Stem Cells and Prolozone: Alternatives to Joint Replacement, Drugs and Surgery

what we'll talk about today is something that I've been studying for actually many years I started doing Prolotherapy about 17 years ago and at least in my life it's experienced a quite a bit of change because now we're doing it with ultrasound and we'll show you some data about that at this point in time injections that are done without ultrasound in my opinion and the opinion of a number of people I know are not the best injections you can see the tissues you can see where you're putting the needle you can see where the damage is you can see where you want to go you can see the injections going in you can see them spread around in the area and you can be precise in what you're doing and the chance of making a mistake in putting the needle in the wrong place is very very minimal well what we're talking about is the human musculoskeletal system I know that all of you have one and sometimes you get reminded of that on a daily basis I've certainly been reminded myself many times and over the years realized you know this is a universal problem there isn't anybody who gets to be the age of 60 70 80 or even 40 50 even 30 or 20 who doesn't run into problems and some of them are very serious and some of them won't go away you see some of these horrible accidents that occur in the middle of a sports field you know like the guy's leg breaks you know he crashes into the wall and he's gone for six months these happen to normal people too and I see lots of them after car accidents after falls in the house after any number of things and they can change your life you know I've had times myself when I was having some low back pain which I don't have right now I hope I never have it again you get out of bed in the morning and you can hardly move and you crawl into the shower and hope that that hot water is going to help you and usually it helps you a little bit but not always enough and it can be surprising it can come out of nowhere I didn't do anything and now I got pain what did I do but what you did was live until that period of time doing whatever you were doing with your body and finally that part of your body decided to give out pain can be acute like a sprain or a fracture or the ones were probably more interested in tonight Are The Chronic ones and these can go on for months they can go on for years frozen shoulder can go on for months and months and a lot of times people don't know what they have the Pain's there and what is it they may get an x-ray the X-ray doesn't show they may see a a doctor the doctor doesn't know what that is either the MRI may not show it the CT scan may not show it maybe the physical therapist can figure out what it is when you go to see them but it can be complicated and a lot of times the location of the pain is not the location of the injury that's very typical in orthopedic problems that it hurts here but the damage is here how do you figure that out I was kind of shocked when I got this little piece of data but it's really not surprising because orthopedic problems are Universal so the biggest expense in medicine is not heart surgery it's not kidney transplantation it's not dialysis it's orthopedic medicine 800 billion dollars a year if you look at all of the things that are involved it's not just joint Replacements not just x-rays MRIs CTS it's all that physical therapy it's all the other things involved the crutches everything that people do related to this kind of injury and the multiplicity of drugs that people take which by the way create other medical problems which we'll talk about so one thing leads to another arthroscopic knee surgery is the most commonly performed Orthopedic procedure in this country a million a year and interestingly enough I have an article that says that it doesn't work and it's still the most popular procedure and I Know It Works in some people and I know in other people it really doesn't work and in a lot of other people it leads to the eventual need for a new knee because when they do surgery they're taking something out piece of cartilage piece of bone the ligament something's coming out and then the anatomy is different and the body doesn't always get used to that so it sometimes sets you down the road of further degeneration especially with the drugs people take 200 000 hip replacements a year 500 000 knee Replacements a year not small change and this is what we see this is the thing that I've been concentrating on lately because it's so evident this dwindling spiral what happens to people as they get older why do they get chubby why do they get heart disease why do they get diabetes why why why this is what's doing it they have pain somewhere and pain stops you from moving and movement is health if you can't move you can't be healthy so what happens people get tired because they can't exercise I have patients that go they have to go into the water every day you know two hours of Surfing every day or they feel terrible that's their life they need that so you get fatigued and you sit around and what happens when you get tired how do you get energy you eat something and it might be an apple or a banana or one of our strawberries or it might be something else like a donut or 10 Donuts so they gain weight then when you gain weight you get high blood pressure and when you gain weight you get diabetes and when you get diabetes you get heart attacks and strokes and you get medication because this is the United States of America you know you're going to get medication and they don't make you move any better the medicines don't make you move better they don't fix the problem so now you have more immobility then you get dementia not you folks but people do you get dementia because you can't move in one of the major treatments of dementia is exercise it's in all the Articles these days exercise your brain exercise your body the more you walk the higher your IQ will be a lot of studies then there's cancer well cancer is pretty common 40 percent of the adult population will get a non-skin cancer at some time in their lives this is not small time cancer this is breast and prostate and colon and all the other stuff 40 percent of people in this country will get that kind of cancer and it's worse when you're overweight the risk of colon cancer goes up the risk of breast cancer goes up the risk of kidney cancer goes up and a few others with overweight the risk of esophageal cancer with obesity is five times what it would be otherwise it's the biggest one for that and last but not least the quality of life declines people don't feel good how do you feel I don't feel good if you're on 10 medications I guarantee you don't feel good and they contribute to that problem so we need to do something about orthopedic problems because that often is the first thing that sets off this whole Cascade of disease people don't want to sit in chairs all day long they don't want to be in wheelchairs they don't want to be using crutches they don't want to be immobile they don't want to be unable to drive their car they want to move everybody wants to move but a lot of people can't so osteoarthritis is the main diagnosis I guess and that gives you pain where do you get it knees hips lower back anybody here who's never had lower back pain there's a hand I've had it four times and I don't mean little lower back pain I mean really lower back pain that was bothering me a lot and lasted a long time so long that you think it's not going to go away like four months you know that's chronic and luckily for me it did go away but I had to work on it neck can hurt fingers can hurt anything can hurt everything can hurt and what's really going on with osteoarthritis is not that the bones are falling apart that's what everybody thinks about and talks about is bones and it's not the bones osteoarthritis is coming because the cartilage in the joint that acts as a supportive tissue is degenerating so here's a a healthy hip nice and smooth and here's an unhealthy hip where the cartilage has degenerated and what happens as a consequence of that is the anatomy screwed up the bones don't slide over each other like they should and you get these spurs forming from the bone and you get inflammation you get fluid sometimes you get pain but the pain is not coming so much from the bone it's coming from the other tissues connected with that joint cartilage can have a lot of pain I know because some of our injections we hit the cartilage when they have pain bone can have pain too but the other tissues can all be very painful the ligaments can hurt and tendons can hurt and those are the areas that really run into trouble first degeneration comes from injuries football basketball auto accidents falling down overuse like running I was a runner for 40 years probably a big mistake but I think I would have done it over again anyway because these things are fun you know you want to do them muscle imbalances like flexors versus extensors if you have one area that's stronger than the other and is pulling on the other it creates an imbalance in the joint so the joint is no longer having forces going in all directions it has forces going in One Direction because of that the cartilage starts to deteriorate bad posture well I know nobody here has bad posture but I see that sometimes and they'll sit up straight stand up straight tuck it in you know be like this like in the military but a lot of people do slouch and that's creates a promise not just that you're like this and it sets you up for neck problems and low back problems but you can't breathe because the lungs are being pushed in by the stomach and if you weigh too much that makes it worse so this lady should have some instruction obesity Alters posture there can be developmental joint deformity sometimes patients can't come in and say why did this happen to me why did it just happen to one hip and not the other well it could be that the one hip was a little bit not perfect at Birth and then over years and years and years it started to degenerate when the other one did not but there can be other reasons people can favor one side over the other when there's an imbalance of things and what physical therapists are always trying to do and chiropractors are always trying to do is create that balance bring it back again because when things are off it just leads you down the road the wrong way genetics yeah sure osteoarthritis can be genetic can also be nutritional so it's better to stay away from the foods that promote arthritis I shouldn't say that they cause arthritis although I've seen people we have half a dozen people with rheumatoid arthritis autoimmune inflammatory disease that went away with no medication meaning the pain went away because they change their diets to eliminate sugar and Grains and dairy and some of them became totally vegans and that kind of diet reduces pain no question about it I've seen it many times I've seen it in myself I get up out of a movie theater after watching the movie for two hours and I'm so stiff I can hardly walk and then I say what did you eat yesterday and the day before and the day before and by gosh it was Christmas and New Year's and was all the bad stuff so instantly I stop all these things and two days later my pain is gone I'm not stiff anymore and that hasn't just happened to me once it's happened to me many times and my wife says I told you anti-inflammatory drugs what's the drug for arthritis it's going to be an NSAID anti-inflammatory non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug that's what NSAID means and it's uh ibuprofen it's Aleve it's a Motrin it's Advil it's all of those guys there's a whole bunch of them they're over the counter now right so they're safe they're not safe they're very unsafe I've seen numerous people go into the hospital with gastrointestinal bleeding because they took too much Motrin it's very very common there's been articles saying that those drugs cost 15 000 deaths a year fifteen thousand that was ten years ago so who knows what's going on now but those are dangerous drugs they inflame the stomach they cause gastritis they cause bleeding by the way if you're on those things because you have to take Motrin 1200 milligrams a day the spirits should help you we use this thing called IGG protect it's a colostrum formulation that tends to coat the stomach and reduce the inflammation that these drugs cause and it's very safe I actually take some of this myself just to uh be nice to my stomach but I don't I don't take Motrin and these drugs interfere with healing one of the things we tell people if we get Prolotherapy or any of these other things that we do don't take Motrin or Aleve or any of them for at least two weeks and if it's stem cells at least a month or two because they will get in the way of the inflammatory process that heals the tissue that's how it works one word about osteoporosis which has very little to do with this except people worry about it and they have pain and they think well this is my osteoporosis giving me the pain it isn't osteoporosis does not cause pain unless something breaks and it's the thinning of the bones due to the loss of calcium has nothing to do with joints nothing and it's reversible so we treat osteoporosis all the time women can get a bone density past the age of 65 every other year Medicare will pay for it men they don't want to pay for it unless you can prove they already have it but guys get osteoporosis too and you can reverse it by optimizing vitamin D calcium magnesium staying away from sugar and alcohol and cut down your coffee and exercise osteoporosis is reversible with exercise and hormones strong strong treatment people do not like being on bisphosphonate drugs at least the people we see because they cause problems they cause problems in your teeth so if the dentist works on you and you're on bisphosphonates they won't pull your tooth even if it needs it because they know it's not going to heal and I had a patient a few months ago fractured this bone just walking and she'd been on bisphosphonates that I gave her five years ago for her osteoporosis so it gives you more bone that can be more brittle there was no trauma connected with them it's in the literature it's not common but it happens so again a lot of Orthopedic type pain is not from arthritis it's myofascial what does myofascial mean it means muscle it's a fancy word for muscle so you can have a problem with muscle then it feels like you have arthritis it hurts to move but it's not the bone and it won't show up on an X-ray and that's in kind of an important thing to know that x-rays are normally done frequently done because the patient saw the doctor and the doctor says let's get an x-ray and the X-ray shows you something that's not normal which everybody has something like that that's not the cause of the pain the pain may be coming from a strained muscle or an inflamed muscle or a tendon or a ligament and you got to go after those things ligaments connect one bone to another so medial collateral ligament is this part of the knee and there's ligaments for every joint in your body those ligaments stabilize it and support it with movement and they're very very strong but they can degenerate a cute problem tendonitis so you can have Achilles tendinitis you can have biceps tendinitis acute problems happen quickly and usually resolve quickly that's not really what we want to talk about because tendinosis is far more common than usually more significant tendinosis is a gradual deterioration of a tendon a tendon is the part of the muscle that attaches to the Bone so you've got the biceps muscle and then you get the biceps tendon that connects that muscle to the Bone you can see it on the ultrasound it looks different because it's thicker it has more striations and it's far stronger than the muscle the ligaments are very strong you can rupture any of these things and a rupture is generally and this is one of the other things is you have problems going on from year to year to year and you don't feel it if you did an ultrasound or an MRI you would see it on there because you can see gradual deterioration but if it's not hurting you you're not going to know to do that but we do studies on people no pain here no pain here and you look at this with ultrasound and it's not normal you can see that the tendons degenerating the ligaments degenerating the bone is starting to separate from the tendon or vice versa and then eventually it gets to such a point that the patient now has pain and that usually means it's Advanced pretty good doesn't mean you need surgery but it's not an acute problem it didn't happen last week it's been happening for years and years so here's tendinosis what we see a lot of and it's called tendonitis a lot because tendonitis sounds nice but it's really a tendinosis Achilles tendinosis is gradual people come in with enlarged and thickened Achilles tendons have trouble walking and you can inject it and fix it it doesn't usually need surgery there's tennis elbow there's golfer's elbow on the other side that's tendinosus it's not a joint problem it's the tendon problem where it's gotten thick and it's gotten degenerated and it hurts couple pitfalls like I said people get x-rays now they get MRIs now they get CTS they get all that stuff done right it's fancy but it often doesn't tell you the truth it always finds a problem a problem that it finds is often not the cause of the pain one of my back problems a few years ago it was killing me it went on for months I said I got to get an MRI that's going to tell me what's going on and the MRI showed that one of the discs down here was actually the wrong disc was pushed out from the bone so I said oh maybe that's it that's that disc that's pushed out kind of extruded is giving me all this horrible pain in my butt going down my leg well it really had nothing to do with my pain my pain was resolved with some physical therapy and massage therapy and that kind of stuff and it went away and a few years later I had a CT scan done for some other reason I don't even remember what it was but the disc that was screwed up in my lower back was no longer screwed up it had resolved it went away all by itself and that happens a lot with discs and the literature says that a ruptured disc will often improve all by itself in two or three months it can get much smaller and the pain can go away what do they tell you these days with a disc don't lie in bed go walk don't stop moving move if you can and then folks do something they do an operation for something that was found on the CT or the MRI and they didn't get better they say why did I do that procedure why I have a cousin who has had nine back surgeries nine back surgeries and he's still suffering from the effects of all of that which has gone on for the last 15 years at least and it's not going to go away entirely we've got Hardware in his spine he's got all these things happening and once you start the surgical route sometimes it just stays there you can't reverse it sometimes it's one thing leading to another leading to another because every operation that alters Anatomy is going to alter function and if this area has changed this area is going to change to be able to accommodate it and this area is going to change and maybe your ankle is going to change and maybe your neck's going to change so one thing can lead to another so prevention is a big deal and stretching's a big deal I'm sure all of you are stretching every day and it's nice to move from one stretch to another try and figure out what in your body is not stretching and those are the things you can focus on and if you can't figure it out go to somebody who can Jackie's very good at telling people where to stretch so you know it's good to have that information because if you do it on a regular basis and one of the reasons I got hurt was because I was working out like a madman and I was so strong and so well built and so everything that I didn't stretch and then I got hurt because I didn't stretch muscles get tight they get injured balls are good for stretching too you know if you can't figure out exactly how to do it you get one of these a tennis ball or one of these other Sky balls or something and you put it against the wall and you rub up and down on that ball and you will feel tender points there those are your tender points and they will stretch and they won't be tender anymore if you do it enough and you can do next you can do backs You Can Do shoulders you can do almost everything with these balls massage therapy important physical therapy important trigger points can be eliminated with therapy and trigger points can be there otherwise for years really a trigger point is a part of a muscle that's gotten really tight and sometimes you can see it on an ultrasound and what happens is blood can't get in because the muscles tight and waste products can't get out so you kind of have a little sludge pot sitting in the middle of your muscle and it's not getting energy it's not getting oxygen it's not getting nutrition and it's in pain and it gives you pain and it goes elsewhere like I said a trigger point can be here and give you pain here and they can recur one of my big problems with my back was this muscle down here the soleus muscle was giving me pain up here the Soleus didn't hurt me how can that be when the guy started working on it it was exquisitely painful I said what the heck is that he says that's this giving you this common common everybody has trigger points you all have trigger points if we you know went after you real hard we'd find one we won't do that okay diet we talked about a little bit again this is good for repetition Sugar's the worst dairy products are second wheat is third other grains may be there too and they increase pain and the increased stiffness in just about everybody so if you're having a problem with pain I would consider making a dietary change and see what happens you will know within two to four weeks these are the medications again they give you gastrointestinal bleeding they give you high blood pressure because they retain sodium so if you're on Advil and you're on a blood pressure medicine and your blood pressure goes up don't add another medication for blood pressure get off the Advil and see what happens and stay out of those restaurants that have salt all through their Foods that goes on it's ubiquitous it's all over the place around here and probably everywhere in the country restaurants Salt their food so they'll taste better and it'll raise your pressure heart failure can come from Advil liver disease can come and kidney disease can come isn't that enough to make this something that's no longer over the counter but it's over the counter you can have all you want don't worry about it but worry about it steroids are used a lot we use them even ourselves sometimes for injections for a severe acute injury injury pain but they're not really good for you steroids Kenalog will reduce inflammation but they do not promote healing they actually block healing so the inflammation that normally is used to heal something is blocked by the steroid and it doesn't heal just the pain gets less but 10 years down the road someone who's been getting steroids on the football field for instance like they always give these guys maybe they maybe they don't anymore they probably still do it degenerates the tissues it degenerates the tendons and the ligaments so they will get hurt down the road and they will get arthritis down the road largely because of the steroids they got and steroids will give you cataracts diabetes weight gain osteoporosis infections Etc narcotics that's when the pain really gets bad or it can be a routine medication when you leave the hospital after an operation probably every patient who gets a new hip or a new knee or a new whatever is sent home from the hospital on narcotics and it gets repeated and it gets repeated and it's the most common cause of narcotic addiction in this country by doctors and it's really common and I've read that it's the most common cause of addiction period more than growing up in the wrong school or being with a you know the wrong group of guys avoid narcotics Tylenol helps it's not very strong and it's the most common cause of suicide in Great Britain so it also is toxic and over-the-counter and you can have all you want don't have it although we use it for a few days at a time natural products we use for pain and these work there's an item called inflacare plus we have has boswella has turmeric which reduces pain cayenne pepper there's another one osteovantive has undenatured collagen so it helps build tissue and some call iso-alpha acids from hops anti-inflammatory and there's another one we've been using mainly for autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis this SPM active is the extracts from fish oils pretty good for reducing inflammation virtually no side effects what about surgery surgery is a complex deal like I said there's a lot of joint Replacements going on arthroscopy is even more common but they'll do backs and necks all done under anesthesia it's almost always general anesthesia what happens to people who've had general anesthesia they don't remember the operation they don't remember what they did two days before the operation they may not remember for a month or two it really depends how many operations you've had and how susceptible you are and how much stuff they give you there can be a prolonged recovery time shoulder surgery it's going to take you months no matter what they do it's going to take months knees are supposed to be fairly quick but they often are not hips are the best if you're going to have to have a replacement of a joint do a hip foreign but I've seen so many people with ongoing problems you know surgery is going to fix it and it doesn't fix it sometimes it makes them even worse than they were one guy we did for a knee for stem cells had had knee replacement surgery and was miserable he couldn't move he was pain all the time and we did stem cells in his knee after he had had a second surgery to fix the first surgery which also didn't work the stem cells have made a difference because he had nerve entrapment he had things out of place and it has made a difference for him but surgery gone wrong can be extremely complex just like in my cousin who's had nine surgeries on his back infection can also occur I have a patient with that right now spine surgery two years later she has an abscess in the iliopsoas muscle draining pus and the abscess tracks all the way back to here where she had her spine surgery two years ago no one's figured out yet how that happened but she's got it and that's difficult so steroids we talked about they don't heal damaged tissues they have undesirable side effects okay all right this is what we go after first we do ultrasound evaluations on everything people can come in with MRIs and x-rays you want to see whatever we can see it's always useful but we use ultrasound to see what's going on and you can see problems in joints it doesn't show the bones that well but it shows the connective tissues very well so you can see muscles and ligaments and tendons you can see joint areas quite well it's very useful thing and it's simple all you need is a portable machine you take it in the room slide it on the patient in five minutes you got your story and there's no x-ray there's no exposure to x-ray so here's a meniscus for instance medial collateral ligament meniscus right here this is a normal one and this is one that's extruded it's pushed out you can see that on ultrasound and a lot of times that causes problems causes pain I hope you can see this can we hit the lights for a minute just for a minute I don't know how well this works let's see or do I have the lights I have the lights all right so here's a meniscus that's normal can you see that indentation there this white line is bone on both sides the femur and the tibia and this is the medial collateral ligament that's going over the meniscus and this is the meniscus it's sort of a triangle shaped object and that's another meniscus from an unlucky person and you can see how that meniscus is extruded it's pushed out and the collateral ligament that runs over it is pushed out it's not straight across anymore so this is pretty easy to see that's an ultrasound picture you don't see that on x-ray meniscus doesn't show on an X-ray MRI should see it but Radiologists are often looking at different things although they should see a meniscus sometimes they miss stuff going on in tendons and ligaments meniscus is a piece of cartilage between the femur this bone and the tibia this bone and it acts as a cushion and a stabilizer of the joint so without a meniscus you would be bone on bone so to speak and you wouldn't be moving very well so it's very important to have it and when people have knee surgery what are they working on usually a torn meniscus that's usually what it is and what do they do with it they take out the tear they're not putting anything in they're taking out tissue which again handles the pain but sets the knee up for further degeneration over the next few years and joint replacement 10 or 20 years later the other thing you can do with ultrasound because it's so easy to do is dynamic testing which means the patient is moving and you're looking for changes in tendons and ligaments and muscles to see the quality of these movements and it can tell you whether there's damage whether there's weakness whether there's atrophy it's a useful tool you can't get that with MRI because a patient MRI is not accessible they're all inside prelisone I started with Prolotherapy like I said about 15 16 17 years ago something like that Prolotherapy is sugar water Prolo stands for proliferative it's to grow tissue but you're basically using sugar water dextrose in solution along with procaine some people use lidocaine put some vitamins and minerals in there that's the injection material and you put it in the areas that are damaged and it sets in motion a healing process which usually goes on for about two or three weeks and you can heal tissues with it prolozone the ozone is Ozone ozone is a gas that's made out of oxygen so you have an oxygen tank a tube goes into a machine the machine applies an electrical charge to the oxygen and turns it into ozone O2 becomes O3 O3 ozone is a very active and very powerful molecule you can smell it like crazy in very low concentration so we're using it in the Millions of a part when we do injections with it but you can put it through the same needle even though it's a gas you can put it right through that needle right into that joint or ligament or tendon and you can see it spreading out in the area that you've injected it it's kind of a beautiful thing to see it's almost like a tiny atom bomb but it's not a bomb it's it's ozone if you give ozone in lots of different ways we have intravenous ozone we have rectal ozone we have ozone creams you can use ozone to kill infections like bacterial infections we've used it for skin infections and ulcers on the skin it can be a very powerful tool this is for injection what does it do prolozone together will increase energy production will increase oxygen utilization that's the ozone part and as I said the ozone kills bacteria and viruses we have never had an infection with an injection it's never happened with us it's probably very rare because ozone prevents infection and if your procedures are sterile you shouldn't get one all right lights here's some more this is just a a joint that's full of fluid this is a knee again and we tap knees usually from up here so this whole black area is fluid that's not supposed to be there in the knee joint or above the knee joint it comes from the joint and it goes up this way and the needle that we put in is this guy this white line is going into the area where the fluid is and now we're sucking out that fluid and throwing it away and at the end of the procedure you can see that the amount in there is much much less so it's kind of neat to see and if you didn't have ultrasound you wouldn't know you might be able to get some fluid out but you wouldn't get all of it because you wouldn't know exactly where to put your needle with this placement is precise within a millimeter you know where that needle is so we inject everything that looks abnormal we inject everything that hurts that's tender and that looks abnormal because it's easy to do so we do a joint it'll be not one spot just into the shoulder joint which a lot of people used to do maybe some still do but if you have ultrasound you can put it into the supraspinatus the subscapularis the this and that you go into the joint space itself so oftentimes we'll do three or four injections when we're treating one joint area so you can cover those things so knees hips shoulders lower back neck ankles this is ankle [Laughter] plantar fasciitis Achilles tendinitis tennis elbows wrists fingers TMJ that's a nice one that works pretty well I had a lady she was going to go to Ohio or Missouri to some specialist for her TMJ that refused to get better I said just give me a chance one shot each side didn't have to go all right what's this one can you see this tear this is interesting this is a subscapularis I think tear right over here and that space that dark split there is the tendon that's separated this guy has a big tear in there and we did prolozone on this fellow oops you thought maybe it'll work maybe it won't because it's pretty big but shortly thereafter which is two months later or so the tear is still there but it's about 90 percent less 80 percent less it's much much smaller and I think that was just one injection maybe it was two but his pain was also much less prolozone there's no downtime you know we don't recommend going out and and uh parachute on anything or you know don't do anything crazy but you can do normal daily activities there's no downtime you don't have to go to bed it takes two to three weeks to do what it's going to do then you can repeat it so a lot of times come back in two weeks we'll do it again come back in two weeks we'll do it again and we can do it again until the pain is gone or until the patient feels I don't think I need this now if it doesn't do anything in three treatments we don't do anymore because it's not going to work but most people will improve for knees I'd say it's 80 to 90 percent that's probably the best result we get maybe 90 percent it's very high in other areas are sometimes more complicated but it's well over 50 percent in general I think it's about 80 percent respond to prolozone and the effects can last a long time they can last weeks they can last months or they can last years you may not need to do it again or you may have another area some other time that's what usually happens platelet-rich plasma is another type of injection we've been doing for four or five years I think you draw some blood you spin it down you separate the platelets from the red blood cells you don't want red blood cells in this injection it will hurt like hell and you separate most of the white blood cells but the lymphocytes you want to stay keep in there and you can use a process for separation that will give you the platelets the plasma and the good lymphocytes and you inject that this is just a separation method but it's very simple and you do it you can do it along with the Prolotherapy you can do it along with the prolozone or you can do it by itself usually we'll do them all together you just put one thing after the next through the same needle and what you've all been waiting for stem cells stem cells are very interesting they really are I think it's it's not I think for sure this is the most powerful regenerative therapy you can do short of orthopedic surgery and joint replacement and Hardware this is the strongest thing and I think everybody should do this first you know unless your joint is so far gone there's absolutely no hope and that's not most people it's always worth doing these other procedures first and some people start with prolozone and then they go to PRP and if that doesn't work they'll do stem cells and some people will do stem cells from the beginning it's a little more to do with it and it costs more money but it's far stronger than the other treatments so certainly if they don't work this is worth going to but this is worth going to in the beginning anyway if you choose to stem cells are undifferentiated cells so they're cells that have not developed into anything else yet and they're situated all over your body that actually go through your bloodstream in small amounts but your body is full of stem cells cells that can develop into anything they can become heart tissue brain tissue endocrine tissue bones joints ligaments you name it stem cells can turn into anything because that's where we come from we come from stem cells full potential of development and where do you find them mostly right here right there you find them we take it out of here and guys mostly as these little guys here and we take it out of here in women mostly or you can get it from here also if you need to really thin people is a little more difficult but you can get stem cells from anybody and you can see it on the ultrasound you can see where the skin is and where that fat layer is which is right beneath the skin and you can see the muscle beneath it and you want to go right in that fat layer and get the fat out of there and the stem cells are living in the fat they're very happy living in the fat in the beginning people were getting stem cells out of bone marrow and they still do that on certain occasions on certain places are still doing these kinds of stem cell therapies using bone marrow but apparently the population of stem cells stem cells in bone marrow is much less than in the fat by a factor of a thousand so it makes a lot more sense to take it out of the fat that's a lot easier to get to because taking out a bone is kind of painful and it requires more of a procedure taking out a fat is much easier especially if the person's a little chubby but skinny we can do it anyway so they develop into different cells depending on where you put them so if you put it into a joint it's going to become tissue in the joint if you put it into a tendon it's that's torn it's going to help develop that torn tendon a ligament the tendon a muscle you can develop all of these things with stem cells just by putting them where they need to be some folks think all you got to do is put it into the joint and they still do that and I recommend don't go to someone for stem cells who's not going to use ultrasound and is only going to stick it in one spot because he's not using ultrasound and he can't see anything except your joint space because that is not a full treatment putting it into the joint space is going to help but it's not going to help as much as putting it into the damaged tendons the damaged ligaments the damaged areas that you can see on ultrasound so all of our injections are done with ultrasound stem cells are called stromovascular fraction because really it's not just stem cells you have other things in there when you put a cannula into the fat which is a tube with holes in it and you're going like this and second out the fat you're not just getting stem cells and fat you're also getting growth factors you're getting that whole architecture of the fat which fat has in architecture and you're pulling that out too in minute amounts and all of that acts as sort of a structure for the stem cells to be in and do their work so it's kind of a complicated aspirate that you get it's not just stem cells that you're using combine it with platelet-rich plasma platelet-rich plasma is always used because platelets contain growth factors platelets stimulate the stem cells to differentiate and grow so it's always done with platelet-rich plasma so you draw the blood you get the fat out you separate the stem cells from the fat and then you mix that with your platelet-rich plasma and what you have then is what you inject so it's really a two-step procedure it's obtaining the fat processing the fat and then doing your injections the whole thing takes for us somewhere between two and three hours a lot of which is waiting time the actual procedure of aspiration and injection may be half an hour altogether something like that maybe 40 minutes because this is a growth treatment because you're putting in cells that are going to divide and grow and form new tissue it takes four to six months to get the full effect and what the patient normally will experience is they'll start to improve the first two days are no fun first today's it hurts mine hurt but after that after a week or two weeks or three weeks the tissue is growing and you're starting to get a relief of pain and you're starting to get better Mobility but that will go on sort of like this a little better a little worse a little better a little worse the curve is going up at the end of four to six months it's done what it's going to do sometimes longer than that but it's not an immediate effect it's not like you had your hip replacement done and your pain is gone the next day this is not like that this takes time so it's possible not to have to have surgery it's possible even if you've had surgery and the result is not so good to still do this and still get relief of pain because you know I don't know if I have that slide here when they do a knee replacement what they're replacing is a is the end part of the femur and the proximal part of the tibia they take those two pieces out they're about this big each of them and they're putting in metal Titanium or something like that that they drill into the bone each of those two bones and the patella which covers the knee they put a pad of some sort of plastic there and that's the knee replacement but there is no effort to do anything with tendons ligaments or muscles they don't touch those things so if there's a problem here it's not going to be changed by the surgery not directly this is the last thing we started working with which is placental Matrix you know they talked about embryo embryonal stem cells that you you know you like kill the fetus and take the cells and use that what's illegal in the United States certainly but this kind of stuff placental Matrix woman has a baby cesarean section healthy baby they take the placenta from that pregnancy and extract the stem cells from the placenta because the placenta has stem cells in it too and growth factors and you can take that stuff and process it and use that for an injection so I had that in this knee about three months ago to see how it would go my wife had it twice in her knee and her sister had it in her knee everybody's had some improvement with it but this is I think is particularly useful for people who are too old and debilitated to want to go through an extraction process because there has to be a little bit of anesthesia with that it's a little more uncomfortable and it's a bigger deal and I have one lady that were working on to try and get her in shape for this treatment because she's 94 years old and she's malnourished and all kinds of stuff and I doubt that her stem cells would be very good anyway you want to have healthy stem cells so we're going to try and do this with her hopefully in the next couple of months for her back pain but the other thing to know is if you're a smoker don't do stem cells if you drink a lot of alcohol don't do stem cells because you're not going to have healthy cells you want to have a good diet you want to be eating lots of fruits and vegetables and organic beef and all that kind of stuff before you have your stem cells done because an unhealthy person is not going to have optimal stem cells you want to build those things up so the procedure goes the right way but I think this is a can be a Panacea stem cells are being developed for all kinds of problems we've looked into a little bit the idea of giving systemic intravenous stem cells to people with things like multiple sclerosis and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and dementia and Alzheimer's and macular degeneration they're working on putting it into the eyes all of these things are still experimental I have one guy with heart failure who's gotten stem cells in his vein three times through someone I sent him to that seems to be doing okay I'm not sure the stem cells are doing it or the other stuff he's doing is doing it I think it's useful to do these things because they're easy procedures and it may turn out that they can be processed in a way that people really get better in a predictable way you know like 70 percent will get better 80 will get better then it's worth doing because some of these diseases as you know are very difficult to treat Ms can be really difficult ALS is terrible there is no treatment uh cardiomyopathies can be very difficult so I think stem cells have a lot going for them that will turn in the future into something really good but in the orthopedic area it's already good this is established we know it works and it's kind of interesting that not everybody knows that you know if everybody knew that and if the orthopedists were on board which most of them are not they'd be doing stem cells why aren't they doing stem cells before they put in a new knee or a new hip well I can guess the answer to that insurance doesn't pay for it even if even though that's that's One Good Reason yeah that's probably a very good reason maybe if Insurance paid for it there'd be a lot more there would be a lot more yeah it is paid for in Europe in a couple of places we met some people at a conference that the National Health Service was paying for it I don't know how much they were paying in this country stem cells will cost depending on where you do it probably somewhere between four and eight thousand dollars depending on who's doing it and how complicated the procedure is for us it costs somewhere between five and seven thousand if we do a hip or a knee it's going to be five if we do a back it's going to be seven because it's far more complicated to do that have you need more injections it's more of a deal um but again if it can solves the problem and it keeps you out of the operating room I think it can be a wonderful thing and it's it's getting more and more established in this country that's variable for us it's around five six hundred bucks because you have to process that yes it is not as profitable or yeah well it certainly is it works better I suppose to to replace the joint and get paid for that than to get involved with all of this but it's it's more than that you know most doctors are ethical people they want to do the right thing they want to help people and it's it's new enough because the stem cells for Orthopedic stuff with the ultrasound is really only in the last five to ten years the ultrasound equipment wasn't that good back then what we have now is really good and it's easy to work with but you got to learn ultrasound so the orthopedist has to learn ultrasound you know and you have to learn how to do the injections you have to learn all of these things and doctors don't have a lot of time you know they're busy and they're called upon and it's hard to make yourself get into something that's totally new and make it work but there are docs who are doing it and there are some who are very good at it and they're still in the Forefront of this kind of thing but there's not that many of them I expect there's going to be a lot more you know I think the physical medicine and rehabilitation doctors ought to be doing this and most of them are not Prolotherapy is such an easy procedure although still I think you need ultrasound but ultrasound is still kind of new you know there's not a lot of people using ultrasound for their injections and I think in the guy I trained with who comes and works with us once a month we do stem cells he works with us to evaluate the tissues where we want to put these needles this kind of thing he thinks it's not ethical to do these procedures without ultrasound and Counting the cells that you're putting into somebody because we do that too we have a lab we take a piece of the specimen that we're using a liquid send it to the lab and it tells you how many cells you have per CC so if you have 10 million per Cc or 8 million and you're putting in 10 CC's you put in 80 million cells or 100 million cells we know that we can do that testing not everybody does that there's places offshore in the Bahamas where you can take these cells and grow them which is not legal in the United States in the U.S whatever you get that day you got to use that day you can't freeze it you can't refrigerate it you can't grow it you got to use it right then but in the Bahamas and some other places where these hospitals exist they can do that they can take your stem cells give you a treatment and save some of it for the next hundred years and grow it and the next time you go there they can take some of that and inject you again I don't know much about it I know that it exists in Europe some places can do just about anything they want but you know we have this available here it's it's very very useful I think it's very effective in most cases and I'm glad it's here I enjoy working with it and we've had a lot of patients who have done well with it I have stories thank you I have stories from from people who have had intravenous stem cells for Ms and had miraculous improvements I kind of believe it when I see it because you hear about a lot of things that maybe are real and maybe aren't but there's a lot of stories like that so it's quite possible that there's a group of people who get Ms who would respond to stem cells I know of a place in Chicago where I went to med school they developed a stem cell program for people with relapsing and remitting Ms so better worse better worse that kind of Ms not slowly Progressive where you're just downhill all the way but they were doing stem cell infusions and they are in patients after destroying the bone marrow so they'll take the stem cells out and they'll wreck the bone marrow with chemotherapy and then give the patient back those stem cells IV and they're improving Ms they might even be curing it but these are in in patients who were severely ill I mean you got to be sick to be willing to have your bone marrow destroyed because you can die from that uh but they have responded they have a very high response rate I tried to get a patient there a few months ago with MS but she wasn't in the right group she didn't qualify for it yeah Northwestern yeah so pretty interesting they you know these kinds of things any procedure that's out there is going to be used for every disease that can't be treated that's the way we work right if you can't treat it we got to do something whether it's a cancer or an MS or a cardiomyopathy or ALS or whatever are going to do something whether it works or not is another another story but you're going to do something I know someone cool you know they didn't used to cover MRIs except for brains like yeah yeah I have great hope that there will be lots more stem cells therapy yeah I'm sure there will it's too easy yeah that'll be another I don't know what what the Mr Trump's going to say about that but we'll we'll see I think it will happen someday doing PRP with it uh we haven't I have to look into that I'm not sure I don't know whether folks are doing PRP with Matrix I don't know anybody else interesting subject we could yeah yeah again it depends on the stage you know the farther gone the joint is the less chance that it's going to work but even in one that's pretty far gone it's worth working with because a lot of times you can get good response hips are harder I don't know why but hips are harder to to get a response with for instance than these or shoulders but still it's definitely worth working with we have patients who've done well with hip injections yeah control therapy protozoan what's the difference Prolotherapy is the sugar water and the procaine without the ozone would you do that Pro therapy mouthpro I have I used to I didn't know about Ozone now that I know about ozone we always use ozone because you can't lose with it it's an additive feature so we always do ozone with the Prolo okay anybody else yeah do you think that would work with them I can't tell you how many people I've seen who five years ago were told they need a new knee or a new hip or a new whatever and they've never had anything done they never had the procedure because they've had Prolotherapy or they had physical therapy or they had whatever they had and they just went on because there's a lot of docs out there who are recommending procedures that don't really need to be recommended and a lot of patients are saying do I really want to do this and then they don't and then they're fine I'm not saying they're perfect but they're getting by from day to day without having to do a procedure that was recommended to them and I would be particularly careful about the procedure if it's this one or this one because those procedures when they go wrong are very bad yeah anybody else anyway anyone has to leave thank you for coming but if I'll stay here for any other questions yeah uh no he's spending the rest of his career trying to show people all the options you know anything you can do to not have surgery and just the perspective from a neurosurgeon and how he had he wasn't popular at the hospital because he's not bringing in the same money and he went through depression it's a very good book but if anyone's thinking about spine surgery it's called back in control I have to read that okay that's good yeah he talks about journaling and how to address impression and exercise of course but it was really quite insightful from that medical perspective too neat very neat yeah my father just as an anecdotal thing he was uh 85 when he died but he had an epidural injection when he was 84. and the doctor in epidural is a steroid injection done through a fairly big needle into the spinal canal We Don't Go Near that spot and he was not told to discontinue his blood thinning drugs he was on Two blood-fitting drugs aspirin and Plavix or something like that and he bled into the spinal canal and he went back to the hospital the next day and he couldn't walk after the procedure he had walked in and he couldn't walk out they went back to the hospital the next day and they they couldn't do an MRI because he had a heart thing in there defibrillator something so they did a CT and didn't see the blood and sent him back home again two days later when he's completely paralyzed and in terrible pain still goes back into the hospital they finally have a neurosurgeon come in do another kind of procedure where they put diet there and they see he's blocked by Blood but he was ruined they did surgery and unroofed the you know the spine and didn't do anything he was paralyzed after that and he lived for another year with septic complications from ulcer back here it was Dreadful my goodness so yeah you know it's hard to know so it's really important with any medical procedure it doesn't matter what it is that's being done by a competent person who's had enough rest who isn't crazy that you can talk to you know so at least if something goes wrong or whatever you've got a communication line and you can say oh my God my such and such whatever I mean I know lots of cases like this my dad's was particularly horrific because he was in misery for a year before he died and it was rough on my ma you know she had to take care of him and whatever it was it was really bad so it's it's important for things to go right as much as they can and I think the the less complicated the procedure the greater is your chance of not running into trouble from it but a lot of times it doesn't get explained and you know I say what is informed consent what the heck is informed consent you're lying in the hospital with a heart attack they've got you on morphine and they sign here because we need to do bypass surgery which can kill you but sign here do you know what you're signing do you have any idea what's going on no there is no real informed consent when a person is seriously ill he can't even think straight so you know it's a situation that that you know you need to have someone on your side who can defend you and you need to try and have your marbles but you know so many things happen that shouldn't happen to 300 bucks maybe less depends how many areas you're looking at you you can the guy that works with us is an expert at spinal ultrasound so he can see the facets and all this kind of stuff doesn't see the bones real well but you can see the tissues you can see the multifidus when we do backs we inject the SI joints and we inject the baltifidus and a lot of people do well oh yeah yeah they're good there's some very good machines yeah yeah I'll just give a testimonial I had a pro ozone injections from Dr saucin in my ankle and it is much much much better how long did it take well I had four different prolos and injections over a span of maybe five months and um and where I am right now it's much better and I had an MRI last year and I have I have tendinosis plus severe arthritis and two joints and moderate arthritis and two joints so there was a lot going on and I had been having pain for off and on for about five years and had gotten to the point where I was having difficulty walking and now I can walk Miles and Miles cool yeah yeah I mean it's not perfect yeah I'm still I still want to get back to like like pickleball you know that works but I'm very happy with that how nice thank you appreciate it anybody else all right have some fruit thank you for coming

Channel: iprogressivemed

Views: 2,765

Keywords: joint pain, health, wellness, pain relief, pain treatment, ozone, prolotherapy, stem cells, prolozone, surgery

Id: o2bb7MtgwKk

Length: 69min 14sec (4154 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 08 2017