Adult Stem Cells For Tissue Regeneration

A fascinating new article, just published in the journal “Arthritis and Rheumatism” shows what our joint preservation clinic at the Centeno-Schultz Clinic and Regenerative Sciences have known for a while - that there is a definite relationship between pain and degeneration of one (or more) parts of the body, and the central nervous sysetm (your spinal cord).

To put the cart before the horse in this article, I’ll start with my conclusion:
Stem Cells as an alternative to traditional orthopedic surgeries, for conditions such as knee osteoarthritis, knee meniscus tears, hip arthritis and lumbar disc herniations, are likely an important step in treating fibromyalgia

In this study, it was chemically prooven that arthritis of a joint causes chemicals of inflammation (interluken 1B) to travel up nerves from the joint to the spinal cord.  There, they inflame structures in the back and “crosstalk” with nerves nearby, causing regional back pain as well.  What’s more, back pain and inflammation travels down nerves to joints and muscles causing pain there as well.

This has  profound implications for fibromyalgia.  Fibromyalgia is poorly understood by the medical community and ofter written off as some sort of psychiatric problem.  Providers, and often the lay public have a hard time understanding that one person can have chronic pain in so many places. 

Our Joint perservation perspective, now strengthened by this new research article, is that some sort of injury in the past, even a relatively minor one, resulted in inflammation which fed on itself and spread to multiple joints and places in the body.

So where do stem cells come in to play?  As an alternative to knee surgery, hip surgery, and shoulder surgery - to name but a few examples, stem cells facilitate a re-growth of tissue in a minimally invasive manner.  When a particular pain generator is treated, inflammation decreases. Both in the treated area, as well as areas upstream or downstream from the nerves connected to that area.  In conjunction with other treatments- like IMS and physicial therapy, a person’s Fibromyalgia can be treated with stem cells .