Why Use Stem Cells
Stem cells have been a hot topic in the medical industry in recent years, though for some people the question still exists as to why they are such an important issue in the first place. The primary reason for this lies in the base value stem cells have to our bodies as objects that can regenerate tissue and allow our body to repair itself in conditions that it otherwise cannot recover from.
With the multitude of tissues that exist within our bodies that have developed and specialized to one particular purpose many of these have lost the ability to actively repair themselves if damaged in order to return to virtually the same state that they existed in prior to the damage occurring while others have remained proficient at it. Skin cells, for instance, have retained this ability to a high degree and can conduct extensive repair procedures along with bone marrow cells that allow our bones to mend and re-grow. Nerve and cartilage cells, on the other hand, have nearly completely lost this ability due to the fact that they have needed to specialize into highly durable and difficult to alter forms in order to allow our body to function properly.
With the advent of stem cell research scientists have begun to allow two separate benefits to emerge that can benefit our bodies: the supplementing of our body’s natural repair functions in regards to tissue it can normally repair and avoid troublesome scar tissue and avoid cases where trauma may be too severe for our body’s natural regenerative capabilities to be adequate as well as the regeneration of certain cellular structures that otherwise cannot repair themselves due to their high level of differentiation and specialization. This effectively means that severe trauma to areas such as our skin or bones can potentially be reversed and allow the tissue to return to a near perfect pre-trauma state while at the same time allowing things such as nerve damage to no longer be an incurable debilitating issue.
Of course stem cells do come with their own risks associated with them along with many ethical issues, particularly in regards to the highly useful yet ethically questionable fetal stem cells that can be effectively used to repair virtually any system, yet the benefits gained from them are strong enough to make a solid argument in medical communities around the world and as of today they have been successfully used to help thousands of patients avoid otherwise debilitating damage that would have been untreatable just a few short years ago.
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