Adult Stem Cells For Tissue Regeneration

“If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail” 
This is common saying in the healthcare profession that today has become so specialized that practitioners do not often look beyond their own specialized knowledge base for diagnosis and treatment.  As a result, going to see a particular type of specialist often sends you down a particular treatment pathway.

One common example of this is treatment of a lumbar disc herniation.  As a disc degenerates, the soft inner gel in the disc can leak back into the spinal canal. This is known as disc herniation, or herniated disc. Once inside the spinal canal, the herniated disc material then puts pressure on the nerve, causing pain to radiate down the nerve leading to sciatica or leg pain (from a herniated disc in the lumbar or lower back) or arm pain (from a herniated disc in the neck).

Far and away, the recommended treatment for this is surgery. This can mean removal of the entire disc and fusing the backbones (discectomy and fusion) or trimming away part of the disc (micro discectomy).  Either way, the process can be painful, involve a significant recovery period, and result in other problems later.  It also makes little sense to trim away the supporting fibers of a disc, when this further weakens it and sets it up for further herniation.
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As the video below illustrates, autologous mesenchymal stem cells are a promising alternative to back surgery for a herniated disc