Healing Injuries Naturally

Dr. Michael Grossman shares different tips as an anti-aging specialist on how you can naturally heal your muscles and injuries. You may view the YouTube video here.

Welcome to the age gracefully show with Dr. Michael Grossman, the well known anti aging stem cell and regenerative medicine specialist, best selling author and founder of the OC wellness clinic in Irvine, California. Each week, he shares the latest information to help you look and feel your best. So you age gracefully. And here's your host, Dr. Michael Grossman.

Welcome. I'm Dr. Michael Grossman. We're gonna talk about slowly. Today, I wanted to focus on what I do as an anti aging physician to keep your body youthful. And repairing any kind of injuries that occur over time. As men and women get older, injuries get more common that we find that happen is that as we age, we can maintain muscle strength by vigorous exercise. And our muscles can be just as strong as they were when we were 21 were 60 or 70. However, our tendons and ligaments don't stay as strong. tendons and ligaments don't have very much blood supply. And when they get injured, when they get stretched when they get torn, they don't have the ability to heal and repair, because there's no blood there to create that repair process. Whenever we get injured, there is a repair process that occurs. And that is you get bleeding. You get a clot form from the platelets. And then the platelets create a fibrin matrix that allows the body to temporarily hold things together like a glue. And it releases then growth. The growth factors go out and tell the body has an injury here. We're maintaining it with this glue, but please come in and repair and the body's intelligent, it sends in repair cells stem cells, and these repair cells go into that error and analyze Well, what's the problem? Is it a nerve that's tone is it a muscle is a tendon is a ligament is it skin, whatever the injury is, the repair cells will go in and repair that area with the right kind of cell. It's a magical process that's designed in a very intelligent way. And we don't have to think about it. We just know that oh, I hurt my finger. And it's kind of throbbing and aching, which is a good thing because then the body gets a signal, okay, there's a repair process that needs to go on. Sometimes that repair process gets very inflamed. And as a physician over the past 40 years, we would often inject cortisone into an acute injury that's gotten all swollen and painful. And if we shrink down to swelling, sometimes it helps the repair process to occur because then the the tendons or ligaments can grow back together instead of being all swollen up. And there's a value to a cortisone injection. But cortisone generally doesn't help the repair process beyond just shrinking the swelling down temporarily. When we have an injury that's been going on for some period of time. What we need to do is to create a stimulus, these repair cells. So if you have an elbow injury in the tendon, the tendons are what attaches from the muscle into the bone. It's very tight ligament, very little blood supply. If that gets injured, it can get swollen and red and tender and that can last for months or years. Sometimes they that tear gets worse. Elbows we call a tennis elbow. That could last for many years. If you don't have a method of repairing shoulder injuries. Big problem with shoulders. Oftentimes you need to have surgery on shoulders because if you tear something is completely torn, the body cannot even with stem cells repair it together. If it's two completely torn, you got to take a stitch and tie it up together then you could use those after after you stitch it up. But most of the injuries are partial tears where the the tendon is torn, but not completely torn and it's sort of like as holding on but not really well and moving and turning and twisting if we have a method of repairing those To intendance, we can avoid surgery. Now, knees are a big problem as we get older, and the knees have a college substance in the middle of this, like, like a bagel as a hole in the middle. And then there's a whole lot of spongy support. And so the hole in the middle has a lot of fluid in it. And that big like substance, the meniscus can tear. And you usually get just mild tears in the beginning, and then the tears get worse over time. And as you continue to walk in, and over the years, it gets worse and worse. And then the doctor comes and tells you, oh, you have a one out meniscus, you have bone on bone, you need to have surgery to either repair, either remove the tear, and hopefully have enough cartilage left to let your knee work. Or maybe you just need a new beam, we're going to put in a knee replacement, take out your knee and put an artificial knee. So those surgeries can be good, and people can do nicely from those surgeries. But 80% of the time, you don't need the surgery, you can repair it through natural methods of stimulating these repair cells to come into that area. So let's look at a typical tendon ligament injury and your elbow in your shoulder. And what we can do with those injuries, first easiest thing to do is to use what we call platelet rich plasma, we take your blood, like we wouldn't a blood test and get about 60 cc's of blood takes a half hour to spend the blood down and concentrate the platelets in the blood which contain the growth factors. And we concentrated to about six to seven cc's of concentrated platelets and we injected back into whatever part of your body has been injured could be a very well II injury. It could be a shoulder it could be an elbow, it could be any part of your body that's been injured. And when we inject the platelets in, you get a signal sent to the body that says oh, there's some kind of injury here. Please bring in the repair cells into this area. And let's repair whatever the damages and the body sends in repair cells over period of six weeks, it will repair the damage. And so you can get six weeks of ongoing repair and then it kind of levels out it just sort of stays at that level over the next years. Now if you get only 50% better, well, then maybe we'll do another one to get you to be 90% better want to get the tendons ligaments cartilage to heal, at least to where you're not having any pain so that you're not continually wearing and tearing on that injury goes away. The body's saying oh, I'm okay with it. Now it's doing it's doing good. You don't have to repair 100% of the coppage. So when your doctor says Oh, you're bone on bone or the doctor says you have a tear. If you just take away the pain that will be sufficient to stop the process from getting worse and will stabilize the process and everything is going to stay the same. You can do more of the platelet rich plasma and it's it's harmless. There's never a side effect from it. It's your own body's healing mechanism. We can use the platelet rich plasma to also heal scars on the skin. If you have an ugly scar on the skin. You can use cortisone to shrink it down but to actually get it to heal and strengthen and look more normal. platelet rich plasma very very helpful for healing scars. healing wounds that don't heal is fantastic for healing wounds that are non healing because it brings into repair cells into that area. Now when we inject it into a knee, we inject it into the joint and then the body will put cartilage back when we repair it in a joint. If you've been told that you have one out to college, if you just put enough college on so that the college covers the bone so the bones in the knee joint can become kind of like hills and valleys. And in the valleys you still have some hills, the college is gone. Therefore your bone on bone but if the college grows from your valleys over the hills, then the pain is gone. You have cushion and as long as you're not running marathons, you're gonna feel fine. marathon just wear and tear. So that's platelet rich plasma which is a very easy, harmless treatment. The The next thing to consider is that we can get other things that if you have a more substantial injury. It's been going on for many years and In the the tearing in the college is really worn considerably. We have the option of adding exosomes, which are growth factors that we take from the amniotic fluid of babies, and the exosomes are signaling factors that will also more intensely send out a signal hose, please repair this area. exosomes are harmless. They're real simple injections, get them frozen. And it's harmless. Because unlike taking no stem cells from babies, there's no DNA on these exosomes, so you're not getting any possibility of motor immune, we're someone else's DNA. We also have other products such as into fill in to fill as a concentrate of the of the, from a newborn baby from the placenta, we can take a variety of growth factors that act as a glue in any kind of an injury in a joint to kind of hold everything together. And to allow the cartilage to have a matrix to grow on. So that's another thing that we can add in. So all these are very, very harmless ways to harness your own healing power. As you get older, you lose the circulation of different parts of your body, particularly tendons, ligaments and cartilage. And it makes it more difficult for the body to repair. So these are simple ways to bring in that natural healing power of your own body. Now there's one additional way I like to talk about. And that is, we have a acoustic wave kind of technology, which has been used for 15 years in Europe. I've been using it about five years in United States. So the acoustic wave is a kind of sound wave different from ultrasound, it's a different free frequency is created to be about 15 hertz. And it's done by having a what looks like a little kind of a gun that has a metal pellet going back and forth very quickly at a certain frequency and it hits a metal, a metal end plate, and it sends out vibratory acoustic waves through your body. Depending on which kind of metal we can go deeper or more wide on one arrow. And this is dramatically helpful to vibrate the cells and trick the cells into thinking that it's a new injury. New injury means the body sends and repair cells sees what's going on. It's essentially painless, it feels like a peculiar kind of massage, that at the time feels a little peculiar, but afterwards, you find that Wow, my muscles are feeling better. It is like the most effective massage for muscle tightness fantastic for that, but it also has this repair quality to it, that it will repair injury, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, nerve, whatever has been injured. We've used it for years with male sexual functioning problems with erection. But it's so helpful for elbows, knees, shoulders backs any kind of a problem once a week, and I find that most people after one treatment feel improved. Even with an injury, it's been going on for a long time. very different than other physical therapy technologies. There's a value to ultrasound to heat, electrical stem, to massage, all these things have a value. But this acoustic wave has been a phenomenon of repairing things that otherwise don't prepare. So we have so many great methodologies to keep the body functioning healthy. It's so important to have healthy functioning, of exercise for your longevity and well being. So it's not just the pain and discomfort, but it's actually we want you to be able to exercise as you get older, keeps your bones strong, keeps your brain young, keeps your mood healthy. Exercise very important to stay neutral. And these technology I'm describing are a big part of aging gracefully. So if you want to come into my office for a consultation, be happy to do that. And we can talk about these different options, see if it's appropriate for you my offices located in Orange County next to the john Wayne Airport. So call 949-222-0232 that's the best phone number to reach me. And I'm looking forward to speaking with you and we'll talk again in a few weeks. Thanks so much for being with us.

Thank you for watching the age gracefully show with Dr. Michael Grossman. Join us next week for another informative discussion to help you age gracefully. Be sure to visit us at oc wellness.com