SuperDoctors - Miracle Cures

In the second of this three-part series examining new medical frontiers, Professor Robert Winston looks at the challenge to harness the body's own repair system. What if we could grow and regenerate parts of our own body? It sounds like science fiction, but scientists and doctors believe they have already found the answer - stem cells. Amazing claims have been made about stem cells, and they have been the subject of Professor Winston's own research for years. Miracle cures for every possible disease are promised on the internet, most of them from countries such as Argentina and Siberia where regulations are less strict. The reason is that miracle cures are, as yet, completely without medical evidence. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence, but real medical trials are only just beginning. We pick up on the first British trial for stem cells as a treatement for heart attacks and heart disease and follow a patient offering himself as a guinea pig in a double trial - so he's unsure whether he is getting the real or dummy treatement. But it is the only way science will know if stem cells work. We also see a family who sought treatment for their brain damaged son, and lost everything, 180,000 pounds and their son's life, in a desperate bid to obtain stem cell treatments in unregulated clinics across the world. And we look at the plight of desperate patients, willing to try anything to save the lives of loved ones, and question how medicine can best use such patients to advance medicine and cross new frontiers, rather than letting them suffer or die in vain.