An Indian doctor claims to be able to beat a variety of incurable or terminal illnesses using embryonic stem cells — and is charging as much as £30,000 for a single course of treatment.

Medical researchers are deeply sceptical of Geeta Shroff’s claims, and brand many rogue stem-cell physicians dangerous quacks offering expensive, unproven and potentially dangerous treatments that are banned in Britain.

Some of her patients, however, insist that they are getting better.

Dr Shroff says she has treated 700 people, including several Britons, since 2002, by injecting them with embryonic stem cells capable of replicating themselves and of giving rise to almost any specialised cell type. She says all the cells she uses are derived from a single unwanted embryo left over from an IVF treatment.

The results, she claims, have been remarkable.

“Almost all of my patients have shown improvement,” she told The Times at her office in Delhi. She claims there have been cases in which paraplegics have regained the use of limbs and of patients with Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis whose physical degeneration has been halted.

A handful of patients have become evangelists. “A positive attitude, prayer, diet, alternative therapies — they never restored function into my legs,” said Amanda Boxtel, an American left unable to walk by a skiing accident in 1992, who took her first steps with callipers after beginning treatment with Dr Shroff in 2007. “I know I haven’t been injected with a placebo or apple juice.”

Dr Shroff half manages to downplay the enthusiasm of her supporters. “It’s not a miracle, it’s science,” she says of her work, before adding: “Theoretically, it can treat all of mankind.”

There is, however, a problem: Dr Shroff has refused to publish her research and to submit it to peer review — a practise regarded widely as a cornerstone of good science. Instead, she has patented her technique, a route more familiar in business than medicine.

Doctors say that without safety trials and randomised clinical studies, her treatments are unverifiable and potentially dangerous.

There has been no research published, for instance, to rule out placebo effects. “If somebody spends thousands of pounds, it’s pretty hard to convince them it’s not money well spent,” said Anthony Mathur, a cardiologist at the London Chest Hospital working on stem-cell research.

“If her claims are true, they will revolutionise medicine,” he said. “I find them hard to believe, but am prepared to keep an open mind. What is harder to explain is why so little important information about them is being shared with the medical community. It’s wrong to give out hope and no facts.”

Others have been more damning in their criticism of rogue stem-cell clinics sprouting up in India, China, Ukraine and elsewhere. “People are allowing themselves to be injected with god-knows-what,” said Stephen Minger, a stem-cell researcher for GE Healthcare. “Patients often have no idea where these cells come from, how they’re stored and if they’re screened for pathogens. These places really do play on people’s desperation.”

Dr Shroff insists that her laboratory follows best practices and says that she will soon publish data on the progress made by 72 of her spinal cord patients.

Case study

Janet Karter, a 56-year-old office worker from Ilford, was given a diagnosis of motor neuron disease in 2006. It is a progressive malfunction of the nervous system that destroys the cells that control muscle activity.

She was given three years to live.

In 2007, with her condition deteriorating rapidly and her British doctors saying that there was little they could do for her, she went to Delhi to see Dr Shroff. “Within 13 days, Janet was responding — she regained the ability to cough, something she’d lost in the previous year,” her husband, Maurice, 61, said. He paid Dr Shroff £57,000 for three treatment courses.

Having since seen his wife regain the ability to walk, he has no doubt of Dr Shroff’s abilities. “If we hadn’t gone to Delhi, she wouldn’t be alive,” he said.