Pain management
Pain management involves various strategies to alleviate or control pain, ranging from medications and physical therapy to alternative therapies like acupuncture and mindfulness techniques. Its goal is to improve quality of life by reducing pain intensity and enhancing functionality for individuals experiencing acute or chronic pain.
Subscribe to the BlogSpondylolysis Treatment Options: Healing the Spine with an Injection Rather than Surgery
What happens when a precise stem cell injection is used instead of surgery to treat spondylolysis? This is the story of NH, an Ivy League wrestler whose career was stopped in its tracks by a traumatic fracture of the spine called spondylolysis. His parents knew that fusing this young man’s spine at his young age…read more
Suicide in Chronic Pain Patients
A few months ago, a special patient of mine decided that the pain in her body and life was too much and she ended her life. After taking care of patients with chronic pain of one type of another for more than 30 years, like many physicians who care for these patients, I have seen…read more A Shoulder Stem Cell Procedure 6 Year Follow-up
One of the benefits of being the first physician in the U.S. to use stem cell injections to help orthopedic patients is that every once in a while, an old patient will come back. While we track everyone in a registry, it’s not the same as a patient sitting in front of you telling you…read more Steroid Injection Risks: STOP INJECTING PATIENTS WITH STEROIDS!!!
I love blogging about my experiences in clinic, especially the ones that make my blood boil. One of those blood boiling issues is steroid injection risks. This past week, while seeing patients at our licensed, advanced stem-cell-culture site in Grand Cayman, I saw a guy whose hip MRI from December wasn’t that bad. In fact,…read more Does Cartilage Heal on Its Own?
Whether or not cartilage heals on its own, according to a new study, depends on your age, and, unfortunately, that age may be much lower than we realized. We’ve known for a long time that the healing cells in our cartilage, such as our hip and knee joints, drastically decrease as we age, slowing or…read more Removing Hip Bone Spurs in Hip Impingement Surgery No Better Than Doing Nothing
Hip impingement as a diagnosis freaks people out. They can envision that bone spurs on their hips are wearing away cartilage with every single move. It’s a horrifying idea. This is despite many studies showing that loads of patients without hip pain have all sorts of MRI findings that a surgeon would operate on if…read more Stem Cells for Bone on Bone Arthritis? Replenish Stem Cell Reserves
Do stem cells for bone on bone arthritis work? Based on questions from all sources, cartilage is something on many people’s minds. Patients often ask why we inject mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) in patients with severe degenerative arthritis if the expectation is that we won’t be able to grow the large stretches of new knee…read more NSAIDs and Stem Cells: Naprosyn Messes Up Cartilage
I highlighted a study recently that suggested that taking NSAID drugs long-term could cause more arthritis. However, the question is how that could happen. Now another recent study sheds light on a possible mechanism for how that could work—NSAIDs cause abnormal cartilage to be manufactured because of the interaction of NSAIDs and Stem Cells. NSAIDs…read more 
