Regenerative Medicine

Regenerative medicine refers to the repair of, or the replacement of organs, cells and tissues in a human system. This will be done to tissues, cells or organs that have been damaged by disease, trauma or being damaged over extended periods of time. There are several ways to repair the organs, tissues or cells but the most promising way of doing this is with stem cell therapy. Regeneration and therefore revitalisation of these organs, tissues or cells can and should be done as they get worn-out, using stem cell therapy to carry out the restoration. The definition of worn-out is: damaged to the point of no longer being usable. This is important because organs and tissues generally become damaged as a person gets older because people of greater

It could be argued that morally, stem cells should not be used for regenerative medicine because stem cells need to be embryonic stem cells. These stem cells come from embryos from an in vitro fertilisation clinic whereby the fertilised egg was donated for scientific research purposes at the consent of the donor. (NIH Stem Cell Information Home Page, 2016) This can be morally incorrect as these embryos could have developed into foetuses and could have therefore been born and these may have potentially been people that would have been important to society. It can also be argued that the destruction of foetuses is against many religious beliefs and theses stem cells are morally wrong to

This is because upon becoming a physician, the doctor must take the Hippocratic Oath. The Hippocratic Oath states that the physician must do everything in their best judgement to help a patient to the best of their ability and that the physician must do everything they are capable of doing to help the patient. (Miles, 2005) This is relevant to the argument of whether or not regenerative medicine must be used on worn-out body parts because if a doctor needs to do everything possible to treat a patient, then stem cell regeneration needs to be considered. If the problem is worn-out tissues or organs, then stem cells being used to revitalise the organs or tissues should be the first treatment considered by a doctor for a patient. This is because with certain organs and tissues becoming worn-out, there are no treatments to cure the problem (such as heart failure) or there are medications that can be used that will have unwanted side-effects with no significant results. (Mason and Dunnill, 2007) Due to this, a doctor should use regenerative medicine using stem cells because it will significantly help the life of a patient and the doctor will be abiding by the Hippocratic Oath which ultimately states all the reasons and ethics physicians have to have become a doctor