How Stem Cell Therapy Can Get You Back in the Game

Whether you’re a professional or an amateur, a sports injury can sideline you from participating in your favorite physical activity. Unfortunately, traditional treatments for sports injuries can require extensive recovery time, including rest, surgical intervention, and rehabilitation, which can keep you out of the game for an extended period of time. From bone breaks to post-injury arthritis, sports injuries can take a long time to heal, or never heal at all.

Fortunately, an innovative regenerative treatment known as stem cell therapy provides patients with an alternative to conventional techniques that helps improve healing outcomes and gets you back in the game in less time.

Even injuries that require minimally invasive surgery need ample recovery time in order for athletes to fully heal and reduce the risk of recurrent injury. Following minor surgery, the recovery process will vary for each individual but it usually includes limited movement, bracing, and/or physical therapy.

For athletes, this loss of active playtime is particularly difficult for athletes who have reached their peak performance as they must pause their athletic careers to simply heal. However, with the use of regenerative therapy techniques, post-surgical patients enjoy faster recovery times and for some, surgical intervention can sometimes be avoided altogether.

What Is Stem Cell Therapy?

While stem cells exist in all of our tissues, certain areas like bone marrow and fat contain an abundance of these regenerative cells. In autologous adult stem cell therapy, regenerative cells are extracted from the bone marrow or fat and injected into areas of injury or degeneration to reduce inflammation and promote regeneration and healing.

Scientists believe that stem cells work in this capacity by migrating to areas of distress and then releasing specific chemical signals to recruit other local cells to switch from a degenerative mode to a regenerative one. In this role, stem cells sort of work as an orchestra conductor. Bone marrow and fat contain not only stem cells but other substances like growth factors, which are also beneficial for regenerative effects.

How is a Stem Cell Therapy Treatment Performed?

Stem cell therapy is a relatively quick procedure that requires minimal downtime. Stem cell therapy is broken down into the following steps:

• Your orthopedic surgeon will extract the cells from a healthy area of the body
• A local anesthetic is applied to this area before your cells are carefully extracted
• The stem cells are separated in a centrifuge device
• Finally, the stem cells are injected directly into the site of the injury

There are many sports injuries that can be helped with regenerative therapy. For example, stem cell therapy can help treat musculoskeletal injuries, such as tendon inflammation, muscle sprains, arthritis, and bone fractures. Some of the most commonly experienced sports injuries that regenerative therapy can address include:

Muscle Injuries

The most common type of sports injury is a muscle strain. When the muscle sustains an injury, stem cell therapy helps create new muscle tissue in a process known as regeneration.

Cartilage Damage

The most typical type of cartilage damage occurs in the knees. When an athlete suffers a knee injury, the cartilage, which helps with shock absorption begins to deteriorate. Regenerative therapy can naturally reduce painful inflammation to help improve range of motion and function.

Tendinopathy

Tendinopathy is an overuse injury most commonly affecting runners and tennis players. Frequent, repeated movements can lead to tendon damage. However, stem cell therapy can help heal the damaged tendons and improve both strength and structure.

Bone Injuries

Athletes often experience stress fractures when training or competing. These injuries occur when a substantial amount of stress is placed on a bone or joint, causing the tissue to weaken and break. Regenerative techniques help stress fractures heal by stimulating the growth of blood vessels at the break and jump starts bone repair.

Your Sports Injury Expert in Los Angeles

If you’re suffering from a sports-related injury, regenerative therapy can help you heal. Beverly Hills orthopedic surgeon Steven W. Meier, MD and his team at Meier Orthopedic Sports Medicine (MOSM) are experts in regenerative medicine techniques, which can help improve your post-injury recovery. Contact Meier Orthopedic Sports Medicine to schedule a consultation today.

Next, read Chronic Back Pain? Now’s the Time to Schedule a Consultation

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Chronic Back Pain? Now’s the Time to Schedule a Consultation

Chronic low-back pain is one of the most common causes of disability worldwide. According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), Americans spend at least $50 billion each year on lower back pain and it’s the leading cause of lost productivity, making it imperative for patients to seek appropriate treatment with an orthopedic specialist to help eliminate their pain and reduce their risk of recurrence.

What is Chronic Back Pain?

There are two types of back pain: Sub-acute and Chronic. Sub-acute refers to pain in the back that lasts between 4 and 12 weeks. The second type: chronic back pain is persistent pain that lasts 12 weeks or longer. Unfortunately, it’s possible to injure your back in typical everyday activities like lifting boxes, reaching into your car trunk or twisting while swinging a golf club. It is so easy to injure your back that almost everyone has experienced low back pain at one time or another. While most of these cases may resolve on their own, chronic pain requires orthopedic treatment.

What are the Causes of Persistent Back Pain?

Some of the typical reasons for pain in the back include:

• Overuse, strain, or injury either through work tasks, sports or daily activities
• Normal aging and/or genetics
• Herniated disc
• Degenerative disc disease
• Facet joint degeneration
• Compression fractures

What Are Common Symptoms?

Just as there are varied causes for pain in the back, there is also a wide range of symptoms. For example, chronic back pain may either be dull or sharp. Pain can occur in a small area of the back or over a large area with or without additional muscle spasms. This type of persistent pain can also cause additional symptoms in one or both legs, such as pain, numbness, or tingling, often extending below the knee.

Chronic back pain can negatively impact several areas of life. Some of the debilitating effects include:

• Reduced ability to perform daily and work tasks
• Insomnia and reduction in quality sleep
• Decreased ability to participate in physical activity or exercise

While it’s true that some degree of back pain and discomfort can be normal from time to time, with more and more people spending large portions of the day bent over their smartphones or working at their desk for hours at a time, are leading to a higher percentage of persistent pain in the back. With an accurate diagnosis from an orthopedic doctor, it’s possible to develop a treatment plan to successfully eradicate long-term pain.

At Meier Orthopedic Sports Medicine, we specialize in leading-edge, minimally invasive techniques as a preferable alternative to surgery. We have been performing regenerative injection therapy (RIT) for chronic back pain with very promising success. This progressive treatment, which consists of a combination of stem cell prolotherapy, intra-discal platelet-rich plasma (PRP), and dextrose epidural injections, harnesses the body’s own healing capacity to help restore pain-free function. Rather than rely on steroids to temporarily mask the pain, we focus on optimizing tissue health and regeneration for longer-lasting pain relief.

Your Chronic Back Pain Expert in Los Angeles

Chronic back pain can happen to anyone. However, with the help of Beverly Hills orthopedic surgeon and regenerative medicine expert Steven W. Meier, MD and his team at Meier Orthopedic Sports Medicine (MOSM) it’s possible to heal from your chronic back pain. Contact us to schedule a consultation today.

Next, read How Different Types of Exercise Can Help Prevent Injuries

The post Chronic Back Pain? Now’s the Time to Schedule a Consultation appeared first on Meier Orthopedic Sports Medicine.

Prolotherapy Tips for Beginners: How I Started with Prolotherapy

I wish to help make hospital and practice-based colleagues aware of Prolotherapy. So, I will tell you how I started with Prolotherapy. After completing my study of medicine at the University of Leipzig, in 1972, I worked at the orthopedic clinics at the Universities of Leipzig and Würzburg, Germany. Then, after finishing my clinical education, I switched to musculoskeletal medicine and manual therapy. I received specialized training in the Cyriax technique for orthopedic medicine.

I had opened a private practice in downtown Leipzig in 1994. At that time, Dr. Funck, in Lübeck, was already successfully applying Prolotherapy in treating causes of spinal and joint pains, and gave me my initial instruction. Thereafter, I took several courses with Dr. Tom Ravin in Denver, Colorado, and I bought the basic work on Prolotherapy Ligament and Tendon Relaxation treated by Prolotherapy by G.S. Hackett, MD.

After returning home, however, I did not immediately start applying the new procedure. One of the reasons was the fact that we did not immediately change our everyday routines with methods of treatment that had been handed down for years. But the main reason for my initial reticence was just the normal nervousness of a beginner.

This changed, however, when a 53 year-old patient turned up who complained of one-sided hip pains, especially when climbing stairs or when getting up from a seated position. To specify the area of pain, she put the fingers of her right hand on the large trochanter. She reported that she had gone through a whole series of unsuccessful specialized consultations. She vividly explained that imaging methods such as X-rays, nuclear spin tomography and bone scans did not result in any clinically relevant findings. Above all, there were no signs of wear and tear to be found in the hip region. A clinical function test did not result in any relevant negative findings either.

The patient also reported that she had rather intense pain when turning over in bed or when lying on the hip where the pain was located. She did not get better, in spite of extensive therapy, including physical applications, chiropractic and acupuncture. Therapists were at a loss with such relatively long-lasting symptoms.

What made the greatest impression on me in the case of this patient was the considerable pain that I provoked when pressing on the region with my thumb.

When examining the patient I used the following procedure:

1. I put one hand around the region of the trochanter major mandibulofacially and pressed the region with the thumb of my other hand. (See Figure 1.) Then I asked the patient how intense the pain was to enable myself to clearly identify the pain areas on the large trochanter. I carried out a side-comparison examination to enable the patient to compare. The pain areas identified were marked in dots with a marker.

Immediately after marking the pain areas, I explained the causes of the pain to the patient in detail as a consequence of the instability at the base of the tendon at the large trochanter. The next step was to explain the procedure of the treatment to her and propose using the pepper technique to infiltrate the pain areas that are in contact with the bone with 20% glucose solution.* I explained to the patient that the glucose solution used in Prolotherapy enhances collagen synthesis. Finally, I informed the patient that normally three sessions at intervals of two weeks are needed.

2. Explaining the gradually continuing cascade-shaped reconstruction processes in the area of the base of the tendon that reduce the symptoms was particularly important to make sure that the patient understood the situation. No less important was explaining that this was a developmental process for reducing symptoms. In other words, it was not just simply a question of getting an injection and making the pain go away. Since this patient had substantial pain over a longer period of time and had gone through a whole series of unsuccessful specialized consultations (mostly with surgeons, orthopedic surgeons and neurologists) with the corresponding apparatus diagnostics, she consented to the therapeutic procedure. She was also sufficiently patient in her expectations of a reduction in pain during the treatment.

There were three injection sessions, over a period of three to four weeks. After the third session of therapy I agreed to another appointment for a check-up after three months. As it turned out, this relatively long time between appointments proved to be beneficial because this was the period of time when there was a significant reduction in pain. I recommended the patient to live normally, subject herself to normal stress and strain, and I appealed to her to be patient in her expectations of a reduction in pain.

Read Full Article Here: Prolotherapy Tips for Beginners: How I Started with Prolotherapy