Get your body to heal itself | Anthony Galea | TEDxIUM

I haven't rehearsed this part of my TED talk then you'll know why in a second I'm going to take this needle and I'm going to stab my finger and I'm going to take this tiny drop blood and place it on this slide and what you'll see even though this drop of blood is extremely small within it exists an entire universe our blood is made up of a wide variety of cells ranging from red blood cells but carry oxygen to the working muscle the white blood cells that protect us from infection to platelets that heal our wounds and the plasma which carry these important cells as well as nutrients proteins and hormones along a complex highway of blood vessels to every tissue in our body I am a sports medicine physician and I try to bring physical change to reality in over the last 25 years I've dealt with a wide variety of sport and recreational injuries 25 years ago as a young physician the treatment focused around what is known as the rice formula standing for rest ice compression and elevation we also had certain medications at our disposal such as the anti-inflammatory drugs homeopathic sand injections like cortisone though it perplexed me that these therapists had this magic spray that would cure all injuries on tact with the skin which one you never could get my hands on however the results were short-lived and the side effects of the medications ranged from bleeding stomach ulcers through up short tendons due to the pressure from my athletes both professional and recreational children their parents coaches who just wanted another way to heal and another way to get back to what they love to do what if there was another way an alternative way a way which would utilize the power of our own bodies to heal a way which would minimize the use of medications and improve recovery time could we you and I make our own medication can we become our own pharmaceutical company thus the birth of a new field known as regenerative medicine based on the three fundamental pillars the messengers are signaling proteins scaffolds and stem cells due to the pressure from my athletes to final alternative way in early 2000 I started taking a little bit of blood and I would put it in a centrifuge for a small amount of time and in a certain speed in order to concentrate these healing cells known as platelets I then would take the super concentrated load of platelets and injected into the damaged tissue such as muscle tendon and ligaments these messenger proteins or signaling proteins are also known as growth factors cytokines and hormones and they're produced by blood cells and exist within the plasma but collectively they work like a construction crew some are plumbers electricians bricklayers any response to injury they go to work repairing damaged muscle tendon and ligaments and would also control the inflammatory process itself and do and the results were quite interesting I got healing in half the time minimal scarring earlier return to play with minimal side effects I was obtaining results with this form of treatment that I never did with any other form of treatment in the above example we see one of the world's top figure skaters in 2009 just before the Winter Olympic Games he sustained a small tear in his calf muscle which you can see by the arrow behind me normally such an injury would prevent the athlete from performing well at such a competition however by taking a little bit of blood extracting out the concentrated platelets that you could see the needle marked acts impacting it into the tear the muscle went on to heal then he placed in the top five during those olympic games however the messengers were these signaling proteins through the platelets have limitations onion bob baer we heard this morning was one of the world's top ten mogul skiers she now lives and works just outside the Monaco area one of the injuries during her career was a tear of a tendon just below the kneecap known as the patellar tendon you can see a big black hole in her tendon now the question is was could I repair this tendon but using the platelets well the answer no the reason if I took the platelet load and injected it in to that hole it would just keep going right through there was nothing to hold it in place long enough to repair the tendon I needed a scaffold of some sort something that would hold these workers in place long enough to repair the tendon but doing a little process known as a micro liposuction and taking a little bit of fat processing that fat and injecting it back into the tendon I have my scaffold so you can see here some live footage the needles going in the hole and I'm filling up the space with the fat then I'm going to take my platelets I can inject it in the scaffold and that scaffold will hold the platelets in long enough to repair the tendon so this opened up a whole new world the possibilities that I was able to treat such as this is a tear and the rotator cuff small tendon in the shoulder I can now put a scaffold seed it with the platelets and repair that tendon the third essential pillar for healing or stem cells these small cells are undifferentiated but have the ability to specialise into other forms of tissue such as bone and cartilage fat muscle heart blood vessels and herb they're easily obtained from our bone marrow or fat but exist throughout the body however these stem cells do other functions that many people don't know about according to Dr Kaplan from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland Ohio one of the foremost stem cell pioneers in the world he states that these stem cells through other functions that their powerful little pharmaceutical plants producing healing signaling proteins that direct the reparative process where do these stem cells come from well as I mentioned before from boomer on fat but according to Dr Kaplan these mesenchymal stem cells also have their origins in another small cell the parasite these are little cells that wrap around every blood vessel in our body but during times of injury they come off and go right to the injured site and they create a wall and on one side of the wall but keep out harmful cells produced by our body that want attack the injured site why because the breakdown of proteins is seen as foreign and on the other side of the wall but produce these healing signals that direct the reparative process dr. Kaplan coined the term MSC's which stands for the zinc mill stem cells but it goes on to state that we should not only think of these cells for their stemness but also as powerful medicinal signaling cells that direct B repair to process itself now let's go back to our mogul skier Anya in her case I took some stem cells from her bone marrow by drilling a small hole in the back they had I concentrated these stem cells I then took a little bit of fat for the scaffold but we know now that there's other functions within the fat corn and dr. Kaplan they're actually healing cells and then I took sari messenger proteins and the signaling proteins from the platelets and injected and denon just the footnote this hearing me here is not onions okay her knee is much stronger and nicer to look at yeah Anya went on to do quite well over the next few years and competed successfully with this powerful Dryad of signaling proteins scaffolds and stem cells I was able to treat a whole new list of injuries and soon I had some of the best athletes in the world asking me to help with their debilitating injuries however in my zeal to heal and being naive and careless about some of the regulatory issues in North America I found myself in regulatory hot water over the next few years they were very difficult accusations of healing by doping criticism by my peers the media and my own professional call had swirled around me it was becoming extremely difficult to maintain my focus however I continued to treat and observe the positive results a new way to heal I believe that this this process would revolutionize the sports medicine future treatment of the future to come a new way to heal which I call human tailored biologics you and I all of us one day will have the ability to heal many of our own illness big pharmaceutical companies and each and every one of us will become partners in a new direction making medications for us by us to treat not just only sports medicine injuries but a wide variety of disease states utilizing the power of our unique genetic programming inherent ability to heal there will come a time when we can date stem cells out of us and deposit into a bank account such as in Monaco it would draw them in the future to help heal ourselves as the Good Book says for the life of a creature is in the blood and this is my small idea worth sharing thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 314,130

Rating: 4.8430181 out of 5

Keywords: ted x, Sports, ted, Medicine, tedx talks, ted talk, TEDxTalks, English, tedx talk, Health, tedx, ted talks, Biology, Monaco

Id: trq-sJfiCKw

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 02 2014