GO

In May of 2010, Kyoto Bethesda Clinic opened its doors with me as its director. During most of my 35-year-long career as a plastic reconstruction surgeon, the standard practice was to use the patient’s own healthy skin, bones, and muscles to reconstruct parts of their body. Then, one day, a new academic field known as tissue engineering, which focused on building new tissue using cultured cells, was introduced. The field evolved rapidly into what we call regenerative medicine. We are now using stem cells to treat disease and regenerate organs and tissues. It was a massive paradigm shift in modern medical science.

Here at Bethesda Clinic, we use patented adipose-derived stem cell culturing technology to produce hundreds of millions of stem cells from a small amount of the patient’s tissue and intravenously inject these cultured stem cells into the patient to treat autoimmunological diseases such as chronic rheumatism and pachydermatosis; ischemic disorders such as Buerger’s disease and intractable ulcer; and neurological disorders such as cerebral infarction and Parkinson’s disease, which are all considered incurable by conventional means. And the results speak for themselves.

There are those who criticize stem cell treatment as being a dangerous and groundless practice. It is true that we lack empirical evidence to back up our results and claims, but that does not mean the treatment is dangerous of ineffective. After more than 8,000 cases of stem cell treatment, there isn’t a single one in which injection of adipose-derived stem cells has led to an accident or complications. Truth be told, there is no theoretical explanation as to how stem cells home-in on affected areas and differentiate into the types of cells needed for regeneration. However, my opinion on this matter is as follows:

Human beings needed to be healthy in both body and mind, and the soundness of the latter can be described with the concept of autonomy. Autonomy is a state in which the person actively and positively adapts to their environment, automatically achieving and sustaining a state in which the numerous functions of the body are harmoniously integrated. Meanwhile, bodies are known to be maintained by a function known as homeostasis. It is my belief that autonomy plays a greater role in one’s health than homeostasis does and that stem cells facilitate autonomy as to increase the body’s self-healing abilities and immunity and thereby induce the body to restructure its functions and heal itself.

There is no doubt in my mind that our stem cell work will continue to produce irrefutable results and clinical data and one day convince the world of the immense benefits stem cell treatment has to offer.