Is Stem Cell Therapy Covered By Insurance?
In America, healthcare is a complicated subject compared to other countries where healthcare is a right and is accessible for the most part of the population. Americans often get the treatments they can get with the help of their insurance, which is not really ideal because sometimes the treatment they need isn't covered by their insurance.
Procedures like chemotherapy end up being somewhat free, but at what cost? Most traditional treatments for autoimmune and degenerative diseases are really aggressive and have severe consequences on the body in their way to stop or slowing down the deterioration of the main disease. Secondary effects can lead to the degeneration of other organs, risking the overall health of the patient.
It’s really common for people to think that some procedures are insured because of their success rate, which is not an accurate assumption. Let’s take chemotherapy again for an example, chemotherapy’s success rate has been controversial for the last few years, some say there’s only a 2% or 3% of the people who undergo chemotherapy that has been cured. This statement can be alarming, but it’s important to know that in any kind of treatment or therapy it’s almost impossible to generalize about the results and to have some kind of complete guarantee. The result of treatments and therapies depend on the condition of the patient, the deterioration, past treatments and their secondary effects, amongst others. So when people ask about the success rate of ANY kind of therapy, the percentage often will depend on the variables of the study such as delimitations, the sample of people that take part in the study, and more. So insurance companies can’t really base solely on success rate to cover a treatment.
Stem Cell Therapy and Insurance
In case of stem cell therapy, it’s a very simple reason why it isn’t covered by insurance yet: Stem cell therapy is not insured because of the lack of awareness there is about it. There are stem cell transplants from blood, bone marrow, umbilical cord, mesenchymal tissue, embryos, amongst others, there are allogeneic and autologous transplants, there are stem cell transplants that are done intrathecally, through IV or local applications. Every one of these types of stem cell transplants has their own process, properties, purpose and can be used for different conditions. Having so many variables and so little awareness about them can create misconceptions about the risks and effectiveness of stem cell therapy if generalized. For example, a common misconception is that stem cell transplants from embryos can create cancer or have harmful side effects and although this is true, it doesn’t mean bone marrow or mesenchymal stem cell transplants have this side effects.
In the US stem cell therapy is limited by the FDA, the procedures cover a very narrow list of autoimmune, degenerative diseases and muscular injuries, and since it’s rigorously limited, there are restrictions that prevent the manipulation of stem cells making it impossible to improve the therapy to achieve better results.
In Mexico, stem cell therapy is approved and providers that are regulated work under high medical standards and although it’s not covered by American insurance, the difference is in the therapy's quality since it’s perfectly legal to manipulate stem cells to attend directly to the patient’s condition.
Here at GIOSTAR, we provide personalized stem cell therapy. This meaning we understand although you may have the same disease as another person, variables such as your health, condition, lifestyle, nutrition, deterioration, side effects of previous treatments are considered when our medical team designs your protocol for therapy. The stem cells go under a specially designed process by Dr. Anand Srivastava the pioneer in the regenerative medicine field and Co-Founder of GIOSTAR, in which they are extracted, selected, cleared, programmed, cultivated, and inserted in the body, ensuring the best results possible. The stem cell therapy you get at GIOSTAR Mexico is backed up by the research protocols developed at University of California San Diego Medical College (UCSD), University of California Irvine Medical College (UCI), Salk Research Institute, San Diego, Burnham Institute For Medical Research, San Diego, University of California Los Angeles Medical College (UCLA).
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