In this episode Dr. Grove talks about your muscular skeletal orthopedic needs and how regenerative medicine injections, platelet rich plasma / PRP therapy or stem cell therapy may help you. These, says Dr. Grove, are simple techniques. A patient will come into the office, the pain generators are identified and if the person is a good candidate, injections to these painful areas are given. The hope is that tissue is regenerated and healing the damaged, pain causing tissue will hopefully keep the person from
having an unnecessary surgery.

Knee issues

  • A former football player with knee issues talks about his procedure at Joint Rehab and improvement in his walking and being able to function better. He had knee instability coming from his ACL.

Dr. Grove discusses muscular skeletal ultrasound, an imaging modality that allows doctors to look at moving tissue, ligaments, tendons, muscle etc., in real time. “Combined with a good hands-on physical exam, we can find the source of a patient’s pain and instability. Then we can use the healing cells in platelet rich plasma and stem cells and inject those areas.”

Too old for treatment

A patient in his late 90s: Dr. Grove talks about a gentleman in his late 90s who asked if he was too old for treatment. He was not too old. Age really doesn’t have much to do with it. We found research over the years suggesting if you have a good a concentration of platelets and stem cells, age really isn’t much of a factor.

This gentleman, in his late ’90s looked fantastic by the way, I was looking at his chart and he had a very typical story. Right knee pain, went to the doctor’s office got an x-ray. It showed some arthritis and he was told he was bone on bone. But he had a full range of motion, which tells me right away he’s not bone on bone, he’s walking around he’s a pretty active guy. I saw in ultrasound that he’s got good cartilage in that knee. So here is a gentlmen in his late 90s being told to get a knee rplacement he did not need.

Part 2

Dr. Grove describes the basic PRP or stem cell procedures.

A case of shoulder arthritis:

This person had some shoulder pain got an x-ray showing that they had some wearing down of the shoulder. When we did ultrasound exam and a proper hands on physical exam, we found the person’s pain was coming from outside of the shoulder joint. This is something that we see in a pretty active population. This person had some inflammation and a small tear in their pectoralis major muscle,
Using ultrasound we helped this person avoided unnecessary shoulder surgery.

Not resting after regenerative medicine injections

The number one reason people come back and say these injections have not really taken or working, I ask them if they are properly resting the area? Many times they say no, they got right back to their activity, like playing golf all day or doing a 10k run. If you’re too active too soon, th etreatments can be compromised and those sort of patients typically need a lot more treatments because they’re not giving themselves a proper rest period.

Oher reasons why injections, might not give you the results that you’re looking for is if you’re taking the wrong medications, things like non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs that block the inflammation that we need to jump start the healing process.

Oral steroids are very strong anti-inflammatories that will block that initial inflammation that we need to jump start the healing process.

Question regarding neck and shoulder

Patient was told they had terrible arthritis and will need a shoulder replacement. Their pain was so bad it radiated in the neck. Patient had PRP injection at another clinic and wondered if stem cell therapy may help. Person said shoulder not right since shingles vaccine. Sometimes a person will have issues if injection was put into the subacromial bursa. The person had multiple cortisone injections in shoulder and one in neck.