Interventional orthopedic medicine is one of the fastest-growing and most attention-grabbing procedures in the world of regenerative medicine. This revolutionary procedure uses your body’s regenerative cells, which can be found throughout the body, to promote healing and drive recovery. While the procedure holds great promise, there are a lot of nuances to the procedure that only a properly trained regenerative medicine physician will be able to grapple with.
What Is Interventional Orthopedics?
Regenerative cells are the body’s raw material in their raw form, these cells are “undifferentiated,” meaning they still have the potential to grow into any cell type–nerve, muscle, tendon, ligament, brain, etc.
The ultimate goal of the treatment is to promote the repair response of diseased, dysfunctional, or injured tissue using orthobiologics and/or their derivatives. Musculoskeletal orthobiologic therapy relies on cells instead of donor organs, which are much more limited in supply, giving the procedure a much wider potential reach.
A significant percentage of our body’s regenerative cells are located in the bone marrow, so it is a very fruitful place to harvest them. During a bone marrow aspirate concentrate treatment, your physician will harvest these cells from specific sites in the hip under local sedation, typically three to five in total. Most reputable regenerative medicine providers will perform this procedure under ultrasound or fluoroscopic-guidance, as the best harvesting locations are small and easily missed if the procedure is performed blind. These harvested cells are then prepared to create an injectable product to can be deposited right where it is needed.
Benefits Of Regenerative Orthopedic Medicine
Regenerative treatments are minimally invasive procedures, so it has a number of advantages over most traditional surgical procedures. It does not require an incision of any kind, so the risk of infection or serious complication is very low compared to surgery, and recovery time is much shorter. It is also done in the outpatient setting under local anesthesia, so patients go home on the same day. Finally, orthobiologic therapy has been shown to be very effective in delaying or completely preventing a patient’s need for surgical intervention.
What Can Regenerative Orthopedic Medicine?
There is a continually expanding body of evidence to suggest that orthobiologics can help promote healing and recovery from acute and/or chronic musculoskeletal disorders. Furthermore, this therapy can be used all over the body, so anyone suffering from an orthopedic injury or disorder could be a candidate for one of these procedures. We specialize in minimally invasive, non-surgical alternatives for patients with:
- Rotator cuff tears;
- Labral tears of hip or shoulder;
- Meniscus tears of knee;
- Spine disorders, including sciatica and degenerative disc disease;
- Ligament or tendon tears; and
- Many other muscle injuries.
While regenerative therapy has the potential to provide relief from a number of conditions, it is not a one-size-fits-all treatment. There are a number of nuances to the procedure that many providers glaze over in a rush to offer this revolutionary procedure. If you think you might benefit from regenerative orthopedic medicine, the first step is to come see our team of specialists at RestorePDX. We will help you diagnose and understand your condition, discuss all relevant treatment options with you, and lay out the best path forward to recovery.
What To Expect
If you have decided to undergo treatment, it will likely be one of two procedures: adipose or bone marrow aspirate concentrate therapy. The principal difference between these procedures is how and from where the cells are extracted; once they have been withdrawn from your body, the process for both procedures is the same. In adipose-derived therapy, fat tissue will be withdrawn from the body and processed to extract the MSC’s; for bone marrow aspirate concentrate (BMAC) therapy, your physician will harvest bone marrow from three to five locations in your hip and then process the marrow to extract the regenerative cells for injection. After being extracted and processed, they will be reinjected directly at the site of your injury with the aid of ultrasound or fluoroscopic guidance. This allows us to ensure the injections are being delivered precisely where they are needed. Some of the sites we target for orthobiologic therapy are mere millimeters across, so they can be missed even with imaging guidance!
After the procedure is over, you will be helped up and out of the room, and you will be released home, but you will need someone to drive you home just to be safe. If you have any pain or swelling at the injection or harvest sites, you can take over-the-counter pain medication. In the days and weeks following your procedure, you will start to slowly work back into your daily activities, under the guidance of your care team at RestorePDX.
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