with “Obamacare.” Indeed, Unruh contradicts the claim by noting that the FDA’s action against the clinic began in 2008.
Unruh basically takes Regenerative Services’ side, even repeating anonymous claims supplied by the company praising its treatment. By contrast, he pulls statements from an FDA press release regarding its most recent action, quotes from “a 2008 letter to the company” from the FDA, and a statement that “An FDA spokeswoman provided the announcement to WND but did not elaborate.”
But five days before Unruh’s article was published, the FDA’s Law Blog went into detail about the agency’s action against Regenerative Sciences, which Unruh made no mention of. Thus, Unruh fails to report one key element of the FDA’s action: that “Regenerative manufactures a biological product (stem cells) that is adulterated because it is not manufactured according to current good manufacturing practices (‘cGMP’) while using components that are shipped in interstate commerce.”
Further, while Unruh writes that “Centeno told WND his company will fight,” the blog states that “Regenerative has agreed to discontinue production of the Regenexx Product while this case is pending.”