“Unnecessary risks are being taken by patients seeking the liberation treatment.” says Dr. Avneesh Gupte of the CCSVI Clinic. “It has been our contention since we started doing minimally invasive venous angioplasties nearly 6 years ago that discharging patients who have had neck vein surgery on an outpatient basis is contra-indicated. We have been keeping patients hospitalized for a week to 10 days as a matter of safety and monitoring them for symptoms. Nobody who has the liberation therapy gets discharged earlier than that. During that time we do daily Doppler Ultrasounds, blood work and blood pressure monitoring among other testing. This has been the safe practice standard that we have adopted and this post-procedure monitoring over 10 days is the subject of our recent study as it relates to CCSVI for MS patients.”

Although the venous angioplasty therapy on neck veins has been done for MS patients at CCSVI Clinic only for the last 18 months it has been performed on narrow or occluded neck veins for other reasons for many years. “Where we encounter blocked neck veins resulting in a reflux of blood to the brain, we treat it as a disease,” says Gupte. “It’s not normal pathology and we have seen improved health outcomes for patients where we have relieved the condition with minimal occurrences of re-stenosis long-term. We believe that our record of safety and success is due to our post-procedure protocol because we have had to take patients back to the OR to re-treat them in that 10-day period. Otherwise some people could have run into trouble, no question.”

Stem cells are "non-specialized" cells that have the potential to form into other types of specific cells, such as blood, muscles or nerves. They are unlike "differentiated" cells which have already become whatever organ or structure they are in the body. Stem cells are present throughout our body, but more abundant in a fetus.
Medical researchers and scientists believe that stem cell therapy will, in the near future, advance medicine dramatically and change the course of disease treatment. This is because stem cells have the ability to grow into any kind of cell and, if transplanted into the body, will relocate to the damaged tissue, replacing it. For example, neural cells in the spinal cord, brain, optic nerves, or other parts of the central nervous system that have been injured can be replaced by injected stem cells. Various stem cell therapies are already practiced, a popular one being bone marrow transplants that are used to treat leukemia. In theory and in fact, lifeless cells anywhere in the body, no matter what the cause of the disease or injury, can be replaced with vigorous new cells because of the remarkable plasticity of stem cells. Biomed companies predict that with all of the research activity in stem cell therapy currently being directed toward the technology, a wider range of disease types including cancer, diabetes, spinal cord injury, and even multiple sclerosis will be effectively treated in the future. Recently announced trials are now underway to study both safety and efficacy of autologous stem cell transplantation in MS patients because of promising early results from previous trials.

The discovery of a cure for MS will not be attributable to a single medical breakthrough but a series of medical discoveries and innovations leading to the cure. This process will involve biochemists and vascular researchers; physicists and radiologists; engineers and neurosurgeons, immunologists and geneticists among many other scientific disciplines. This is not to discard the new theory of a vascular disease connection. But that is only the snowball that got the avalanche moving down the slope. The theory that a simple dilation of the jugular veins can achieve a cure for MS oversimplifies the explanation of the disease pathways and ultimately obscures therapeutic objectives. Since it was proposed three years ago, it has also politicized a specific disease like never before.
Anyone looking at the empirical evidence demonstrated by the growing number of MS patients who are commonly affected once the retrograde blood flow pressure on the brain is relieved by expanding the occluded jugular veins will quickly agree that Zamboni’s hypothesis is more or less correct; that an equalization of the outflow of blood from the CNS to the heart muscle is essential to reducing the presenting symptoms of MS. But the surgical act of neck vein dilation by itself will not come close to providing the cure. Once the vascular pressures are balanced, only a correlation between a vascular event and the disease itself has been demonstrated. The occluded neck veins do not explain the autoimmune trigger that causes the disease.