Understanding Regenerative Medicine

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In the United States of America alone, there are currently more than 90,000 patients on the waiting list for organ transplants and a good chunk of these are elderly citizens. This is no surprise as aging has been found to increase the occurrence of chronic diseases and injuries.

At Florida OrthoCare, with the growing strain from a drastically aging population and an increased criticism on the effectiveness of existing organ transplant procedures; more people are turning to ‘regenerative medicine’ as an effective alternative.

Regenerative medicine is a revolutionary branch of the medical practice that employs safe, comfortable, and sterile techniques to harness and optimize the body’s natural healing response with the aim of restoring (repairing or regenerating) tissues and organs damaged by chronic diseases, aging, or congenital defects. From a host of alternatives, the current technique for regenerative medicine use stem cells for building and restoring organs and tissues.

In current medical practice, various types of stem cell therapy have been employed to replace or supplement major surgical operations in the treatment of chronic disease. The stem cell therapy regenerates the damaged organs or tissues by fostering the body’s natural healing mechanism.

Stem cell therapy can handle a broad range of defects including degenerated or herniated discs, chronic joint disease, muscle sprains and tears, sport-related meniscus, ligaments, tendon injury, joint and spinal injuries, arthritis, osteoarthritis and sciatica.

Depending on the organ or tissue targeted by the regenerative medical procedure, some of the most common forms of stem cell treatment include the stem cell spinal therapy, stem cell shoulder therapy, stem cell disk therapy, stem cell joint therapy, and the stem cell knee therapy.

For older people especially former athletes, that chronic backache could stand in the way of your everyday life. As the chronic back pain experienced with aging usually results from spinal cord injury, inflammations, and degenerative defects; stem cell spinal therapy has been identified as an effective regenerative medical practice to restore the proper functioning spinal tissues.

Aging results in a loss of some essential cell proteins required for maintaining healthy bones and joints. This results in severe joint aches, stiffness, and swellings that might make normal daily functioning tedious and uncomfortable. It is not any more comforting to find that aging offsets the body’s natural healing mechanism for chronic diseases and injuries. Stem cell joint therapy has therefore been employed as a regenerative technique for restoring damaged joint tissues by fostering the tissue’s natural healing mechanism.

For athletes especially, it is common the knees get bad and sore with age. Stem cell knee therapy would improve the body’s natural ability to restore the healthy functioning of the knees even at old age.

For tennis players, some develop traumas, ‘tennis elbows’ or other injuries to the tissues of the elbow joint, and this becomes more likely with aging as the body loses its natural healing ability. Stem cell elbow therapy is just the excellent regenerative medicine for ‘tennis elbows’ and those severe or mild elbow pains and injuries.

You can bet that weightlifters might experience severe shoulder in old age that might make even daily activities unpalatable. And if you are a retired weight-lifter, you don’t have to live with that constant shoulder pain. Stem cell shoulder therapy would get your aching shoulder fixed with its safe, comfortable, and effective regenerative medical procedure.

In the case of herniated disks and sciatica, it is useful to employs a regenerative technique with minimal manipulation, and without recourse to surgery. The stem cell disk therapy provides a medical procedure for eliminating the pains resulting from the herniated disks and promotes the natural regeneration and repair of these damaged tissues.

From stem cell joint therapy to stem cell spinal therapy; regenerative medicine is the future… and the future is bright.

To detoxify the patient’s body and optimize the impact of the stem cell therapy, it is recommended that an IV Vitamin therapy is performed prior to the regenerative medical procedure.

The basic procedure for Stem cell treatments begins with the collection of adult stem cells. Some of the stem cells currently employed in regenerative medicine are classified based on their sources as embryonic, fetal, cord blood, embryonic, peripheral blood-derived, umbilical, placental, induced pluripotent stem cells, bone marrow-derived, and adipose-derived stem cells.

The most commonly applied in the treatment of joint, disk, and spinal injuries are the bone marrow-derived and fat cell or adipose-derived stem cells collected by bone marrow extraction and a mini-liposuction respectively. These collection procedures usually take around 15 minutes and are performed in a sterile environment. Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) is also collected from the patient’s blood, which is a concentrated mix of serum and platelet.

A combination of the extracted stem cell pellets and the platelet-rich plasma (PRP) is administered to the targeted tissue area, with local anesthesia. The entire extraction and injection procedure usually takes 2 hours, and with the administration of local anesthesia, the patient can be awake throughout the comfortable and safe procedure, and would be ready do discharge immediately it is completed.

Stem cell therapy usually employs a relatively small recovery time, which might be as low as 6-8 weeks after one treatment. In most instances, the initial stem cell injection suffices, but in other cases, multiple stem cell injection sessions (2-4) are required.

It must be noted that patients of stem cell therapy usually experience some irritation in the region of the stem cell injected tissue. This irritation, however usually disperse within weeks of the injections, and most patients report quick improvement in the functionality of the treated tissues.