In sports and fitness training, there’s always that likelihood of sustaining injuries and developing pain. Some of these injuries can heal through conventional non-surgical treatments, like physical therapy, proper nutrition, and rest. However, if your injury can’t heal through such treatments, your doctor may prescribe regenerative medicine.

What Is Regenerative Medicine?

Naturally, your body triggers a repair process the moment you get an injury. This involves body components like cytokines, growth factors, proteins, and collagen. But if you have high-stress levels, your diet isn’t well-balanced, or your lifestyle isn’t healthy, the natural healing process may not proceed to completion.

Regenerative medicine applies a condensed form of the healing components to the injured area to stimulate natural healing. Thus, it’s effective in repairing and replacing impaired tendons, cartilage, and ligament tissues.

The Different Forms of Regenerative Medicine

Regenerative medicine treatments can be carried out in four main ways, namely:

  • Stem Cell Injections: Depending on the environment, stem cells can remodel themselves to carry out a particular task. For example, when you place stem cells around damaged triceps tendons, they can transform into healthy triceps tendons.

Regenerative medicine specialists, like the team from https://www.walkerspineandsport.com/regenerative-medicine, typically collect stem cells from your blood, fat, or bone marrow. Alternatively, they can purchase stem cells harvested from placenta tissue or amniotic fluid. These are then injected around your injury to promote natural healing.

  • Platelet-Rich Plasma (PRP) injections: Plasma is the fluid part of blood. It takes about 55% of blood. Platelets are the smallest fragments in the blood. They help with clotting of the blood around damaged blood vessels and also promote healing and repair of damaged tissue.

To obtain platelet-rich plasma, your physician takes blood from your body and processes it using a centrifuge. Gravity helps to form a layer with a high concentration of plasma and platelets. This is harvested and injected into your injury. The influx of platelets stimulates faster healing.

  • Cartilage Regeneration Surgery: Damaged cartilage may not heal fast because the blood supply to cartilage isn’t sufficient. Therefore, your doctor can transplant cartilage from one part of your body to another. You can also get cartilage from a fellow human donor or an animal. Another alternative is to implant engineered tissue developed from stem cells.
  • Prolotherapy: When you get an injury, it’s inflammation that triggers the flow of blood and its healing components, such as monocytes, granulocytes, fibroblasts, and macrophages, into the injured area. However, if inflammation stops prematurely, the injury may not completely heal. That’s the basis of prolotherapy, which involves the injection of an irritant into the injured area to increase inflammation. This promotes complete healing.

Application of Regenerative Medicine

With the above background, you can better understand the uses of regenerative medicine in sports and fitness. Read below for details:

1. Enhanced Healing of Injuries

By engaging in sports or fitness training, you can get quite a number of injuries. These include the following:

  • Sprains and Strains: As you go about your athletic maneuvers, you can tear or stretch any ligament in your body, especially those in your legs and arms. A ligament typically connects bones at a joint. Such injuries can also occur to a tendon, which is the fibrous tissue that joins muscles to bones. In this case, it’s referred to as a strain.

Common symptoms of sprains and strains include: pain, weakness, swelling, or bruising around the ankle, knee, foot, leg, wrist, thumb, or back; inability to use these body parts as you normally would; limited flexibility; and muscles painfully tightening on their own, otherwise known as muscle cramps.

If conventional treatments, like ice therapy, heat therapy, resting, massage, and acupuncture, don’t work, consider seeking regenerative medicine treatments.

  • Tennis and Golfer’s Elbow: If you overuse your elbow or fail to stretch it enough, there’s a likelihood for your extensor tendons to get inflamed. The resulting pain may make it difficult to handle any activity that involves the use of your outer elbow. This is referred to as tennis elbow. If the injury is to the inner side of your elbow, the condition is called a golfer’s elbow. These two injuries can be treated using regenerative medicine.
  • Knee injuries: You bend your knee thousands of times whenever you’re playing a game. Each bend engages delicate bones, muscles, tendons, and cartilage. As such, you can experience injuries like fractures, Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) tears, jumper’s knee, and dislocation, among many others.

These can be painful to the point you find it difficult to stand up and walk and thus unable to participate in sporting activities. Regenerative medicine may help you heal faster and continue enjoying your favorite sports.

  • Bursitis: Your joints have fluid-filled sacs that cushion the bones, muscles, and tendons. These are technically known as bursae. When they get inflamed, you develop a condition called bursitis. This commonly affects your shoulders, elbows, knees, heels, and hips. While bursitis pain can subside within a few weeks of resting, persistent symptoms may be treated by regenerative medicine.
  • Lacerations and abrasions: In case the field you’re playing on has sharp objects, you risk having shallow or deep cuts on your skin.

The minute this happens, you should stop the bleeding by applying direct pressure on the area. Then, wash the wound with warm water and soap. Apply an appropriate amount of antibiotic on the area and seal with a bandage.

You should also consult with your healthcare provider, especially if the cut is deep or you’ve not had a tetanus shot in the past five years. If for some reason, the wound fails to heal or becomes excessively painful, you may want to try regenerative medicine.

  • Fractures and Dislocations: A fracture refers to a broken bone. This can be anything from a small crack to a complete break. On the other hand, dislocation is the slipping of a bone from its natural position in a joint.

Fractures and dislocations occur when a bone is impacted by a relatively strong force. For example, for footballers, an opponent may miss the ball and forcefully strike your leg.

Treatment usually involves placing the bone pieces back into their natural positions and stabilizing them with a cast until they heal. While this treatment works, your physician may recommend regenerative medicine to hasten the process.

2. Alleviation of Acute and Chronic Pain

Acute pain is that which lasts up to three months. Beyond this period of time, the pain is classified as chronic. Normally, the pain goes away when an injury heals. However, chronic pain can continue for many years, even after the healing of the injured area. With such pain, you find it difficult to play that game you like or exercise for fitness purposes.

Some of the treatment options for chronic pain include:

  • Massage therapy
  • Self-help, yoga, and meditation
  • Stretching and strengthening
  • Heat therapy
  • Ice therapy
  • Use of CBD pain relievers
  • Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation
  • Taking over-the-counter painkillers like aspirin, naproxen, acetaminophen, and ibuprofen
  • Changing diet and lifestyle
  • Surgery

Take note that regenerative medicine treatment is also part of this list. It promotes faster healing of the painful area and reduces inflammation. This helps reduce chronic pain.

3. Improved Function of Organs and Tissues

With regenerative medicine, it’s not just a matter of healing injuries to tissues and organs. Since it involves the reproduction of new cells, the damaged tissues and organs may emerge stronger and more functional than they used to be. It’s like building a new organ altogether. That’s what sets this treatment option apart from the others.

Say you’re a basketball player, but your injured ankles and knees can’t allow you to jump very high or make lightning-quick sprints. After undergoing regeneration, your ankles and knees can get strengthened enough to make you jump higher than you used to or run faster than your original pace.

4. Reducing the Risk of Future Injuries

In line with the thought above, regeneration develops stronger ligaments, tendons, bones, and the like and thus reduces your risk of injury. It’s obvious that weaker tissues and muscles are more prone to get injured compared to stronger ones.

As experts claim, every athlete has their own weakness. Suppose yours is the ankle of your right leg. No matter how careful you get in the sports fields, you end up injuring this ankle time after time. To avoid the recurrence of this injury in the future, you can take advantage of regenerative medicine.

5. Organ Transplants

As a sports and fitness enthusiast, you’re not immune to conditions that may necessitate the replacement of your organs and tissues. Some of the commonly transplanted organs include:

  • Heart
  • Kidney
  • Liver
  • Pancreas
  • Lung

You may also require the replacement of tissues such as:

  • Tendons
  • Veins
  • Cartilage
  • Skin
  • Bones
  • Heart valves
  • Corneal tissue

Most of these come from fellow humans whose blood groups are compatible with yours. Otherwise, tissues such as cartilage can be obtained from animals. Once transplanted, the new organs and tissues need to seamlessly bond with the rest of your system to ensure proper functionality. This can be facilitated by regenerative medicine.

Alternatively, new tissue can be manufactured by growing cells around scaffolds. This can be used to repair or replace parts of bones, blood vessels, skin, cartilage, bladder, muscles, and related tissues.

How To Choose a Regenerative Medicine Specialist

Regenerative medicine treatment is a very delicate treatment procedure. For instance, poor storage and transportation of stem cells obtained from amniotic fluid and placenta tissue may result in them dying. In case you’re injected with such, you don’t expect your injury to heal as expected.

And that tells you the need to choose a regenerative medicine specialist that knows how to do their work. Here are some factors to consider when you go looking for one:

  • Qualifications: Does the physician in question have relevant training to handle tissue regeneration? Ask them to show you their certifications. Don’t settle for a self-taught individual. Professional training and certification impart some level of knowledge that can’t be obtained by, perhaps, searching for information online.
  • Experience: Aside from training, has the doctor treated injuries using regenerative medicine? Did the patients heal? Or they got worse? Look into such issues to avoid disappointments. If the treatment didn’t work for others, you might not be very confident that it’ll work for you.
  • Treatment Type: As mentioned at the beginning of this article, regenerative medicine treatment can be done through the use of stem cells, platelet-rich plasma, prolotherapy, or surgery. You need to know what type of treatment a particular physician offers. Not every doctor offers all these. Also, not all these options may be viable for your specific condition.
  • Treatment Procedure: Inquire whether the procedure involves the use of anesthetics and other additives. General anesthesia puts you into a sleep-like condition so that you don’t feel pain as surgery goes on. This may be accompanied by side effects like postoperative cognitive dysfunction and breathing problems. Local anesthesia numbs only a part of your body, usually the area undergoing surgery.

While anesthesia is generally safe, conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes, obstructive sleep apnea, seizures, smoking, alcohol addiction, and the use of certain medication can increase your risk of complications.

Therefore, if you have any of these conditions, it’s in your best interest to avoid regenerative medicine treatment that involves the use of anesthetics.

  • Equipment Usage: Will the doctor be using tools like ultrasound and fluoroscopy to guide the injections? It’s good to have these details. If so, you’d want to ensure that they have additional certification for the use of these tools. Non-professional use of ultrasound equipment can lead to damage of tissue as body temperature increases beyond the maximum threshold.

To Conclude

Regenerative medicine is very helpful for sports injuries that can’t be fully treated using traditional methods like ice therapy, massage therapy, acupuncture, and the like. If done properly, it may lead to complete healing of tissues and organs and even make the organs and tissues stronger and more functional than they originally were. Just make sure to work with professionally trained and certified physicians, who also have vast experience in using this treatment method.