Joy Kong, MDRegenerative Medicine Physician, Educator, and Entrepreneur

I Was a Psychiatrist. I Couldn't Help These Kids

8 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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In this personal narrative, Dr. Joy Kong, MD, a former psychiatrist, discusses the dramatic rise in autism diagnoses in the United States over the past two decades, noting the increase from 1 in 100 to 1 in 36 children. She critiques the conventional psychiatric pharmacological approach—primarily sedatives, stimulants, antidepressants, and anxiolytics—which she argues does not address the underlying cause of autism. Dr. Kong recounts meeting a physician who administers umbilical cord blood stem cell therapy and presents a compelling case study: a child whose teacher documented roughly 40 improvements in social interaction, eye contact, and verbalization after receiving the treatment. This anecdote sparks her interest in stem cell therapy as a potentially transformative option for families struggling with autism, highlighting her desire to bring such outcomes to more patients.

Chapters

The rate of autism has skyrocketed in the last 20 years. In the US, it went from 1 in 100 children to 1 in 36. In the US, children diagnosed with autism will go see psychiatrists. As psychiatrists, the drugs we were using were meant to either sedate them or to help them focus a little better, or we're giving them antidepressant, anxiety medications, but nothing was targeting the root cause of what's causing autism. So I met this doctor who told me that he was doing stem cell treatments. You're actually using it? He said, yes, and look at this kid I treated. And he showed me about 40 different things written by this kid's teacher after he gave the child umbilical cord blood stem cells. The child had these drastic improvements in social interactions, eye contact, verbalization. That really got my interest in stem cell therapy, right? If I can bring that kind of difference to these families, that's remarkable.