Home › Blog › Back to Running Races after 7 Years!

7 years ago,  a patient decided to run the Boston marathon with a hip labral tear. That didn’t go well. I just recently got an email from my colleague Dr. Pitts who sent me the above picture of Gary who is finally back to running!

An Email

I got this email from Dr. Pitts this week:

“Guy is a patient from Boston, you saw several years ago with Bashir and treated his hip. Had a big SI flare up after BMA calmed down with S1 TF and SI injection. I’ve treated his knees several times successfully since then. He wanted me to share this with you as he used to be a marathon runner but happy to be back running.”

“5 miles may not be a marathon , but considering how my knee was in 2017 before you started treating it, i view this race as one of my biggest running accomplishments. Doctors and others who saw me then in so much pain and disability are amazed at my improvement due to Regenexx. Please pass along my positive feedback .

Guy”

I asked if I could share this on the blog and here was Gary’s response:

“5 mile race, and absolutely share with DR. Centeno as he did an expert job on my hip labrum. i’m always asked if you have to get treated yearly and my response is , well,it’s been 7 years since my hip treatment and still doing fine.”

A Runner’s History

Gary was diagnosed with a hip labral tear and ran the Boston Marathon. After that, things quickly went downhill and he was seen by Dr. Schultz at our Colorado HQ site. He was diagnosed not only with the hip issue, but also a low back problem that likely caused it. He underwent an ultrasound-guided injection of bone marrow concentrate into his hip labrum. Because his low back was really the cause of his hip problem, the Bone Marrow Aspirate initially flared that up, which is when I first met Gary. I began treating that back issue with platelet-based injections into his SI joint ligaments, hip tendons, and around irritated low back nerves. That got that problem under control, so next up was the second treatment of his hip labrum, SI joint ligaments, and hip girdle tendons.

The patient then began to see Dr. Pitts for his knees and over a few years he had several platelet-based procedures and bone marrow concentrate injections mostly focused on chronic knee cap issues with severe loss of cartilage. All of that helped.

It Takes a Village

As you can see, Gary is now back to running races again, this time avoiding marathons. He was a hip arthroscopy candidate way back when and then a knee replacement candidate. Along the way, he would have also likely needed an SI joint fusion and one or more low back surgeries. He avoided all of that.

If he had gone the aggressive surgical route, would he be running again? That would be very unlikely. What Gary did instead is to trust that eventually, despite his severe pathology in multiple areas, interventional orthobiologics could get him back to where he wanted to be.

What’s also amazing is that Gary saw four physicians at our Colorado site over the past 7 years. It’s a testament to our uniform training and approach that he could end up with the result he wanted.

The upshot? We see many people like Gary who just want to stay active as they age. However, when their body doesn’t cooperate, they instinctively know that getting orthopedic surgery is more likely to cement that transition into being inactive. Instead, they chose interventional orthobiologics, or precise image-guided injections of their own platelets and bone marrow concentrate. At Regenexx, we’ve been doing all of this since 2005 and in that time we’ve helped thousands of people just like Gary get back to doing what they love!

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