Home › Blog › A Patient Who Didn’t Do as Well…

Regenexx treatment failures?  While it’s always great to hear about patients who did really well with stem cell injections, to promote transparency, it’s also helpful to hear about those who failed the therapy we provide. Case in point is EJ, a patient from Wyoming with severe ankle arthritis. The patient had undergone several prior ankle surgeries that had failed and had “bone on bone” ankle arthritis in the main tibio-talar joint. He was told his only other option would be an ankle fusion-something he very much wanted to avoid because he still enjoys bike riding. Because of his severe ankle pathology, he was told he was a POOR candidate for the Regenexx-SD same day stem cell procedure. He wanted to try anyway. We finally relented and he was treated several months ago with a tibio-talar stem cell injection. I saw him this week in the clinic for follow-up. While he has less swelling in the ankles, he has had only a very minimal change in his pain and function. I told him that it was likely that we would consider this one of the Regenexx treatment failures.

Why did his therapy fail? I would say the single biggest factor was his arthritis severity. On a scale of 0-10, with 0 being no arthritis and 10 being the worst possible in this joint, his ankle arthritis was about a 8. The upshot? We’re happy to talk about successes and failures. We don’t consider stem cells magic, but merely another tool that can be very effective or fail to provide any relief. Any patient we see, whether they are deemed a GOOD, FAIR, or POOR candidate, just like any other medical procedure we perform, may not get any measurable results.

NOTE:  Regenexx-SD is a medical procedure and like any medical procedure has a success and failure rate.  Not all Regenexx-SD patients can expect these results.

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Chris Centeno, MD is a specialist in regenerative medicine and the new field of Interventional Orthopedics. Centeno pioneered orthopedic stem cell procedures in 2005 and is responsible for a large amount of the published research on stem cell use for orthopedic applications. View Profile