Chronic pain is pain that lasts longer than 12 weeks. While everyone has aches and pains from time to time, a 2010 study estimates that about 30% of Americans have chronic pain. This is why it’s so important to understand your chronic pain treatment options.
While narcotic medication is commonly used to treat this pain, heavy painkillers can cause addiction. A recent New York Times article described how opioid overdose caused 59,000 deaths in 2017, a 19% increase from the previous year. Drug overdose is now the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 50, and many of these are caused by opioid abuse.
Chronic pain is a huge contributor to opioid drug addiction because so few methods exist for treating it successfully. After spine, back, knee, and hip surgery many patients need opioid pain medications. Sadly, many surgeries are unsuccessful or require further painful and costly procedures—often with little or no successful pain management.
Stem cell therapy may be on the verge of changing that. Stem cell injections are fast, non-invasive, and non-surgical. They also contain no addictive ingredients or dangerous drugs.
This’s why we are proud to offer regenerative medicine for chronic pain in the form of stem cell therapy. These stem cell injections stimulate your own damaged cells’ regenerative potential to eliminate your pain, reduce your inflammation, and restore your tissue. Ultimately, these injections for chronic pain could reduce the need for opioid medication prescriptions, specifically for back pain.
Chronic pain can have serious effects on your mental health and quality of life, but regenerative medicine may help. To discover how stem cell therapy may be able to reduce or eliminate your chronic pain, speak with a specialist today in Midland Park by calling (201) 806-6099 or contact us online.
There are many different conditions that can cause chronic pain, such as:
Overweight or obese people have a higher risk of chronic pain. Besides discomfort, chronic pain may also cause symptoms like fatigue, mood changes, and insomnia.
Since pain is subjective, diagnosing your pain will require asking questions about your pain, using imaging tests like x-rays and CT scans to search for conditions that may be causing the pain, and electrode machines to identify muscle or nerve issues.
Injured cells in your skin, bones, muscles, ligaments, tendons, and connective joints send out signals; MSCs respond to those signals, migrate to the injured tissue, and release proteins that stimulate your own cells to begin regenerating.
Common chronic pain regions that are treated with stem cell therapy include the joints, back, and neck. Stem cells have powerful anti-inflammatory effects, which also help reduce pain in conditions like tendonitis.
Regardless of where your chronic pain is, your regenerative specialist will most likely use x-rays to help pinpoint the regions that require regeneration. He or she will also clean and numb your skin to reduce infection and prevent any discomfort.
Once injected, the stem cells will release growth factors, cytokines, and chemokines which then may:
As with all medical procedures, success rates of stem cell therapy will vary depending on your age, body type, genetics, injury severity, stress levels, and other environmental factors.
We process the umbilical cord blood of healthy newborns. If a pregnant woman scheduled for caesarean section decides that she does not want to keep and store her unborn child’s umbilical cord, she can sign an informed consent form and undergo a medical and social history review, along with a blood test. The new mother can be accepted as a donor if she meets all donor eligibility requirements.
The umbilical cord blood is collected in a sterile bag, sent to a lab, and then processed within 48 hours using proprietary methods. A sample of the finished product is tested by an independent third-party lab for sterility. Only after all lab reports have passed the regulatory requirements can the umbilical cord stem cells be distributed.
The FDA recently confirmed there is only one registered and approved stem cell product on the market: umbilical cord blood-derived hematopoietic progenitor cells (blood forming stem cells) used for certain indications. While there is enormous promise in stem cell therapies, and thousands of ongoing experiments trying to establish efficacy, stem cell treatments do not yet meet the FDA’s scientific approval standard.
Practitioners tapping into this enormous promise of stem cells for any therapeutic use must exercise their professional judgment and expertise. We urge anyone embarking on the use of stem cell therapies to consult the national health data bases to evaluate current clinical trial information, and the FDA’s website on human tissue to get its current therapy evaluations.
In 2018 the FDA’s commissioner and research director reported that the agency will be incorporating some “new concepts for how small investigators and firms can seek and meet the approval standard for products through efficient expedited pathways.” You can keep up with latest developments on the FDA’s website.
As with any injection procedure, there is a small risk of bacterial infection (not associated with the product) and nerve damage. If you experience severe pain, bleeding, or swelling at your injection site, or experience symptoms like fever, nausea, dizziness, or vomiting, seek emergency medical care right away.
Chronic pain can cause a lot of trouble for you, but stem cell therapy may help you regain your wellbeing. To learn more about our chronic neck and back pain treatment in Midland Park, call (201) 806-6099 or contact us online.
