THE HOPE MERCHANTS
THE HOPE MERCHANTS Inside the booming stem-cell “miracle” industry — and the patients left paying the price It always starts the same way. A bad knee that never heals. A parent frightened for their child. A tremor that could become something worse. A diagnosis that steals your future one appointment at a time. Somewhere between fear and fatigue, a new promise appears: regenerative medicine . Stem cells . Exosomes . Secretomes . Words that sound like the frontier of science — and are often used like a sales script. In the legitimate world, cell therapies take years of trials, mountains of data, and strict regulatory approvals. In the shadow industry, hope is packaged like a luxury product: a consultation that feels like certainty, a checkout that feels like salvation. And the bill can land anywhere between “a few grand” and the kind of money that changes a life. This industry has become a global marketplace of aspiration — and, regulators warn, it has ...