During a recent appearance on the Goop podcast hosted by Gwyneth Paltrow, neuroscientist and Stanford professor Dr. Andrew Huberman opened up about a frightening medical incident involving a well-known physician who was left paralyzed after receiving a stem cell injection into his spine at a clinic.
Huberman shared the story while discussing his close friend Eddie, whom he described as the chair of neurosurgery and, without hesitation, “the best neurosurgeon on the planet.”
He credited Eddie with performing groundbreaking procedures that other surgeons refuse to take on, including work that has helped patients with locked-in syndrome communicate again. He described his friend as someone doing work “10 times cooler” than anything currently happening at major neurotechnology companies.
It was in that context that Huberman revealed the stem cell case. “There’s a very public facing physician who paralyzed himself with a stem cell injection into his spine recently,” he told Paltrow, declining to name the individual.
He explained that the injection was administered at a clinic and went wrong, leaving the man unable to walk. The situation was so severe that doctors were considering severing his spinal cord entirely.
Huberman was direct about what he had been told regarding the procedure itself. “Don’t get stem cells injected into the discs, I was told, because the discs can’t receive stem cells,” he said, emphasizing the biological limitation of that part of the spine.
The implication, he suggested, was that the treatment had been performed without a proper understanding of spinal anatomy and how that tissue responds, or rather does not respond, to stem cell therapy.
Eddie and his surgical team stepped in to take on the case after no one else would. “His team did the surgery, I should say, that no one else would do,” Huberman said. “This gentleman is now walking again. They were going to sever his spinal cord. “
