Knee Conditions

A Conflicted Sydney Scientist and a New Knee Arthritis Stem Cell Study

I’ve documented what I and others have called “fake” PRP studies. One of the key players involved in one of those studies was David Hunter, a rheumatologist at the University of Sydney. Now David has a new study, one where he’s using stem cells to treat arthritis. Is this another fake study or a real…read more

We Never Looked: Treating the Joint vs. Joint+Ligs

One of the hardest things to do in orthobiologics is to teach patients that there are major differences between what clinic A offers when it says it can perform a “PRP” injection and what clinic B offers. These two procedures may be wildly different. Today I’ll explore that concept through a medical abbreviation called “WNL”. …read more

What My Unstable Knee Can Teach You About PRP Treatment

I’ve blogged about my right knee which is a case study in Instability and why a PRP injection MUST include more than injecting inside the knee joint. Let’s review the concept of Instability and why it’s so critical for doctors who use PRP to understand this issue. Let’s dig in. The Knee Your knee is…read more

A Tale of Five Knee Joint Injections: You Get What You Pay For

It’s always hard to explain to patients how training and expertise in medicine vary widely. The good news is that in the more established areas of medicine represented by board certification, while the skill levels between doctors are different, there is a minimum standard of competency. However, once one gets into Regenerative Medicine where no…read more

What a New Bone Marrow Knee Study Can Teach Us About QA

QA is a term that you hear more often in industries like manufacturing or engineering, not in medicine. However, the bone marrow concentrate procedure for knee arthritis has so many moving parts that QA is key. So today we’ll review a new research paper and also learn how they failed on several key QA metrics.…read more

Is Injecting a Knee Blind Associated with Worse Health Outcomes?

Like a headline from the Onion, I recently read an email describing a big orthopedic surgery conference where a panel was sourced on whether or not you needed ultrasound guidance to inject a knee. While the result of this panel was a LOL moment for many of my colleagues, none of us really knew the…read more

More Information that High Dose Steroids Are Bad News for Joints

One of the most common orthopedic interventions on earth that collectively occurs more times than any other is a steroid injection into a joint. However, we know that these simple procedures harm joints. Despite that, they are still used millions of times each year. Now new research shows that a steroid injection before a meniscectomy…read more

Are Umbilical Cord Stem Cells Better for Knee Cartilage Repair?

Let’s look today at two studies that posit an interesting question. They both ask if umbilical cord stem cells are better than the patient’s own bone marrow concentrate in healing a small cartilage lesion in the knee. This is an important topic because we have hundreds of crazy chiropractic clinics claiming that they are injecting…read more