Joint pain need not be the scourge of growing older or having led an athletic lifestyle. With new developments in the tried-and-true method of stem cell therapy, joint pain can be not only resolved but the injury itself can be healed from within, all by using the body’s own mechanisms with a little help from modern regenerative medicine.
Joint pain complaints are increasingly common in our society, even in populations that continue to be active and healthy as in the case of Knoxville, Tennessee. When back and joint pain show up, it leads to a marked decrease in the quality of life. This kind of pain can be intermittent or constant, and it hinders your ability to move and enjoy exercise or any recreational activity. It can be debilitative to the point that heavy pain medication is necessary – a lot of Americans unwittingly have become addicted to opioids as they attempt to manage their pain.
What if our goal isn’t to simply manage the pain, but to do away with the source of the pain?
When cartilage is damaged in a joint, either due to arthritis or possibly because of an injury, pain is often the direct result. It typically doesn’t resolve on its own and anti-inflammatory medications only mask the issue temporarily. The joint must be treated. A medical doctor will frequently suggest medications or even surgery, but it’s been proven that these treatment options rarely alleviate all the pain the patient is experiencing, and in some cases can exacerbate or even create additional side effects due to the medications used. In extreme cases like Dean’s testimonial (video below), the pain and damage can be so debilitating it can completely incapacitate the patient.
In cases like this, is it possible to alleviate or even reverse the damage without resorting to even more surgery? In the ongoing search for better ways to treat this kind of pain, mesenchymal stem cell regenerative therapy was developed. Stem cell therapy isn’t a new concept; it’s been around since the late 1960s when this technology was pioneered and found to be effective. However, it wasn’t until the mid-1980s when stem cells were discovered to occur in human adipose (fat) tissue, and soon later in all body tissues, that they became more widely used. More recently, the we gained the ability to more simply harvest these cells.
Stem cells are able to stimulate the creation of healthy cells and provide relief and repair to old and damaged tissue. Since these cells use the same functions as the body’s healing mechanisms, they’re able to use the body’s own intelligence to work on the injury, speeding recovery times and alleviating pain.
This treatment is called a same-day procedure. This is possible because the stem cells can be harvested and re-injected on the same day – no down time for the patient. In most situations, stem cell treatments entail a series of injections that will take place over the course of a week – depending on the unique needs of each patient. In Linda’s case (video below), stem cell therapy was effective on treating not only plantar fasciitis, but a series of other joint and muscular disorders successfully.
Key to this treatment is the ability of the doctor to deliver the therapeutic cells directly to the area of injury, and in much greater numbers than even a healthy body would be able to do by itself. Using a combination of stem cells and platelet rich plasma (PRP), we are able to administer the injection directly into the area in need of repair. This is done using real-time fluoroscopy or musculoskeletal ultrasound, which enables precise guidance of the injection as well as dispersion of the cells into the tissues.