Promising developments

Dave Carrigan, who has lived with a profound hearing loss for 15 years, is turning out to be quite a font of information for me. He's the poster who accidentally-anonymously recommended an FM wireless system for me. He also passed along this extremely intriguing piece of information:

Re: getting a second implant. If I was in your position, I would not. There has been some new research with stem cells, and they have actually been able to regenerate the cochlear hair cells in guinea pigs after destroying them with ototoxic drugs. It's still years away from a human treatment, but I'm very optimistic that in 10 years, there will be a genuine cure for your (and my!) hearing loss. However, an implant would probably interfere with or even prevent this kind of treatment.

I knew that stem-cell research was turning up a dizzying array of possibilities for medical breakthroughs, but I hadn't heard about this research. This is genuinely exciting to me. I will be doing a lot more reading on this in coming days.

This is a good place for a layman to start, it looks like...

I just hope they're allowed to continue the research, is all. Even though some of the research, at least, has been done using stem cells from adult patients' own bone marrow, just the phrase "stem cells" seems to make governments and funding agencies itchy...

ronnie