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Happy Thanksgiving from Regenexx!

It’s Thanksgiving here on Seven Mile Beach in Grand Cayman! Time to eat way too much, catch up with relatives, and count our blessings. So what am I thankful for? I’ve got a long list.

Being Off Today!

I have spent the last five or six Thanksgiving celebrations in Grand Cayman as November is one of my months here along with March and July. I usually work at least half of Thanksgiving as I’m only here for two weeks and there’s high demand. However, last year I told our licensee here that it was time for me to take Thanksgiving day off. So believe it or not, this is only the second Turkey Day in years that I’ve had totally off!

My Patients!

While I, like most doctors, have patients, many times they’re also fans. They usually find me online, and first get to know how I think through all of the stuff I’ve written, spend a year or more getting to know me further through my writings, and then finally travel to Colorado or to Grand Cayman to see my partners or me as a patient. So I am truly thankful that people like what I write and how I practice medicine and then become patients!

My Clinical Staff

The crew down here in Cayman is now a well-oiled machine. This last two weeks here have been flawless. Cayman is a multicultural experience, with Brits, Americans, Canadians, Jamaicans, and Filipinos. One of our Filipina nurses, Chris, often shares fun facts about her culture. One of the more interesting from this trip is that in the Philippines, you celebrate Christmas in all of the “ber” months. That means that Christmas decorations go up on September 1st! So it’s four months of the happiest time of the year!

I’m also very thankful for my work family in Colorado. These are the folks who keep me on time, position my X-ray beam just right, help during procedures, room patients, support my countless patient appointments and Regenexx meetings, and keep the ship afloat. They often toil in the background of what I notice every day as I’m often in my own little world, expecting everything to be there when I need it. However, it’s great to be thankful for all the work that goes on behind the scenes and to notice and thank the people who make that happen!

My Regenexx Blog Team

While I do put a ton of work in on the blog, there are also helpers who keep it all rolling. On many days, I wake up with what my mother used to call “piss and vinegar,” which is what we would call passion. Meaning, something the day or week before has caught my attention as a topic patients need to know about and energized me to write. On those mornings, there is a team of people who come in and help with things, like final editing and important details like web tags. On other days, when I’m struggling for a topic, that same team has helped write parts of blogs at my direction. For example, I’ll usually scour the Internet for interesting topics, and my web team will write some of those blogs with me adding in my own take or editing the medical details after the fact. In addition, we have a network physician, who sends me several studies a day to see if they would make interesting blogs.

All the Employees at CSC and Regenexx

There’s a lot of stuff that gets done behind the scenes at our Colorado HQ (Centeno-Schultz Clinic, or CSC) and Regenexx. Our call centers and web experts answer the phones, e-mails, texts, and social media enquires. Our admin staff makes sure the bills are paid, the lights stay on, and that everyone marches in the same direction. Our lab processing staff both in Cayman and at our Colorado HQ make sure that patient samples are the best they can be. Our corporate team at Regenexx are tirelessly speaking with self-insureds about how they can save money by using interventional over surgical orthopedics. Our physician network team speaks with and finds qualified physicians for our international network. Finally, I’m thankful for all the stuff I don’t know about that happens to keep these finely tuned engines working.

My Science Team

If you read my blog, you know that there is a crew of scientists who keep the science working at Regenexx. For example, we have a lead scientist, a lab team, a clinical research coordinator, a biostatistician, and others who make sure that we continue to test what we think we know, publish what’s interesting, and continue to make Regenexx procedures the best possible. We now also have a small army of consultants helping with advanced regulatory approvals. So I am thankful for these brilliant people who make sure our science is second to none!

Our Network Physicians

We carefully choose our affiliate network physicians so that they have high levels of base training in their ability to place needles accurately with image guidance and their knowledge of the musculoskeletal system. Our doctors also take additional courses and tests, so it’s a ton of work. I’m thankful that these doctors are out there keeping up the high standards we expect.

My Family

My family puts up with a lot from Dad. I work quite a bit, and every morning is spent in front of a computer getting out the blog. So I’m thankful they put up with my passions. Today we’ll spend the day on a boat, go out to a local hotel here on Seven Mile Beach for our Thanksgiving feast, and then hopefully take a nice long walk along the shore in the warm Caribbean sand.

The upshot? I’m thankful for a lot of stuff this morning. I also want to wish all of my readers and their families a very Happy Thanksgiving!

If you’re interested, you know I’m a technology geek at heart, and that picture above is of the moonset over the beach when I woke up at 5 a.m. this morning. I used my phone, which has advanced computational photography hardware and software that used a combination of many images and machine learning to be able to get that image. This is what it looked like without the machine learning:

So Happy Thanksgiving by the setting morning moon here in the Caribbean is thanks to artificial intelligence and a visual processing core!

Chris Centeno, MD is a specialist in regenerative medicine and the new field of Interventional Orthopedics. Centeno pioneered orthopedic stem cell procedures in 2005 and is responsible for a large amount of the published research on stem cell use for orthopedic applications. View Profile