Patient Advocacy

New Treatments for CRPS: Ivy’s Story

CRPS is an awful disease. Picture this: you injure yourself or get injured, and then instead of healing, this turns into a bonfire of pain that you can’t get rid of or control. Even a big breeze can set this off. It’s a miserable experience. However, we have been working for years on new treatments for CRPS,…read more

Honesty Is Key: Not Every Patient Is a Good Candidate for Stem Cell Treatment

One of the things that was very clear at the Interventional Orthopedics Foundation meeting this past week was that there are two opposing forces offering “stem cell” therapies out there. On the one hand, you have the doctors like the ones lecturing at IOF, who are working hard on the science of who responds best…read more

Busting the Mythbusters

I’ve previously blogged on the Marrow Cellutions device that purports to be so good at drawing stem cells right out of your bone marrow that the bone marrow aspirate doesn’t need to be centrifuged to concentrate these cells. We were intrigued a few years ago by the claim, so we paid for several of the devices and tested…read more

Why a Normal MRI Report May Be an Increasingly Dangerous Thing…

We see patients every day who have normal MRI’s and pain and patients who have abnormal MRI’s and little pain. I’ve blogged about this extensively. Given that, for orthopedic imaging, a well-trained and observant physician can usually find more than the reading radiologist and also knows where to look, reading the MRI personally is a…read more

Acupuncturists and Naturopaths and Chiropractors…Oh My!

Becoming an MD or DO physician is hard. Four years of college where you bust your butt to make good enough grades to get into medical school. Four years of medical school where you work hard to get your choice of residency. Then another four years (or more) of residency and fellowship training. By the time…read more

Stem Cell Seminars: 7 Questions to Separate Real from Hype

There’s been an explosion in clinics offering stem cells for orthopedic treatments in the last few years. The most aggressive blanket major metro areas, taking out full-page ads on the front pages of major newspapers, putting on large stem cell seminars that double as high-pressure sales events. As a consumer, especially one making medical decisions…read more

Stem Cell Institute of America: The Plot Thickens

As I sit here and write this, I’m in a bit of a time crunch. You see, getting better and better at regenerative medicine is hard. There are physicians to educate in advanced image-guided injection procedures, research that needs to be completed or published, fellows that need to be taught, advances in the lab and the…read more

Confounding and the Biopsychosocial Model

As I blogged a few days ago, the biopsychosocialists are back. We dealt with these theories in pain management and orthopedic injuries a decade or more ago, but advances in pain research made these theories go away or at least fade into the background. Now, they have again surfaced in a new physical therapy viral…read more