In this MedPage Today interview, Leigh Turner, PhD, a professor of health policy and bioethics at the University of California Irvine, unpacks the growing influence of stem cell clinics and the blurred line between medicine and marketing. He explains how athletes like NFL quarterback Kirk Cousins and the nation's top health official, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are promoting unproven interventions .
Following is a transcript of the video:
Kirk Cousins: Most people just go to the Caribbean for a vacation, but we were there for a completely different reason.
Newscaster 1: Netflix has dropped its latest version of "Quarterback," and Kirk Cousins is ...
Newscaster 2: ... Kirk Cousins flew to Antigua to get a stem cell treatment on his Achilles ...
Newscaster 3: ... as there are some hurdles getting this type of treatment here in the U.S.
Cousins: Stem cells, you're allowed to harvest in the United States, but you're not allowed to then put them into someone in the United States.
Turner: There's certainly some truth to what he says, in terms of the way things work here in the United States. Most stem cell products have to go through FDA review, oversight, and approval. And so there is not any kind of stem cell product that's FDA approved for treating Achilles tendon tears. There are potentially clinical trials where someone could gain access, but he basically goes to what is sometimes described as an offshore clinic, an international clinic, goes to Antigua.
Part of it seems to be to move to an environment that's not subject to FDA regulatory oversight. There are FDA approved stem cell products, cell and gene therapies. It's not a long list, but you can go on to the FDA website and see that there have been some cell and gene therapy products that have been approved by the FDA. There are other stem cell interventions that are not necessarily FDA approved, but have really, not just years, but decades of robust, credible evidence, scientific evidence behind them in terms of both safety and efficacy.
But when you go beyond that area of really robust, reliable, credible, legitimate scientific evidence, we then enter a different world where there's kind of an effort on the part of businesses and clinics to really take advantage of stem cell hyperbole, all the clinical research that's going on, the legitimate studies that are taking place. And then go beyond that evidence and start making much more grandiose, much more strong form kinds of marketing claims in terms of being able, so businesses that claim to be able to treat in many instances, dozens of diseases and injuries.
And so they may say, we'll take fat from you and we'll process it and we'll put it back in, and we will use that to treat three dozen different diseases and injuries. Anything from ALS to MS, Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injuries, erectile dysfunction, hair loss. I mean, it's really quite astonishing when you go on the websites of these businesses and see the breadth of marketing claims that they make.
George Kittle promotional video: Hi, I'm George Kittle here at the Stem Cell Institute in Panama. Join me for my treatment. We're going to have a good time.
Turner: Plenty of other athletes, both professional and amateur who have gone to clinics and they end up sometimes perhaps inadvertently becoming part of the marketing machine. And that can happen -- they may be given free interventions, they may not be charged for it -- but they end up becoming an important promotional figure for different kinds of businesses.
They also, I think, just help to normalize and routinize a marketplace like this in terms of, here are these clinics you can go to. It's all framed as stem cell treatment. It's all framed as stem cell therapy when, in fact, often there's very little evidence supporting those kinds of claims.
And so I see Kirk Cousins as one among many individuals, many athletes, NFL and otherwise, who will go to these businesses and then talk about having received a stem cell treatment. And they may not really have a good sense of whether it's helped them or not.
There's something really fascinating here that Kirk Cousins goes to this clinic, and in some respects it seems like a somewhat obscure destination, a somewhat obscure business. But here we are in 2025 and the very clinic that he went to is staffed by a clinician, someone who Secretary Kennedy invited to a roundtable to have a conversation about stem cell treatments and accelerating access to stem cell interventions. And then it turns out that Secretary Kennedy has also gone to this very same clinic, met the doctor who was at the roundtable, and that doctor performed the procedure on Secretary Kennedy.
So all of a sudden we have this, in many respects, rather obscure clinic. Suddenly it's starting getting closer to the kind of cultural mainstream. And Secretary Kennedy has a very interesting attitude towards stem cell interventions. He has gone on a podcast, for example, and said that the FDA has been engaged in a "war on stem cells," suggesting that it sort of has suppressed access to stem cell treatments that are ready for prime time. He wants to play a role in facilitating access to stem cell interventions, to reducing regulatory barriers.
The rhetoric is really shifting right now. And then the rhetoric now is moving into we need to lower regulatory standards. We need to deregulate. And I think the question right now is, what is this actually going to look like in practice? Are we going to go from having a very large scale direct-to-consumer marketplace in the United States and on the international scene? Is this going to get substantially larger in the United States? Because that's very much a direction away from what the FDA has been trying to do in previous years.
Both in the Netflix episode and elsewhere, where he's commented on this procedure and there's sort of video of his time there, he refers to himself receiving a stem cell treatment and describing it as stem cell treatment, stem cell therapy.
Was he actually enrolled in a clinical study? That certainly doesn't come out in the Netflix episode. Did he sign an informed consent form that he was enrolled in a clinical trial? Or is this one of many businesses where you can go in one door and get what's framed as a stem cell treatment, but you can also pay to participate in a so-called study?
So this is the kind of conversations that athletes need to have with clinicians who will try and help them think through these sorts of issues. What's being framed, what's really going on? Is it investigational? Is it evidence-based? Is it really kind of beyond the world of meaningful evidence and so forth?