Patient Education

Statins and Stem Cells: Barely There Results

Pharma is pretty funny sometimes. They have manufactured a 20 billion-dollar-a-year market on data that would normally get laughed out of a scientific conference in any other area of medicine. Now with major patents expiring on their statin cash cows, their next move to keep the gravy train rolling is called “combination therapies.” This means…read more

Fix the Neck Curve: Surgery Is Not the Answer

The neck curve is the red-headed stepchild of spine care. Thankfully, spine surgeons, after ignoring this issue for many years, are just starting to realize its importance. Regrettably, the surgeries they’re performing to fix the neck curve are for the most part unnecessary and causing more harm than good, but, heck, you can’t have everything. Let’s…read more

Dural Leak Treatment: Harry’s Story…

Most patients are unaware that there’s fluid around their brain, spinal cord, and nerve roots that literally floats their whole neurologic system. They also don’t realize that the system designed to hold it all can spring a leak and that when it does, all heck can break loose. While we’ve treated many patients with dural…read more

Hip Arthritis Getting Worse? New Research Says It Could Be the Bone

Is your hip arthritis getting worse? In addition to cartilage breakdown, your bone could also be deteriorating. A bright spot (or dark spot depending on the imaging sequence used) on the bone on MRI is called a bone marrow lesion (BML, also called a BME which means bone marrow edema). It’s an area in the…read more

Sitting and Sciatica Pain: How I Solved It With a Walk

On this page: What is sciatica? How are sitting and sciatica pain related? How does walking help sciatica pain? I’ve been at a medical conference lecturing all week, basically a sit fest. Despite trying to exercise every day and get up and move as much as feasible, my intermittent sciatica was singing last night at…read more

Our Annual Stem Cell Research in Orthopedics Update—2016 Edition

Every year for the last few, I’ve created an infographic summarizing stem cell research in orthopedics. Every year, the list gets bigger and the number of patient results represented grows. This year is no different! (Click here for a larger view) How Is This Created? I searched the US National Library of Medicine under several…read more

Is IV Stem Cell Therapy a Good Idea?

I got an e-mail yesterday from a physician colleague asking about whether IV stem cell therapy for knee arthritis was for real. It hit me that this would be a great blog topic as the number of physicians offering IV stem cell therapy has exploded in recent years. So is this a good idea? Is…read more

Why Is Regenexx the Best That’s Out There?

How can Regenexx claim that it’s the most advanced and best-researched orthopedic stem cell therapy in the world? After all, if you cruise the Internet, you’ll find any number of clinics, all proclaiming that they’re the “best” or the “greatest” or “experts.” However, if you look “under the hood” of any of these web-sites and…read more