It’s time to change
Nearly 126 million people worldwide have suffered pain for the past three months. Among them, 40 million people undergo pain every day, and 20 million have severe pain that limits their routine activities.
Most people opt for standard traditional treatments such as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), opioids, physical therapy, corticosteroid injections, and surgeries to eliminate the pain. Unfortunately, these treatments provide relief only for a concise duration. And also may develop serious side effects in long-term use.
For example:
- NSAIDs and steroids promote joint cartilage loss
- Opioids prove to be too addictive
- NSAIDs increase the risk of heart attack, kidney failure, stroke, and gastrointestinal bleeding
- Corticosteroid injections increase the risk of infection, promote further degeneration of weakened tissues, and increase sugar levels in your body
- Surgeries also lead to more degeneration, followed by the possibility of joint replacement in five years
- Joint replacement increases the risk of infection, clotting, stroke, and heart attack
- Surgeries for knee ACL torn repair can result in severe arthritis in the future
- Even the lumbar fusion for low back pain proves to be ineffective
Hence, it is time to look for safer, better, and newer treatments. Here comes interventional non-surgical regenerative treatment to get rid of your ailments. This article aims to go through this branch of revolutionary medicine in detail.
What is interventional non-surgical regenerative orthopaedics?
Interventional non-surgical regenerative orthopaedics is a natural, innovative, and the best alternative to traditional treatment methods, including surgery. This field of medicine aims to treat various musculoskeletal injuries and degenerative conditions.
Unlike other treatment methods, non-surgical regenerative medicine uses your body’s healing cells to heal the damaged tissue and revive normal function naturally. The healing cells include platelets, growth factors, and stem cells. In regenerative medicine, these cells are derived from your body, concentrated, and delivered to the injury site for natural healing.
Who is Medica Stem Cells Clinic?
Medica Stem Cells is a non-surgical regenerative medicine centre that aims to relieve your pain permanently and get you back to the things you love as quickly as possible. At Medica Stem Cells Clinic, we specialise in creating personalised treatment plans backed by extensive published research according to your unique needs.
Our team is proud to work with the most advanced diagnostic tools, leaving no stone unturned. Your evaluation process with us may include CT Scans, MRI scans, X-Rays, and a complete medical history – in short, whatever it takes to get to the root of your symptoms. Once we have established the cause of your pain, we can offer a wide range of interventions to tackle it.
Today, Medica Stem Cells Clinic is the largest non-surgical regenerative medicine centre in Ireland, where more than 50,000 procedures have been performed as of 2022. This number anyway continues to increase every day. Our branches are in the UK, Ireland, India, the US and UAE.
What is Orthobiologics?
To know the meaning of the term ‘ortho biologics,’ let us break down this word into two: ‘ortho’ and ‘biologics.’ The term ‘ortho’ refers to the orthopaedic parts such as bones, tendons, joints, and muscles. Similarly, the term ‘biologics’ refers to the naturally extracted substances of the body that helps in healing orthopaedic injuries.
Remember that the term ‘biologics’ differs here from that used in the pharmaceutical sector. In this pharma sector, biologics refers to the prescription drugs prepared from living microbes or a component of a live microbe.
Orthobiologic treatment can help to promote natural self-healing if injected into the injured orthopaedic parts such as bones, tendons, joints, or muscles.
Orthobiologics are categorised into two types:
- Autologous
- Allogeneic
Autologous refers to the orthobiologic derived from the same patient, while allogeneic refers to the orthobiologic extracted from another patient.
Examples of the use of orthobiologics
Here is the list of common examples of the use of orthobiologics in our everyday medical practice:
- Suppose you have a partial rotator cuff tear. Despite following physical therapy and consuming medications, this tear does not heal. In such cases, the doctor extracts the orthobiologics from your body, harvests them, and injects them precisely into the torn regions with the help of ultrasound guidance.
- Imagine you get into a car crash where your neck joint gets injured. They are ‘facets’ that do not heal by themselves. In such cases, the doctor performs ortho biological therapy with the help of X-ray guidance into the injured facet neck joints. This ortho-biologic treatment will assist in healing the cartilage.
- Suppose you get an immense rotator cuff tear that requires urgent surgery. Even in such cases, the doctor implants an orthobiologic to help heal your injured tendon.
People already have natural substances that can heal the affected region by themselves. With the help of orthobiologic treatment, we stimulate that healing mechanism so that the natural substances can heal the damaged region non-surgically. This therapeutic approach is called ‘Interventional Orthopaedics’ or ‘Interventional Orthobiologics’.
The list of the body’s natural healing agents used for ortho-biologic treatment in Medica Stem Cells Clinic includes:
- Bone marrow stem cells, especially mesenchymal stem cells that are vital for in BMAC (bone marrow aspirate concentrate)
- Adipose-derived stem cells obtained by SVF
- Enhanced Platelet-rich plasma
- Cytokines, growth factors and stem cell-specific factors, like GELSOLIN, G-CSF (granulocyte-colony stimulating factor) and SCGF-ß (hematopoietic stem cell growth factor-beta) used in Autologous conditioned serum treatment – GOLDIC
In their journal article, Cotter et al., 2018 revealed that orthobiologics restored cartilage ailments and accelerated the development of new cartilage. Hence, there was a significant improvement in clinical outcomes. Spasovski et al., 2018 reported considerable improvement in pain score, range of movement, and quality of life in their patients who had undergone orthobiologic therapy.
Stafford et al., 2020 reported in their review that orthobiologics deliver promising results for various orthopaedic ailments. Pak et al., 2018 reported that orthobiologic products can attach themselves to the affected region and regenerate cartilage naturally and quickly. Makaram et al., 2020 reported that orthobiologics therapy could promote recovery and revive function by enhancing the natural healing mechanism.
Why non-surgical regenerative treatment is a suitable alternative to surgery??
Surgery is often suggested for patients experiencing orthopaedic issues once other conventional medicine methods have been exhausted. However, orthobiologic therapy is something that, in many cases, can be an option before going the surgical route, and it has the following benefits:
- This treatment is natural since it involves using natural substances directly from the patient’s body
- This procedure does not involve the use of general anaesthesia
- There are no adverse side effects
- The patient does not have to undergo extensive workup before or prolonged hospital readmissions following this therapy
- No need for post-rehabilitation sessions
- Doctors perform this procedure under strict sterile conditions
- Long-lasting relief from symptoms
- No strong medications are required after the procedure to manage the after-treatment period
- Use of sophisticated and precise image guidance for easy targeting of the injury location
- Availability of on-site orthobiologics lab with sophisticated processing techniques to get superior orthobiologic solutions for the best results
However, remember that orthobiologic treatments ARE NOT generally covered by insurance. Instead, you will have to pay from your pocket. Still, this procedure is less expensive than other treatments and has much shorter downtime than surgery.
Overview of our non-surgical regenerative treatment procedures
- Enhanced PRP Treatment
- Stem Cell Treatment
- GOLDIC treatment – Autologous conditioned serum treatment
- Prolotherapy
Enhanced Platelet-rich plasma (Enhanced PRP) therapy
When the degree of tissue damage goes beyond the body’s natural ability to self-healing, your body should secrete growth factors. Doctors can insert them in the affected area if they are not secreted adequately. This is where Enhanced Platelet-rich plasma treatment helps!
In this Enhanced PRP procedure, the doctor will extract blood from your body and centrifuge it to get separated into multiple layers. One of the three layers will be the Enhanced PRP layer which will be taken out and injected directly into the damaged area.
Stem cell therapy
Stem cells are primitive non-specialised cells that can develop into any type of specific cell by constant division and cell propagation. Hence, the treatment utilising stem cells can be a life-changer for patients, especially those with severe degenerative arthritis.
In this procedure, doctors extract stem cells, including mesenchymal cells, from bone marrow aspirate and adipose (fatty) tissues. After harvesting and processing the stem cells, they will be introduced into the affected tissue for quicker healing and regrowth.
GOLDIC therapy – Autologous conditioned serum treatment
GOLDIC refers to ‘Gold Induced Cytokines’. It involves the contact between specially designed gold particles and the patient’s endogenous blood cells externally to produce gelsolin proteins, growth factors, and cytokines. The gelsolin proteins can then develop stem cells into cartilage. Furthermore, they can reduce inflammation and activate your natural healing mechanism without side effects.
In this procedure, doctors extract the venous blood from the patient and place it inside specially designed tubes with gold particles. Next, they are incubated for 24 hours for gelsolin production. After 24 hours, centrifugation is performed to get the enhanced serum in concentrated form, and then it is injected into the affected region for quick recovery.
Prolotherapy
Prolotherapy is a safe and non-surgical procedure involving injecting an irritant into the affected region. This step will increase your blood flow, heal the damaged cells, and promote the new growth of healthy cells. Dextrose is used as an irritant in this procedure.
Potential complications
Non-surgical regenerative treatment might cause only mild, temporary side effects at the sample collection and injection site, such as slight pain and swelling, which subsides without additional treatment.
Medica Stem Cells clinic has published multiple research works where we keep tracking our patients who had stem cell therapy, Enhanced PRP therapy, and GOLDIC therapy to date for any complications. However, they did not show complications other than those mentioned above in a few cases. It’s due to proper non-surgical regenerative treatment protocols we have in place to prevent complications, such as any risk of infection at the injection site, during and after the procedures. All our procedures are always carried out under strict sterile conditions to minimise risk, and proper protocol is followed for every procedure.
Areas that can be treated
The customised regenerative protocols can heal damage to your body’s tendons, muscles, ligaments, cartilage, and nerves using your body’s natural healing agents without surgery. Here is the list of the most common medical conditions we treat:
- Shoulder treatments – Arthritis, Osteoarthritis, Rotator Cuff Tendinitis, Rotator Cuff Tear, Labral Tear or Degeneration, Shoulder Impingement, Frozen Shoulder, SLAP lesion, ACJ, SCJ & C-C Ligament, and Anterior & Posterior Band of IGHL
- Knee treatments – Arthritis, Osteoarthritis, Patellar Tendinitis, Medial Collateral Ligament/Lateral Collateral Ligament, Sprain or Partial Tear of the Posterior Cruciate Ligament, Bone on Bone Cartilage Wear and Tear, Meniscus Tear, Cartilage Defects, Tendinopathy
- Elbow treatments – Arthritis, Osteoarthritis, Bursitis, Golfer’s Elbow, Tennis Elbow
- Ankle and Foot treatments – Arthritis, Osteoarthritis, Ankle Sprains, Plantar Fasciitis, Ligament Sprain or Tear, Achilles Tendinopathy
- Hip treatments – Arthritis, Bursitis, Osteoarthritis, Tendinopathy, Labral/Labrum Tear
- Hand and wrist treatments – arthritis, Thumb Osteoarthritis, Trigger Thumb & Finger, De Quervains Tenosynovitis, Radial tenosynovitis, Gamers Thumb
- Chronic back pain
- Hair and skin problems
Is the interventional non-surgical regenerative treatment right for you?
Anyone at any age who suffers from pain or any ailment due to injury or ageing can be the right candidate to undergo non-surgical regenerative treatment. Even after trying other treatment methods, such as activity modification, medications, steroid injections, and physical therapy, you may not experience a significant improvement in pain. So, exploring safer and non-surgical regenerative therapy for any orthopaedic condition that keeps you from doing routine activities always makes sense.
If you expect a treatment that does not hinder your routine life, has minimal side effects without any significant risk, and you are not ready for surgery, try the cost-effective regenerative medicine. Surgery can often be avoided or delayed in many orthopaedic conditions. Moreover, this treatment is entirely natural and free from significant complications. The best part is that there is no age limit – excellent news for older people, who are often limited to specific conventional treatment methods due to the risks involved in some procedures.
Visit our non-surgical regenerative medicine centre – Medica Stem Cells Clinic – for direct consultation with our specialists, where our orthopaedic surgeons and doctors will diagnose the root cause of your condition and offer a personalised plan of care for a long-lasting improvement in your condition. Please bear in mind that the success of the procedures varies to some extent in every individual based on the severity of the condition being treated, the patient’s age, and overall health condition.
Medica stem cells Clinic is here to help
Our Medica Stem Cells Clinic, the non-surgical regenerative medicine centre in Ireland, is proud to offer revolutionary regenerative treatment for all your orthopaedic conditions. The treatments aim to reduce pain and inflammation, increase joint function and mobility, and prove to be a suitable alternative to surgery, which often involves a prolonged recovery period and painful post-rehabilitation.
Will interventional non-surgical regenerative medicine work for you? Visit our non-surgical regenerative medicine centre – Medica Stem Cells Clinic – for a direct consultation to determine whether you are a qualified candidate. Opt for interventional non-surgical regenerative orthopaedics medicine to get back on your feet.
