Stem Cell Therapy

It’s exhausting to live with a debilitating chronic illness or pain. In your search for relief, you may end up managing your symptoms reactively one at a time. Stem cell therapy has been around for decades, but it’s recently proving successful as a solution that:

• Reduces the progression of disease or illness
• Reverses the degeneration of damaged cells, joints and tissues
• Builds up cellular strength that you had prior to your recent diagnosis
• Slows down your body’s aging processes
• Eases the pain and discomfort from chronic conditions

What Is Stem Cell Therapy?

Stem cell therapy is a proactive, preventative treatment plan that allows you to regenerate healthy tissue and cells. Stem cells are naturally occurring cells in your body that have the potential to act as the repairmen in your body. No other cells in your body can become another kind of cell. Stem cells have the ability to:

• Divide and duplicate themselves for long periods of time
• Become specifically oriented cells such as those that make up your blood, heart, muscle and brain cells
• Integrate anywhere because they don’t have any specific functions in and of themselves

The Regenerative Powers of Stem Cells

When you undergo stem cell therapy, the process regenerates healthy cells to replace damaged or diseased tissues. For example, one popular use has been to rely on stem cells to prevent further deterioration of your body’s immunity following chemotherapy. They have been used to help the body’s immune system fight off other blood diseases like lymphoma and leukemia.

Increased longevity is another preventive use for stem cells. By improving the rejuvenation properties of your cells, stem cell therapy intervenes to slow the aging process. It prevents premature aging from wear and tear on your tissues.

Prevention and Mitigated Risks

Stem cell therapy not only alleviates your pain, allowing you to return to your daily activities, it also may be used as a prevention tool. This minimally invasive therapy prevents and eliminates the risks and complications you can experience with other therapies.

Conventional methods of pain management are invasive and often cause long-term side effects. Stem cell therapy allows you to avoid many of the risks because it:

• Is less invasive than surgery, with fewer risks of infection
• Carries no risk of addiction common with other treatments and long-term medicinal use
• Reduces in-patient hospital stays

How It’s Done

The donor stem cells for your procedure come from yourself, from a compatible person or from an umbilical cord. If they come from you, your doctor extracts stem cells through a painless blood draw or from bone marrow in a minimally invasive procedure.

The procedure and recovery time for your typical blood stem cell or bone marrow transplant is approximately five weeks — about two weeks for your preparation and another three weeks for follow-up visits. The procedure and recovery are mostly painless.

Symptoms Treated with Stem Cell Therapy

Stem cell therapy is a solution to natural cell and tissue degeneration, the damage from a previous injury or the pain and discomfort of chronic conditions. Transplanting stem cells creates a healthy environment for your new cells to grow. Your injected stem cells form a cushion that relieves the friction, inflammation and pain caused by damage and degeneration. Common symptoms that stem cell therapy treats include:

• Chronic pain
• Tissue damage
• Degeneration of joints
• Neuropathic pain
• Intractable musculoskeletal pain

Chronic diseases often treated with stem cell therapy include:

• Lou Gehrig’s disease
• Burger’s disease
• Spinal cord injury
• Parkinson’s disease
• Osteoarthritic ailments
• Autoimmune diseases such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis

Making the Decision

Your team of doctors understand the importance of offering you a balance of preventative care and diagnostic treatments. Providing you with the best resources and therapies available remains the priority. While stem cell therapy carries very few risks when performed by an expert in the field, it can be expensive. Insurance doesn’t yet cover stem cell therapy.