TVScope/Padraig O'Morain Horizon: The doctor who makes people walk again BBC 2, Thursday, September 29th, 9pmSelling hope to the desperate can be a lucrative business.
It may be unfair to attribute financial greed to Dr Huang Hongyun whose clinic in Beijing attracts people from all over the world, desperate for a treatment for spinal injuries and brain disease.
Nevertheless, the people concerned pay $20,000 each for his treatment and he treats 25 people a month at his clinic.
Dr Huang comes across as a man utterly convinced by his own treatment method. So convinced is he that he sees no need for clinical trials to prove whether his approach works.
He believes he has overcome one of medicine's great problems. This is that the human nervous system is unable to repair itself. This has catastrophic results for people who suffer spinal injuries or who develop neurological disorders such as Motor Neurone Disease.
However, hope has sprung from the discovery that the cells responsible for the sense of smell are very good at renewing themselves.
These cells, injected into the spines of rats, seem to help them to cure damage to the nervous system.
The pioneer in this field, Prof Geoffrey Raisman, will shortly begin clinical trials on human patients in London in the hope of applying this approach successfully to people.
While Prof Raisman, who has devoted 30 years to studying this one cell, is adopting a scientific and clinically ethical approach, Dr Huang has forged ahead regardless.
Dr Huang claims he can restore some or all of the functioning of people with various neurological disorders by injecting them with olfactory cells from aborted foetuses.
These claims have brought the desperate to him from all over the world.
They include Vic Washby and his wife Katrina. Vic was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease in 2002. He loves the outdoors and physical activity but is now confined to a wheelchair and may die within two years.
He has raised the $20,000 needed to pay for treatment in Beijing, and he, his wife and their two children set out followed by the Horizon cameras.
The treatment is done quickly under local anaesthetic and is followed by two weeks of physiotherapy.
Vic and his wife see some improvement at first. He is able to move a finger by a couple of centimetres more than he was able to move it before he came. To the viewer, this is a pitifully poor result.
Vic believes this improvement is significant. His consultant in London has to tell him that it does not represent any change at all.
We leave Vic hoping for continued improvement but with his wife disappointed.
Meanwhile, a visit to the Beijing clinic by Prof Raisman and his team has failed to convince the latter that Dr Huang's claims are true.
Dr Huang showed him patients who, he said, had recovered some or all of their functioning. But he would not give Prof Raisman or his team access to clinical notes or medical records relating to these patients.
Questioned about this for the programme, Dr Huang gleefully points out that he does not need the approval of experts. Doctors in his own country have also questioned his methods, he says, but still the patients come to him for treatment.
The programme devoted relatively little time to the ethical issue surrounding the use of foetuses, aborted at four months, for medical procedures.
Dr Huang dismisses the issue with an airy "use it or throw it away" argument. Prof Raisman will use cells taken from his patients' noses in his clinical trials.
"Somewhere in the future, there is hope," Katrina says at one stage in Beijing.
But there is little here to convince the viewer that spending $20,000 on Dr Huang's treatments is a good idea.
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.