Obamacare has landed in Denver, where doctors at a pain-management clinic have been told they must stop treating patients with a successful process that extracts their own adult stem cells, cultivates them and then reinjects them to stimulate growth in damaged limbs.
The word of the dispute comes from Dr. Christopher Centeno of the Centeno Schultz clinic, whose Regenexx, or Regenerative Sciences Inc., has been successfully treating patients with the process for several years.
Centeno confirms his work provides a much less costly and significantly more convenient alternative to knee or hip joint replacement surgeries, which sometimes require a year or more of recuperation.
But the Food and Drug Administration, in the wake of the adoption of President Obama's plan to nationalize health-care decision making, has ordered the company to halt, because the federal agency views the process as making "drugs."
Just as predicted.