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Happy Birthday IVF-We Never would have had our Kids had you been Born Today!

Happy Birthday IVF!  IVF fertility treatment turned 34 this month. This brings back some memories and highlights the regulatory insanity of the stem cells=drugs debate. First, I remember our pain as a couple not being able to conceive. While all of our friends were having kids and shifting into those next gears of life, we couldn’t seem…read more

4 year Follow-up on a Patient with Severe Knee Arthritis Treated with Stem Cells

We’ve been treating knee arthritis with stem cells for a long time with different knee arthritis stem cell injections. When other clinics that have popped up in the last year or two didn’t know what the word stem cell meant, we were diligently treating patients with our Regenexx-C and Regenexx-SD stem cell procedures in a clinical trial. While we’ve published…read more

Knee and Hip Joint Replacement Surgeries Dramatically Increase Heart Attack Risk

Knee replacement risks and hip replacement risks are accompanied by a myriad of complications, one of the most significant are clearly knee replacement heart attacks and hip replacement heart attacks.  Several years ago we queried the National Sampling System for Medicare for a paper we were writing and found that in the year 2008 alone, there…read more

Helping a Woman’s Knee Arthritis with Stem Cells

Can a knee stem cell treatment help knee arthritis in an older woman who also has back problems? LN is a 60 year old woman with a two year history of knee pain on the left and a 10 year history on the right.  Because of this moderate to severe pain she avoided stairs, water aerobics, and spinning and had…read more

Understanding Inflammation: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Do you have chronic knee inflammation, or inflammation of other joints? Most patients and even physicians have a hard time understanding inflammation and the concepts behind it.  First, the word is derived from the Latin “inflammo” which means “I ignite”. So the word’s origins have to do with fire-makes sense since inflammation is the body’s fire. There are three different types…read more

A Patient Speaks Out about Cells=Drugs

I get e-mails from patients with serious and chronic diseases all the time. They often ask me to use stem cells to treat their illness. Since we only treat orthopedic conditions, I can’t help other than to refer them to someone who I think is doing credible work. This one was so well written and so spot…read more

A Modern Greek Tragedy-Small Amounts of Steroid Use can Lead to Osteonecrosis

I’ve blogged before about how corticosteroids can cause osteonecrosis, a disease where the bone can quickly turn to mush. How does this happen? These drugs hurt the normal adult stem cell population responsible for maintaining healthy bone. In some patients these effects are more pronounced than others. Despite this, steroids are still widely used. Some of this…read more

This isn’t too Hard to Figure Out: Smoking Hurts Stem Cells

As you’ve heard, smoking is bad for your health. But did you know that smoking hurts stem cells? A recent study looked at the ability of mesenchymal stem cells (the kind we use) to turn into cartilage. This is called, “chondrogenic differentiation” (chondrogenic literally in Latin is cartilage generating). It’s likely no surprise that nicotine reduced the ability…read more