Home › Blog › My 3,000th Blog Post! A Multi-Decade Project

It’s hard to believe that I have personally written 3,000 blog posts. When I started this project I had dark brown hair and now it’s firmly grey. So this morning, let’s celebrate the Regenexx blog!

I’ve actually been eyeing 3,000 for the last year. When I noticed that the blog was about 2,700 posts, I first thought to myself, “Wow! I’m almost at 3,000!” Then the reality of the math set in when I realized that an additional 300 posts were still at least a year away. However, I’m finally at magic 3,000!

The Beginning

On Sept 24th, 2008, some 12 years ago, I wrote my first blog post. Looking back, it was poorly written and all over the place. By early that next year my blogs became more consistently published, but they were still once a week or so. By May of that year, I started to try to blog almost every day. Man, did that change my life in all sorts of ways.

Blogging Daily

My day usually begins between 4:30-5:30 am when I wake up to get the blog out. The first thing I do is sit down in the dark in front of my home computer and get blasted by the light of the computer screen. Everyone else in my house is fast asleep. That’s prime time for me, as I’m fresh, bleary-eyed, and have several hours to myself.

Then comes the big daily decision. What to write about? You may notice that the blog goes in waves of topics and doesn’t have a set editorial calendar. That’s because when you write every day, the topic has to, as my mother often says, “get you goat up”! Meaning, what I write about has to be interesting to me and get me motivated.

How Many Pages is 3,000?

War and Peace has 1,225 pages. The King James Bible has 1,200 pages. The blog is now officially longer than any single volume published book in existence. In the 4,174 days since the blog began, I have done 3,000 posts. So that’s a post every 1.4 days.

So What is The Regenexx Blog Today?

It’s many things: an information portal for the industry, a home for patient education, and my personal catharsis.

Industry Information Portal

The regenerative medicine industry is a mess right now, so the blog has become an information portal where physicians and patients can find out the real deal once the layers of hype are removed. I can’t tell you how many physicians and sales reps stop me at conferences to tell me that they read the blog or thank me for calling out the craziness. Hence, I consider this blog a way to try to get everyone involved in legit orthobiologics on the same page, as real medicine is built on consensus and the best available evidence.

Patient Education

There’s more misinformation out there than real information about regenerative medicine. Hence, patients who are researchers usually eventually find this blog and latch on, as the Regenexx blog tries to take complex topics and distill them down to simple things. For example, the blog has likely stopped thousands of people from getting scam stem cell treatments at chiro offices and thousands more from getting overly aggressive surgeries they didn’t need.

My Personal Catharsis

This last part is critical. Remember, I was one of the guys that started this whole orthopedic regen med space was back in 2005 when the average physician couldn’t tell you what a stem cell was. Since then the space has spun out of control. Hence, when something really irks me, the blog is my way to get it out onto the written page to try to effect change and protect patients.

How Influential is the Blog?

I ran this quick search on one of the Internet SEO sites. This measures how many searches per month there are for each of these terms. There are other ways to look at this such as volume of hits, but having run those as well, they also tend to track about the same as this graph:

Hence, when you look at one information source, the Regenexx blog has a big footprint!

My Helpers

A big “thank you” and hat tip to Rob Kramberg, M.D. who sends me interesting research articles every day. Also to Carol Yates who helps with editing. In addition, thanks to the countless readers who send me inside information that keeps my investigative pieces fueled up. Keep that stuff coming, as it allows this blog to be unique. Nobody else approaches investigative pieces into the stem cell and exosome wild west from a physician’s viewpoint. That angle is unique, as it’s focused on patient impact, which is what physicians do best.

I’d also like to give a big shout out to Regenexx, as the company is celebrating it’s 15-year anniversary this year!

The upshot? When I started the Regenexx blog I was in my mid-forties and now, poof, I’m in my late 50s. How many more blogs do I have in me? Not sure. 5,000 sure sounds like a nice round number! By that time I’ll be firmly in my sixties!

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