Can You Treat a Meniscus Tear Without Surgery?

The research support on using surgery to treat meniscus tears is collapsing. Study after study shows that this common surgery doesn’t work and likely sets patients up for more problems down the road. However, there’s one type of meniscus tear that has been thought to always require surgery – a flipped bucket handle tear. This type…read more

New Video on Back and Neck Stem Cell Treatments…

The issue of stem cells and disc problems is a complex one that often gets simplified by doctors advertising stem cell spine treatments into: “stem cells are magic fairy dust to be sprinkled on the spine to cure even severe degenerative disc disease”. The truth however, is much more complex than this simple message. Based…read more

Is Disc Stem Cell Therapy for Real?

I have a lot to blog about this morning with many subjects waiting in the cue, but every once in awhile a subject is pressing enough that it needs to be blogged immediately. This morning that subject is disc stem cell therapy. Yesterday a patient on a discussion board about biologic orthopedics jumped in on…read more

Epidural Steroid Injection Risks: New FDA Epidural Steroid Warning?

Epidural steroid injection risks are in the news again. First, I am not a big fan of epidural steroid injections. These injections are imaging guided procedures where a steroid (potent anti-inflammatory) is placed between a bulging or herniated disc and a painful nerve that’s causing sciatica. The good news is that they’ve dramatically reduced low…read more

Severe Buttocks Pain After a Fall: A Patient’s Story

On this page: RP’s story Diagnosing the severe buttocks pain Treating a hematoma in the buttocks RP is an elderly physician who I met in the most unlikely of circumstances. He was performing a life insurance physical on me and I noticed he had a cane. We struck up a conversation about his severe buttock…read more

Hip Replacement Pain: A Frustrated Patient

I’ve blogged before on hip replacement pain, or when patients still have pain after hip replacement. Likely the most detailed study to date showed continued pain in patients who had hip replacement surgery-for example, on average 53% of hip replacement patients reported pins and needles 6 months after the surgery. Yesterday a new patient came…read more

Traditional vs. Regenerative Spine Care

Yesterday in the clinic I had two patients before lunch that define the differences between our traditional existing spine treatment paradigms and what our clinic defines as Regenerative Spine Care (using platelets and stem cells to treat patients with bad discs, facet joints, or ligaments). The first patient was a late thirties father who had been in…read more

The Scientist, The Doctor, and the Patient…

This past week I’ve been hyper-focused on updating our long-term disc data and finally met my match yesterday. These are low back stem cell patients who had bulging low back discs treated with precise stem cell injections. It’s always an arduous task to pull all of this together, especially when some of the patients were treated in…read more