Home › Blog › TMB Cracks Down on Faux Chiro “Stem Cell” Clinic Medical Director

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One of the crazier and frankly more insulting components of the Stem Cell Wild West are “faux medical directors”. As you’ll see this scam is often run by chiropractic clinics offering fake birth tissue “stem cell” treatments. Let’s dig into what the Texas Medical Board just did to one of these medical directors and why it’s significant.

Injections and Chiro Clinics

As I have written for years now, chiropractic clinics have been adding medical services at an alarming rate. Initially, these were simple low-risk services like medically supervised weight loss or bioidentical hormone replacement. However, these past few years, chiropractic consultants like David Singer and others have encouraged these alternative medicine clinics to add “stem cell” injection procedures. Regrettably, this has led to a big jump in risk which requires very close supervision by a medical doctor. However, as you’ll see below, oftentimes that supervision is sorely lacking.

The “Faux” Medical Director

Some of these chiro clinics offering “stem cells” hire medical directors. From my investigations, I’ve learned that these medical directors are mostly for show. Most rarely step foot in the clinic and many permit the chiropractors to be the ones who run the operation. Are chiropractors qualified to determine who needs care like this and who should avoid it? Nope. However, the idea is that paying the medical director for his license will confer protection for the chiropractor. We even have some clinics where these largely absent medical directors are used by chiros to justify injecting patients without a medical license.

The TMB Case

A Texas physician, Dr. George Givens Miller, was just reprimanded by the Texas Medical Board, and here are the details:

Basically, this was a faux medical director scenario where a fake stem cell injection scam was also going on. Note that the chiropractor was running things and the medical director was just along for the ride. Meaning the chiro was the one performing exams, determining who needed what, and the medical doctor just showed up and did what he was told, all without adequate informed consent per Texas law. Obviously, the medical doctor should be the one driving the bus here, which is why this physician was reprimanded by the board.

Dr. George Givens Miller is a cardiologist. What was a cardiologist without any musculoskeletal training doing injecting joints with fake stem cells? That in and of itself is a great question, as in this clinical scenario he was out of his depth and field.

Looping in the Fraud Angle

I have been and am currently a medical expert in many legal cases against chiropractors, nurse practitioners, and physicians being sued for medical malpractice after using amniotic and umbilical cord “stem cells” to treat orthopedic conditions. One of the more recent trends I’m seeing in these cases and in this TMB case is that the fraud aspect is now being added. Meaning amniotic and umbilical cord products contain no living and functional mesenchymal stem cells, but the chiros in these clinics usually sell this treatment as containing millions of healthy, live, and vital stem cells. Meaning that this is consumer fraud.

Where Should This Head?

We need more medical boards to step up to the plate and begin prosecuting more faux medical directors who are hired by chiro clinics. The charade that these physicians are actually supervising the medical care being delivered, IMHO is total fiction. From what I have seen, they are collecting checks for the use of their medical licenses and often allowing the illegal practice of medicine by chiropractors.

The upshot? I hope more medical boards get this one right. I’ve found countless scenarios just like this one, where a physician enables a chiro clinic to scam patients.

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