Presenter: Ryan Minarik, ND

Original Date: November 06, 2016

Regenerative injections are a rapidly evolving therapy in the field of sports medicine and athletic injuries. With the potential for top level athletes to return to play a game or two earlier, or the "weekend warrior" athlete to just finally deal with a nagging injury that has been present for years, these therapies are intriguing. But the question from a mainstream media and science standpoint remains, do they work? An initial form of regenerative injections, prolotherapy, has been around since at least the 1950's and used successfully to help strengthen ligaments and stabilize joints. In the last decade or so, platelet rich plasma (PRP) injections have arisen as a way for us to utilize the repair potential of our blood to help (re)stimulate healing. And even more recently, stem cells harvested from adipose or bone marrow are being injected to provide a potential "seed" for growth of new tissue.

This presentation discusses how these therapies are applied for musculoskeletal injuries, a brief overview of how they may work and the science behind it, and clinical examples of how they are used to help demonstrate patient selection and the actual injection procedure.

1.0 General CEUs approved by OBNM