A Major Chiro Stem Cell Scammer Bites the Dust

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Yesterday, the Attorney General of the state of Georgia and the FTC charged numerous companies linked to Stem Cell Institute of America (SCIA) with violations of the Georgia and FTC act. This was great to see as I have been tracking SCIA’s shenanigans for many years. Let’s dig in.

Who Is Stem Cell Institute of America?

SCIA was a company founded by the leaders of another company, Physicians Business Solutions (PBS). The original company was one of many that would teach chiropractors how to maximize their practice revenue. One of the leaders of PBS, Brent Detelitch was a former ex-con who had been convicted of health care billing fraud. That wasn’t the honest mistake type where the doctor didn’t get the memo about changes in billing codes, instead, this was billing for chiropractic visits that never happened. 

PBS and SCIA led to the pair creating other businesses including Superior Healthcare, LLC and Regenerative Medicine Institute of America. These companies would purchase regenerative medicine products like amniotic tissue, umbilical cord tissue, and ‘exosomes” and then sell that to chiropractic offices while teaching them how to claim that these were stem cell products and how to sell these to the elderly as miracle cures for various diseases including aging, arthritis, strokes, ALS, etc… They would charge between 5K-20K a piece for these treatments, despite the fact that no clinical research had ever been conducted that these products had stem cells or that they could do what they were claiming.

If you haven’t yet seen it, film-maker Doug Orchard did a deep dive into SCIA and Detelich and his accomplices in the Movie, “From Jail Cell to Stem Cell” now on Amazon:

What does stem cell fraud look like? For example, this is a flyer I just pulled off of the Regenerative Medicine Institute of America Facebook page:

Notice that it even includes the faked before and after knee x-rays purporting to show knee joint regeneration!

If you want to learn more on faked knee x-rays, see my video:

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What Just Happened?

The state of Georgia and the FTC charged the PBS founders (Steven Peyroux, and Brent Detelich) with violating the Georgia Fair Business Practices Act (FBPA) and the FTC Act by making false and misleading claims about the regenerative medicine products they offered to consumers in Georgia. The charges are based on the fact that the pair aggressively marketed various regenerative medicine products to the elderly and there was no credible scientific evidence that what they were selling could help these patients in the way they claimed.

What’s the Significance of this Move?

Detelich, Peyroux and PBS are just one of a large number of chiropractic practice management consultants who have added “Stem Cells”, “Exosomes”, and “Regenerative Medicine” to their offerings. Basically, they all work very similarly to PBS. They advertise to chiros that they can have a 7 figure earning practice by adding a nurse practitioner to inject this stuff and by giving seminars to the elderly. So if I was one of these chiro practice consultants, I would be reading these court documents VERY carefully.

What Will This Cost Detelich and Peyroux?

This is what the press release says:

“The Georgia Attorney General’s Office is seeking injunctive relief, consumer restitution, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, and civil penalties of up to $5,000 per violation of the FBPA and up to $10,000 per FBPA violation committed against elderly and/or disabled consumers.”

So let’s do some quick math. Between 2017-2019, Superior Healthcare sold 444 treatments to consumers, with 70% of those being elderly. Based on what I know about the bills from these programs, the average bill is about 10K (some had a single joint or area treated for 5K, but some also had 3-4 treated at upwards of 15-20K). Hence restitution for those consumers is already at approximately 4.4M USD. Then there are civil penalties of 5K per violation of the FBPA and 10K for each elderly person:

  • $5K x (0.3 x 444)=$665K
  • 10K x (0.7 x 444)=$3.11M

Hence, $4.4M for restitution plus $3.8M in fines is $8.2 million. Add in half a million for legal defense and you have upwards of a 9 million dollar cost!

Is This a New Trend?

One of the problems that the FDA has in going after the stem cell wild west is that while it can easily target 361 registered birth tissue companies and because of the case law, physician practices that cross the line, going after companies like PBS and sales reps has less precedent. However, the FTC may be the better agency to go after these aggressive marketers. Hence, is this a new trend? Will the FDA handle the manufacturers and the clinics while the FTC takes on the middlemen?

The upshot? We applaud the FTC and the state of Georgia for going after the chiropractic practice consultants who have been violating the law. This is a major blow to that industry as with one fell swoop, they can take out a company that was allowing hundreds of US chiropractors to violate the law. Now if the FTC can keep the momentum going, there are 3-4 more chiro practice consultant kingpins playing this same exact game who still need a takedown.

Chris Centeno, MD is a specialist in regenerative medicine and the new field of Interventional Orthopedics. Centeno pioneered orthopedic stem cell procedures in 2005 and is responsible for a large amount of the published research on stem cell use for orthopedic applications. View Profile

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NOTE: This blog post provides general information to help the reader better understand regenerative medicine, musculoskeletal health, and related subjects. All content provided in this blog, website, or any linked materials, including text, graphics, images, patient profiles, outcomes, and information, are not intended and should not be considered or used as a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please always consult with a professional and certified healthcare provider to discuss if a treatment is right for you.

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