Why Are People Flying Abroad for Stem Cell Treatments That Aren’t Proven to Work?
Stem cell clinics abroad promise cures for everything. Experts say the science only supports one narrow use.
Wellness travel has expanded well beyond spa retreats and cosmetic procedures, and one category sits at the center of the conversation: stem cell treatment sold abroad for conditions that legitimate science has not validated. Thousands of patients are boarding planes each year, paying tens of thousands of dollars per session, in pursuit of cures that experts say do not exist outside of a narrow set of approved uses.
The pull is understandable. The promise is enormous. The evidence, in most cases, is not.
What stem cell treatment actually does
The first stem cell transplant took place more than 60 years ago, and decades of research have established a clear, narrow lane in which the therapy is proven to work. Stem cell transplantation can be a safe and effective treatment for blood cancers — leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma — along with certain non-cancerous blood disorders. Outside of that lane, the picture changes sharply. Bone marrow transplantation remains the only stem cell treatment that is not considered experimental, and cancer is the only disease category with published, scientifically valid evidence that the therapy may help.
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“A stem cell transplant – sometimes called hematopoietic stem cell transplantation – is a complex medical procedure that can be used to treat blood cancers,” per City of Hope.
The mechanism is specific. Patients with blood cancers receive chemotherapy, sometimes combined with radiation, to kill cancer cells. A stem cell transplant then replaces the destroyed cells with new, healthy ones.
Why stem cell treatment tourism is booming
A growing number of clinics worldwide are advertising stem cell transplants as a way to treat — or even cure — a wide range of health conditions, without any science to back up those claims. The wave of patients traveling to receive these unregulated procedures is what researchers call stem cell tourism, and it has scaled into a global industry. Hundreds, if not thousands, of clinics now market unproven stem cell treatments for everything from common sports injuries to neurological diseases, charging tens of thousands of dollars per session.
In December 2025, the FDA approved a gene-based stem cell therapy for Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome, a rare and life-threatening genetic disease. That approval, based on data from two clinical studies showing clinical benefit, is the exception rather than the rule.
The trend was the subject of a panel discussion hosted by the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. Timothy A. Caulfield, Canada Research chair in health, law and policy at the University of Alberta, said the phenomenon “hurts the legitimacy of the entire field” of stem cell science and medicine.
What the science actually says about stem cell treatment
The gap between what clinics advertise and what peer-reviewed research supports is not subtle. Patients are not being offered seats in clinical trials. They are being sold what providers describe as established treatments with proven results — language that the scientific literature does not back up. Caulfield’s research found that treatments are offered as safe, routine and effective, but “none of what is being offered matched what the scientific literature said.” He accused the clinics of “financial exploitation” of desperate people.
George Daley, MD, PhD, a member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute’s executive committee and past president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, said: “We are seeing a growing number [of legitimate clinical trials] but all such uses are experimental … and there is great skepticism as to whether we have” the scientific knowledge and basis even to “predict that these will be effective.”
“It may,” he said, “take decades before there is certainty.”
“The only stem cell therapies that have been proven safe and effective,” he said, “are those constituting what is known as bone marrow transplantation for treatment of some cancers.”
Health risks of unproven stem cell treatment
The dangers of pursuing unproven stem cell treatment are not theoretical. Studies have reported patients suffering both short- and long-term side effects, including heart problems, neurological changes, accidental infection with hepatitis and urinary incontinence. Some patients have died as a result of organ failure caused by unlicensed stem cell transplantation. The cost — financial, physical and emotional — can be devastating, and the travel itself adds another layer of risk for already vulnerable patients.
Stephen J. Forman, M.D., a blood cancers expert and director of the Hematologic Malignancies Research Institute at City of Hope Cancer Center, told City of Hope: “I have seen patients over the years who had terrible diseases, like ALS, traveling to people who called themselves doctors and who were offering ‘stem cell therapies’ in unusual locations.” He noted that the risks associated with travel and the financial burden can also be significant.
Where stem cell treatment regulation stands
The FDA filed two lawsuits in 2018 against clinics promoting unapproved stem cell therapies. After years of court filings and appeals, the agency won an important case in late 2024 that confirmed its authority to regulate unproven stem cell treatments. In October 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to reconsider the decision, leaving the FDA’s regulatory authority intact after a seven-year legal battle.
Whether that authority gets used aggressively going forward remains an open question, and patient advocates are watching closely. For now, the legal framework supports evidence-based medicine — but enforcement at the clinic level is still uneven, and many of the operations marketing unproven treatments operate outside U.S. borders entirely.
The human side of stem cell treatment decisions
Behind the legal filings and the clinical literature are real patients making impossible decisions. Jill Lepore, PhD, chair of Harvard’s History and Literature Program, framed the cultural pull plainly: there is a kind of “faith in science that draws” some people to any promise of a cure, no matter how specious. What fuels false hope, she said, is “one of the most dangerous elements of our culture: that we have forgotten how to die.”
I. Glenn Cohen, JD, professor at Harvard Law School and co-director of the Petrie-Flom Center, has suggested that one way to slow stem cell tourism when minors are involved could be prosecution under existing child abuse and neglect statutes — though he noted sympathy for parents seeking help for seriously ill children.
For physicians on the receiving end of patients considering unproven treatments, the approach is more about preserving the relationship than winning an argument. Forman’s strategy, per City of Hope: “My goal in that situation is to retain my patients’ trust and maintain their continuing care with us. I don’t want to close the door in case they do leave, since I know that they’re likely going to need to come back.”
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