The newest and greatest treatment options for musculoskeletal injuries/problems are here. These specialized treatments/procedures are an excellent alternative to repetitive corticosteroid injection or surgical intervention. Unlike our traditional treatment options that focus on addressing symptomatic improvement, the goal of regenerative medicine procedures is to improve or replace damaged tissue. With the hope of healing injured tissue, you can expect longer lasting improvement in pain as well as function. Currently here at First State Orthopaedics, we offer our patients a variety of these treatment options: PRP injections, amniotic injections as well as stem cell procedures.

PRP Injections: PRP (Platelet Rich Plasma) is a therapy that uses a patient’s own blood, concentrating his/her platelets and injecting the concentrated portion back into the injured or diseased tissue. The ultimate goals of PRP are to decrease pain, encourage the healing of the injured and diseased tissue as well as improve a patient’s overall functionality.

Amniotic Injections: This therapy is the use of amniotic fluid/tissue that has been appropriately cleaned and prepared and contains growth factors and cells that encourage the healing of injured/diseased tissue. These products are taken from other people (allograft) and sterilized prior to use. Similar to PRP, amniotic injections have been shown to decrease pain, improve tissue healing as well as improve a patient’s overall function.

Stem Cells: Stem cell therapies use specialized cells that can develop into multiple different types of cells throughout our body depending on location to help heal damaged tissue. Stem cells can be taken from the bone or fat of your own body or can also be obtained from cadaver bone.   When obtained from your own body, a bone marrow aspirate can be performed to obtain MSCs (mesenchymal stem cells).  Additionally, a fat aspiration can be performed to obtain ADSCs (adipose-derived stem cells).  These types of aspirations can then be concentrated and subsequently injected back into any injured or damaged tissue.  When donor cells are not obtained from your own body, another option would include using stem cells from cadaver bone.  These products are obtained frozen from our medical distributors and need to be thawed and processed prior to use.

Overall, all of the regenerative medicine/biologic procedures discussed can be safely performed in an office or operative setting with very minimal risk. Regenerative medicine/orthobiologics offers a great opportunity to decrease pain, improve function and heal tissue with much shorter recovery times.