Are These Procedures Better Than Joint Replacements?

Interviewer: Doctor, we talked earlier about people that need joint replacements as they get older. If they go down the road of a PRP, Prolo Therapy Stem Cell treatments, can they possibly avoid those invasive procedures and what kind of success do you see with those treatments that you offer?

Dr. Baumgartner: Most patients that come to see us are very educated. They've done their research. They know, okay, I've looked at a knee replacement. I've looked at cortisone shots. I looked at PRP. I want PRP because - and their becauses are usually based on the fact that when you are getting knee replacement your range of motion might not ever be the same again. You may have loss of range of motion. You'll have metal in your body now.

So there's a lot of metal ions that circulate through your body. We're finding out with blood draws that once you get your knee replaced you could have some metal type issues from the knee replacement. Higher risk of strokes and heart attacks because you've had the knee replacement of 21 times because of the surgery itself. There's a high risk of complications.

The really interesting thing is I was at a talk about two weeks ago, and the talk was given by a surgeon who did in 2007 hundreds and hundreds of joint replacements. In 2008 he started doing regenerative medicine, stem cell, PRP type injections instead of joint replacements. 

The interesting thing is he found that the group that had the joint replacement after one year they still didn't have the range of motion back. They still had pain and they weren't back to activities in sports.

The patient who had the stem cell done on their knee, they're back competing again. They had better range of motion than the groups that had the surgery done, and they had less pain. So he had totally switched. He was no longer doing joint replacements because he's getting a better result doing the regenerative work.

Interviewer: A lot of times you find people that do the knee replacements they don't just have one if they're young enough.

Dr. Baumgartner: Right. Right. If you get it done too early, you're right. You may need a replacement ten, 20 years down the road. . .

Interviewer: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Baumgartner: . . . which is a harder thing to do.