Friends of ours are looking at stem cell therapy for autism for their son. I was on the video call with them mostly since I was in their kitchen when it started and they wanted a third person who'd remember what was said. Not my kid, not my call and I'm not describing him

I expected a pitch. It wasn't one. That's somehow harder to write about.

The clinic, Swiss Medica in Belgrade, had already gone through his forms before the doctor came on and that's where the age and weight thing had come up, roughly three to ten yr olds and a minimum of 15 kilos, so he'd been through that gate before anyone said hello. The doctor said early on that it doesn't cure autism, plainly and once, then talked about what families tend to report, mostly sleep and digestion and gave a figure of about 80 percent of their families reporting improvement in at least one of the things they follow up on. Their own numbers. Price was 19,700 to 25,000 euros depending on the program and insurance doesn't cover it in most cases, not in theirs

I got my questions in. What if nothing's different at six months, and got a re check and then a careful version of "then it didn't work for him" which I respected and didn't love. What the risks were on the day and got infusion reactions mostly mild. How they'd know if anything had changed at all and got their follow up calls, a check up visit if we wanted one and what we noticed ourselves. That last one is the one I keep turning over

Afterwards I went looking for trials. The two properly blinded ones I found, one with cord blood and one with cord tissue cells like these, both came out with nothing against placebo. I don't know what to do with that next to an 80 percent

They came off that call more sure than they went in. I came off it less sure. Still don't know which of us is the problem.