Stem Cell Therapy for Knees: What Actually Works in Regenerative Medicine

hello my name is Dr Jeff crra I'm here to answer any questions fill in a little bit about my past what men Matrix has to offer and also clear up a lot of the misunderstandings around functional medicine hormone health health span versus lifespan so we'll be talking on quite a few different things here in short um my past is uh as a board-certified Internal Medicine provider a board-certified pediatrician who has additional board certification in Primary Care sports medicine also I'm a certified practitioner through the Institute of functional medicine um with that that's all founded on my desire to get to the root cause of illness a deeper knowledge of medicine Beyond just the pharmaceutical agenda or the insurance agenda when it comes to your health care unfortunately I feel that most of our patients are missing out on the healthc care that's provided to them and it's a shame that they have to spend their hard-earned money for the best level of care possible if patients are making that investment in their healthare I believe that the health care provider should also meet them at that at that level and and provide more than what they're getting these days um there are a lot of misunderstandings about what is functional medicine what is normal medicine but for me personally functional medicine is lifestyle medicine which is is founded on stress nutrition movement or exercise relationships and sleep these are the foundation of everyone's health and things that uh we want to put attention on to increase health span and not necessarily lifespan this day and age a lot of people are focused on longevity and extending life but the focus really should be on extending the health that you have have towards the end of that life not just a higher number but rather a higher level of function as we walk through this life it is natural for our processes and our bodies to have some degradation as we age but that can be minimized with focusing on sleep stress nutrition movement and relationships or those lifestyle factors functional medicine to me is similar to what the Institute of functional medicine say it's individualized it's personalized to that individual it's still science-based and Cellular in origin it's a recognition that each system within our body is not isolated but interrelated and you do not deal with only your thyroid condition without considering other things around heart health and mitochondrial health and energy Etc there is a lot of talk around hormonal health and how that contributes to our health span and function through life hormones for those who don't know are simple chemicals that are released from various glands within our system I would say that anyone working in the Hormone Health has to recognize the hierarchy of those uh glandular systems we talk about the adrenal glands which provide cortisol that help us respond to stress but when over stimul ated produce a detrimental state of too much cortisol they also produce adrenaline and noradrenaline and this is our response to those immediate dangers we talked about adrenals producing cortisol and stress that's part of that lifestyle medicine where you can be overstressed but the body responds to an appropriate amount of stress uh in moderation it's how we get stronger it's how we become more resilient other parts of the hormonal system include the thyroid oid gland this is something that also is related to our energy our function at a cellular level it is how we utilize our substrates for energy Generation Um and then also hormonal Health when it comes to the sex hormones whether that be testosterone in both males and females estrogen in both males and females and progesterone all these systems are interrelated and excessive stress can up impair your thyroid function it can impair your sex hormone function and sometimes going through the natural change of menopause and perimenopause affects uh sex hormone levels which creates more stress and therefore you're circling back to the adrenal gland so these are like all of our physiology or how the Body Works interrelated and interconnected so you cannot treat any of them in isolation so often patients will want to know what the ideal hormone millu looks like for them and this is individualized now some will function very well on high levels some will function on very low levels but the body is meant to be in balance and there are natural processes in which certain hormone levels drop as we age when we talk about sex hormones some of the misconceptions are there's no excessive level of testosterone and that's in correct there definitely is uh damage damage done to ignoring testosterone and it's and its effect on our cardi metabolic Health it actually is very important when it comes to atherosclerosis we're still talking about the number one killer in America is atherosclerosis and those with less testosterone whether they be male or female are increasing their risk for the number one killer in America the the natural process of per menopause and menopause is uh really misunderstood and done great damage by the Women's Health Initiative a huge study in which the dangers of hormone replacement therapy were allegedly reported but that is due to a misinterpretation those were synthetic progestins and actually some of the benefits of a well balanced estrogen progesterone level for females is related to breast cancer and actually reduction in breast cancer not an increase so the picture is not as straightforward as all hormone replacement is damaging to females that is incorrect that the quality of life the longevity and health span factors related to proper Hormone Health through that per menopause age cannot be understated whether that be the change and the effect on stress on top of our already daily stressful lives or a new stress or change in our moods and interaction with our relationships and life again we come back to that lifestyle of maximizing for Sleep nutrition relationships Stress Management and movement um those changes are individual to every single person and and optimizing Hormone Health is enhancing that Health span and um function in one's life testing around hormones and sex hormones in particular is a interesting topic because there's so much variation in how it's practiced amongst conventional medicine and integrative in functional medicine in short uh serum or blood level lels of many hormones are inadequate or not necessarily representative of what's going on at the tissue level with one exception testosterone can be measured by the serum but estrogen progesterone are going to be better measured in the saliva or the urine um and then cortisol is something that's fluctuating throughout the day so without uh a an assessment of cortisol levels through the day you are only getting part of the picture the other thing that changes is replacement or hormone replacement therapy does change one's biology and one's biology affects how those hormones are handled so as someone is attending to their stress their sleep their nutrition the handling of the hormones by the body is changing so it is a moving Target for the first year or so and I find a lot of people believe they can just Place someone on hormones and forget about them and not rep test um in medicine we first want to do no harm so we will I will recommend testing frequently when it comes to hormones until we find a nice steady state unfortunately that often does takes 6 to 12 months of uh intervention and conscientious attention to what's happening to the body it's interesting as a male talking about a female condition I have to be very understanding that this is an individual process and I've only walked that Journey with other females their Pro their Journey has been their journey and I try to learn from them and understand what it means to them however the belief that they have to suffer with night sweats they have to suffer with muscle loss they have to suffer with mood flexibility or irritability as a normal process I fundamentally disagree with that and there's good evidence that attending to hormones and lifestyle medicine during the per menopause time is beneficial for all the question about um does stress affects menopausal experience and vice versa everything is inter related and it's never anyone's fault but those that have more daily stressors or tapped up against their Str stress resiliency do often experience more symptomatology so it falls on us to help with that symptomatology so we do not add or push on the stress resiliency that is already there so one one sex hormone a lot of people are given attention to is testosterone and this belief that it will make me bigger the true benefit of testosterone for men and women is uh recovery it does allow you to get the benefit from the work you put in at the gym or on the track so it is a tool to facilitate recovery from physical activity levels those are damaging that's how we develop bigger muscles but if you are always injured or damaged um because of low uh testosterone in the setting of a heavy workload you are only adding to that stress so in that sense testosterone does not make someone develop muscles it may allow them to uh recover better from their efforts and put more load into their body but testosterone in and of itself does not give anybody magic muscles or uh super gy physique so growth hormone is a interesting topic in the sense that growth hormone is produced by uh portion of the brain and is related to recovery and repair from usual physical activity efforts um it is beneficial for tendon repair ligament repair tendons being the connection from muscles to the bones and ligaments being connections from uh bones to Bone um you can it it is another Goldie Locks of the uh hormone system where in too much is too much and too little is too little you want just the right amount and unfortunately with stress and um impaired sleep that natural growth hormone and natural hormone of recovery is impaired so sometimes we will talk about working on the grow grow hormone access or supporting the growth hormone access to facilitate recovery this is usually done through the uh use of peptides which are smaller proteins that do have an effect on in our physiology that affect us on a cellular level and this is one way in which we can help that recovery from our work efforts allow more workload without excess stress stress um we've kind of danced around that topic of stress whether it be physical or emotional stress or any other stress the body does respond to small doses of stress with an improvement in whatever measure is needed but when that stress becomes excessive Andor chronically present the body has no mechanism of recovering Andor building as a result of that stress when we talk about testosterone and growth hormone when facilitated or aided in the setting of stress then you make the gains in in life whether it be increased stress resiliency or ability to handle a higher workload and therefore see muscle gains um gains in a robic capacity and that's a whole another topic that we haven't touched on the benefit to health span of aerobic capacity and muscular strength there are other ways of uh stimulating the growth hormone access without giving growth hormone this is a pulsatile uh hormone meaning it is up and down through the day but generally with a little stimulation you're getting additional benefit additional recovery the peptides that are most often talked about for uh growth hormone access stimulation and assistance include somorin or ipamorelin these are various peptides that are going to stimulate a hormone that stimulates the production of growth hormone so these are peptides that have been around for many decades and used by some of the most the elite athletes in the world for Olympic competitors um and their under the understanding of the science and formal study of them is just now being recognized once we finally have said what happens with all these smaller proteins that have been blown off by conventional medicine and research by pharmaceutical companies in the past another one of my specialties that I mentioned was sports medicine and musculoskeletal injuries and uh one of the major debilities uh that Americans are suffering from is joint pain and the inability to have a regular movement practice get into the gym to build muscle to build aerobic capacity these things that improve health span and that's what drew me to Med Matrix was knowledge that some of these regenerative Orthopedic practices had access to stem cells Andor their products everyone uh likes to talk about stem cells these days and there is a lot of confusion as to what entails a stem cell and what entails how they help in muscular skeletal injury however some of the products uh that we use at Med Matrix include exosomes which are the products of stem cells that come in many different things peptides proteins RNA DNA things that modulate the immune system to put it into a building state so stem cells yes can build um but we also want to consider is an 80-year-old stem cell the same as an umbilical stem cell and the products that they produce do they have the same regenerative potential when we are talking about reversing pain reversing the damage of many years or Decades of load to joints um we probably need to take the most powerful or most potent entity and that's what we're learning from umbilical stem cells or umbilical mesical stem cells both the stem cells have building potential but mostly their products are what we call exosomes what they put out into the environment as their communication are the most powerful entities that we have in regenerative medicine the reason being is that we as we study them more and more they are immunomodulatory and meaning that they help bring down the inflammation they he help tone the immune system so that there is less pain so that the muscles can and strength can shine through and take Force off of joints to keep it very simplistic if you have pain you have slight muscle and ambition if you have slight muscle and ambition you have more force on a joint if you have more force on that joint you have more destruction and more pain this becomes a vicious cycle so we need more tools rather than just pain medicines to try and get strength to shine through in addition we want people to have more strength but focus on the health span Health span and be more functional and that is where working with exosomes working with mesenchimal stem cells or umbilical stem cells to turn down the inflammation to modulate the immune system and allow people to get the benefit from working out um really is a wonderful tool for those that have a movement practice Orthopedics as a field and I can say this as a non-operative orthopedist is not always known for the most evidence-based medicine however when it comes to exosomes and helping this very Monumental task of taking on osteoarthritis or destruction of the joints exosomes always rise to the top um there are other modalities besides exosomes but the evidence is that we are starting to move the needle on joint degeneration whether it's rebuilding or better functioning joints I do not care I want my patients to feel empowered and have a higher lifespan and so anything that allows somebody that's been living in chronic pain to function and come back to me and say the stairs aren't as hard anymore I'm able to get around and play with my grandkids I can get up and down off the floor and engage with the world more is something that catches my attention and that's exactly what I'm hearing from my patients this idea that it is a Relentless forward progress of nothing but destruction and less activity is something that we do have to combat it does take work on the patient part it's not a magic pill there's no such thing as one thing that just makes everything go away but those that are not seeing the Returns on their investment of being in the gym or investing in their health need more assistance from the health field than just this is what you have to live with for the rest of your life so the field of regenerative Orthopedics and trying to assist with uh the treatment and function of osteoarthritis has come with many different options and there are varying levels of uh studies and results from things such as platelet rich plasma this is a patient's own blood spun down to isolate the plasma and the platelets within the plasma these platelets do have granules within them that are filled with growth factors so T taking one's own blood and the platelets to inject into areas of damage and assist with uh restoration is platelet rich plasma there is prazone which is uh means a lot of different things to different people some of that is taking PRP and adding it to Ozone to others it is Ozone with a few other things to help with the mitochondrial dysfunction or the power cell dysfunction and uh pain that comes from joint destruction so ozone in and of itself is also something that produces a little uh inflammation in the hope of a healing in process so that is as as you may have heard me say part of recovery or becoming stronger is at times stressing the cell and ozone is something that overall decreases inflammation and enhances recovery so we've talked about platelet rich plasma prosome which can be platelet rich plasma with ozone or ozone with other constituents to decrease some of the toxic um environment of an osteoarthritic joint these can also both be placed into soft tissues too given that they are very natural products and not causing any damage ozone by itself is not something you want to inhale it is that sort of smell you hear around uh uh smell around lightning um and it can be very costic to the lungs but placed in the right are areas is very beneficial for healing processes within the body and then we've also talked a little bit about exosomes or mesenchimal stem cells things that can also work both soft tissue within joints for bringing down inflammation allowing things to rebuild um and increase function bpc157 is another one of these peptides again for those who have haven't heard peptides are the same thing as a protein but a smaller number of amino acids amino acids are the building blocks of all proteins and back in the day research and development and Labs did not have the ability to study smaller proteins or peptides so essentially said that they were worthless and did not have a function in our body as science has advanced we are able to study small peptides BBC 157 is a shorter it is a peptide a smaller protein that has the ability to stimulate the growth of cells it's been studied orally a lot in gastric and GI repair it is something that actually can make it past the acid of the stomach to enhance uh repair of the GI tract whether it be ulcers on and on past the the stomach um but also by injection uh that peptide has also been very favorable for tendon and ligament repair so chronic sprained ankles repeatedly torn tendons um or ligaments instability bpc 157 is one of those tools and peptides that's worked very well in restorative um and regenerative Orthopedics you had asked me about studies around some of these injection therapies and uh prolozone Prolotherapy is one thing that can often get uh interchanged and intermixed inappropriately Prolotherapy has been something that's been used very for a very long time mostly in the Chiropractic World in which hyperosmolar dextrose or sugar at a higher concentration is injected into tendons ligaments or areas as an irritant to stimulate healing of the ligaments and tendon so Prolotherapy is taking a high concentration of sugar and generally placing it into an area of disease to stimulate the immune system and so people may ask well how do you know it's the sugar because there's also benefit sometimes from just dry needling tendons and ligaments in which your own blood brings some growth factors so in the area of regenerative Orthopedics it's always about bigger and bigger doses your own blood will by dry needling will bring a little dose of platelets and growth factors irritation with sugar Prolotherapy will bring a bigger dose partly because of the needling but partly because of the irritation of sugar there are studies that show the benefit of the sugar over just dry needling and then you have the ability to inject platelet rich plasma a higher concentration of platelets and growth factors into that area and then if you want the mega dose of growth factors then we are talking about the exosomes all of these things um of uh ways of bringing growth factors to the area of injury can be combined can be sequenced in different ways and even with prazone the injection uh the augmentation of PRP or even bpc 157 a peptide with ozone is all in the name of um healing that area and stimulating regrowth regeneration and less pain stem cells come in many different locations um and they come in many different forms some Reg generative orthopedic clinics will use stem cells from a patient's own fat stores some will mobilize them with uh chemicals that are used in chemotherapy patients before they have a radiation of their bone marrow some will go straight to the bone marrow to draw out the stem cells within the bone marrow the one problem with using a patient's own cells which is to be respected if a patient patient show so chooses is is those stem cells also come with the same age as that patient they aren't uh necessarily A young cell so men Matrix and my personal preference would be to use umbilical stem cells that have been tested for all diseases our younger stem cells are actively producing exosomes with higher amounts of growth factors and things that are going to be doing the business and modulation of the immune system so while all stem cells carry that capacity it's my belief and our belief that a younger stem cell is going to have a greater regenerative uh potential if you are going to um invest your hard-earned money on stem cell therapy I want the most potent product possible and also with the least amount of uh iritation to you a bone marrow biopsy is something that everybody will feel there is no way to make that without some discomfort whereas Others May say getting them from the fat really does not CA uh cause that much but also fat is um an aged stem cell too so umbilical stem cells umbilical mesenchimal stem cells can be proven to be free of the Decades of life that come with some of our patients and potential infectious agents that they've been exposed to Through The Years too another point I want to return to is uh the issue around exosomes and all those growth factors and potent uh potential building and immune modulating chemicals these are things that our body naturally makes they are made by our stem cells and they can be infused in IV they do not have to only go into joints only into soft tissues there may be some additional benefit and potential access to the central nervous system where there's actually reports of patients receiving exosomes and seeing the reversal of stroke like symptoms as the exosomes make access to the bloodstream so exosomes can also be combined with other IV Therapies things such as antioxidants glutathione which is our Master antioxidant NAD which some people SAR searching for longevity would be seeking at men Matrix there's a whole host of IV offerings and one could even include the exosomes with that so whatever the need is there is something that can help whether it be um simple buffering or C search sech in for something to help long term um we've covered a lot of different things through this little uh Whirlwind tour in short functional medicine is something that we are offering at Med Matrix this is going to be individualized and focused on the patient's function it's going to be systems based and deeper than what I would practice as a conventional medicine practitioner it's going to go deeper into the cellular function the catch term that everyone is throwing around this day is looking for the root cause rather than just throwing Band-Aids on your problems or covering up a symptom with medication we want to find what is the source of this pain dysfunction or disease that you are living with the functional medicine approach does come with a foundation of sleep stress nut nutrition movement and relationships but on top of that if if you are attuned to all those aspects of your health we want to bring a higher level of testing a better level of lab analysis something beyond what conventional insurance will say they'll pay for so that we can move the needle on your health everyone should have an opportunity to increase their health span this is not about increasing lifespan some number number this is about increasing one's function and engagement with the World engagement with their family engagement with their friends whether that be physically mentally socially um the focus of functional medicine is to increase and maximize function in your life that may come with Advanced testing Advanced lab interpretation it may come with that testing to find area where we can talk about hormone replacement therapy or focusing on degenerative conditions that can be improved with exosomes or other peptide therapies my goal is really to help patients get to their stated goal they are always the better physician for them they know their life their experience more than I do I know the medicine better than they do and together we make great team functional medicine and the options available through men Matrix help you get to where you want to be not where I want you to be so if you're interested in maximizing your function getting the most uh out of your life and your investment in your health I would encourage you to reach out to Med Matrix so you can Google Med Matrix USA or give the office a call the staff is amazing and more than happy to meet you where where you need to be um and I look forward to working together