Restoring Joint Function Without Surgery

Dr. Michael Grossman talks about the injuries that do not heal well as we age. He explains why tendons and ligaments takes longer to heal compared to a cut on the skin and how to recover joints without surgery. 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.

I'm Dr. Michael Grossman, I'm an anti aging physician, located here in Newport Beach, California. My website is oc wellness.com. I've been anti aging position for many years 1976. So I work in this arena of anti aging medicine. And it's so fulfilling. This is the area of cutting edge medicine, where we work at keeping people youthful, and healthy as they age, and there's so many parts of that integrated approach to make it happen. There are so many things you need to do from your side, you got to eat healthy, think healthfully, you have to be able to sleep in a good way. And and there are so many things to do that that is your responsibility. But there are certain things that have my responsibility as your physician. Yes, I have to tell you about all the good things we have to do. But there are certain kinds of injuries that don't heal well as we age. So let's think about injuries. As we age, what happens when we're a youthful person with 10 years old, we heard ourselves and usually heals pretty well, whatever the injury is, we usually heal it. Now, as we get older, then things don't heal so well. And the thing is that don't heal Well, in terms of joints, and tendons and ligaments are a specific kind of a problem. When you enter your skin and you get a cut in your skin, it's going to heal whatever age you are, it's pretty much going to heal. Now sometimes if your circulation is really bad in your legs that will never heal because you don't have any circulation there. But for the most part, you injure your skin. Yeah, it get a little scar there, but it heals. And it's fine. You know, you don't have to work too hard with it. Why does the skin heal so easily and not so well in the tendons and ligaments and cartilage in the joints, while tendons and ligaments and cartilage is a very very, very thick kind of substance that has to hold things together really, really well. So your tendon in your biceps in your in your arm. It's really thick and strong like a heavy rope that allows the muscles to pull against it and the tendon uncertain to the bone and holds on to the bone. So it's a very, very thick substance. You enter the muscle, it'll heal and usually heals pretty well it sticks together and it repairs itself pretty well. But the tendon or ligament is so tight, there's no blood vessels in it. It gets its its nutrients, just from the surrounding area just sort of floats through it. There's no real blood vessels there. In the muscle, there's lots of blood vessels, you cut it, it bleeds a lot, but the tendons ligaments, then there's really essentially no bleeding because there's no no real blood vessels there. And so the amount of repair possibilities attended to ligament or cartilage is very limited. You don't get a signal to repair where those signals come from to repair. It comes from the bleeding when you get bleeding in the body, the platelets clot and release a signal odors or an injury here. Let's repair this problem. So the clot is formed like a matrix there to hold it together temporarily and it says okay, please repair this now. I'm holding it together but I need for the stem cells and repair cells to come into the area and repair it and make it work. So that allows repair to occur easily in the skin. And then a lot of internal organs. You can repair pretty well with that kind of an approach. But tendons and ligaments and Cartlidge there's, there's just so tight. So you have cartilage in your knee and then your hips and then your shoulders and the cartilage. Kind of lets the bones rest on it. And it's it's like A cushioning there, but it's so tight. It's like a really hot rubber. And and you just don't have blood vessels to allow the repair to occur. So what can we do then what can I do as an anti aging physician a natural approach to let the body repair these areas that otherwise won't repair. When I say it won't repair, you'd have people have tendon injuries for ages for 1020 years, and it never never repairs, do you want to do surgery for it? Well, sometimes you need to do surgery. If you have a tear in attendance, and it completely tears off from the bone, and the muscle is contracted, then you have to go and surgically and reattach that tendon to the bone and and get it to stick there. Or if the tendon actually tore on some of its in the bone and some of us off, you have to solve the tendon up to itself to get it to stick. Mostly, that doesn't happen mostly, you get frayed torn tendons or ligaments that are just partially torn and they're stretched. And there, instead of it being tight like this, they're kind of like stuck apart and they're just wiggling around and that just not attaching well. So what we can do is we can use this natural signaling, the body has to repair things, and stimulate the body to send it repair cells into that area. So we do that with platelet rich plasma, we call it so the platelets that are in the blood are just waiting for a signal. Or if there's an injury, I'll create the clot and I'll send off the repair signal. So what we do with the blood, we take like 60 cc's of blood. And then we have a process of spinning down the blood and separating the platelets out and concentrating maybe five or 10 cc's out of the 60 and concentrating the platelets. And then we can activate the platelets with some usually some calcium, and it activates the platelets to go into that area and actually form the the the matrix of repair and signaling to the body blinging repair cells. So we can do this in all different joints in your knees and your hips and your shoulders, ankles wherever and signal the body to repair. And if that injury in the college is not completely torn, it's just frayed, it will repair. And it's very helpful. It takes about six weeks to go through a whole process of repairs like a bone when you break a bone, it doesn't repair right away, it takes about six weeks to repair. And that's about how long it takes to get the full benefit of one platelet rich plasma injection. We can inject a tendon or ligament you can even inject a scar on the skin sometimes your skin scars up and it looks all out of shape and funny and you can inject the European you will get nice repair on the skin. And for people who have trouble repairing the skin because their circulation is really bad. It's a great great way to get the skin to repair. Now what happens if the the tearing is is pretty intense. And your doctor says oh, you know this is bone on bone you're going to need to have hip or knee replacement or shoulder replacement. Mostly what that means is that the the the joint has lost a lot of cartilage and instead of the cartilage being resting on the bone, it's sort of really frayed but you still have little pieces of cartilage there. The cartilage is sort of like mountains and valleys. And in the valleys the college is still there but on the mountains the bone is on bone. But bone on bone means that there is lots of islands of of cartilage in between those mountains and valleys. Those that college will regrow when it's looks like it's bone on bone on the X ray on the MRI. What we suggest to see the exosomes are stem cells, exosomes are little growth factors, little packets different than platelets, these are in the in the amniotic fluid of of a baby's. And these exosomes send out signals to repair and grow things for the baby. And we can take these super signaling little packets and concentrate them and use that to inject into people and it's very safe. There's no no DNA from the baby but just these little packets. And they're very, very helpful. The most intense process or prepare is done by your own stem cells. And we can take stem cells from your own fat. And the body stores fat all over. And you think that the Fed has no purpose, but there's a big purpose to the fat, the fat has stem cells all around it. And the stem cells are waiting for a signal. And when the signal comes in that there's an injury, the stem cells will wake up and swim towards that injury. And what we do is we take your own fat from the belly and or the low pandal areas, and we dissolve the fat with an enzyme and then the stem cells are left then we activate the stem cells. And then we can inject the stem cells back into your own body. They're your own stem cells. They're there, they're waiting for a signal, okay? What should I repair. And so we take these stem cells out, and we get millions of them 100,000,300 million, lots of stem cells. And these stem cells. Once we activate them, we can inject them directly into the area that's been injured, knee, hip, ankle, shoulder, wherever. And we can also injected intravenously inside your vein, and they go all over your body to repair your brain to repair your heart, kidneys, but specifically to inject them into the joints, the cartilage, the injury. And we find that we get great repair and repair from exosomes and stem cells and not just for six weeks, but rather for six months, ongoing repair, to really make that process occur. And I've had so many great successes. It's like 80% of the time, it's like a miracle. People have been told Oh, you need to have surgery and and I inject them with the stem cells. And six months later, they're a new person, they feel great. I've had one young man who was like 26 years old, had two knee surgeries. And they wanted to do a third one because his knees were like the size of a volleyball. And he could barely walk. And he came to me and I said, Well, I don't know how much it'll help but it will help. We did his treatment and he got 80 to 90% better his knees went back to normal size, he could start exercising, he insisted on a second one because he was so much better after a year and a half. But he wanted to be 100% better. So I injected them again, and sure enough 100% better. Stem Cells are an incredible opportunity to utilize what's natural in your body to repair and regenerate. So I encourage any of you will have injuries that don't seem to be healing, come in and see me we can help and repair those areas. If it's just a minor thing, then we just use a PRP. We also have vibrational gains wave therapy we do from minor injuries. So come and see me talk to me and see if it's something that could be helpful for you. It's a pleasure to talk with you all. You can go to my website, oc wellness.com. We have a lot of information there about the stem cells. And I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks so much.

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