Thursday, February 25, 2010

RJA #6c Field Research Options

Interviews

For my primary research in stem cell therapy, I think interviewing will be my main focus. I plan to interview Dr. Stephen Grover, head of the OBGYN Center at Sky Ridge Medical Center. He is an expert in cord blood stem cell storage and cord blood replacement therapy. I also plan to interview a potential recipient of stem cell therapy, Drew Covington, who is 10, and suffers from Cerebral Palsy. Drew is under going tests for stem cell therapy procedure that will be done in Germany. His tests are being done at Children’s Hospital here in Denver. I would also like to interview his doctor at Children’s, if possible, to get his imput on this procedure.


Forum Discussions

There are several good forum discussions that I have found on TEDMED I would like to become more acquainted with concerning the study of stem cell therapy. These discussions can be found at the following link:

http://www.ted.com/search?q=stem+cell+research&x=0&y=0.

There are also other forum discussions that are listed on the Geron site, these forums are dealing specifically with spinal cord injury and stem cell replacement therapy. There are two that I am most interested in, they are CareCure Community at http://sci.rutgers.edu/ and National Spinal Cord Injury Association at http://www.spinalcord.org/.


Observations

As much as I would love to be an observer at any stem cell therapy clinic and or hospital, I don’t think that would be possible at this time. One thing I would like to check up on is perhaps a clinic doing physical therapy on stem cell patients. That type of observation may be available in Denver and if so would be very interesting to me.