Stem Cell Therapy for Athletes

The last thing any athlete wants to hear is that they can’t play, but there’s a new medical treatment known as “stem cell therapy” that athletes are starting to turn towards for sports related injuries because of its quick recovery.

 

Stem cell therapy can treat multiple injuries, such as inflamed joints, ligament sprains, muscle strains, early osteoarthritis, and more. One of the major benefits to this treatment is the recovery time, which is the most important thing for athletes who have been injured.

 

Stem cell therapy is believed to regenerate new cells and replace damaged cells. Stem cell therapy enables the patient’s body to use its own stem cells to heal and repair. Some patients may experience pain and soreness after the procedure. Since the patient’s own bone marrow is used, there are no chances of rejection.

 

The recovery time for this procedure varies depending on the patient and the treatment type, but it usually takes 2-6 weeks. Patients who have tried stem cell therapy have noticed improvement soon after their procedure. Another benefit to this type of treatment is avoiding surgery which has a longer recovery process.

 

Although there are a some benefits to this treatment, there are also a few down sides. Stem cell therapy is so new that there aren’t a lot of studies to prove it is fully effective and the long term side effects are still unknown. Stem cell therapy is still undergoing research and there’s still a lot that needs to be done for it to be used as a front line treatment.

 

The way stem cell therapy works is by taking the patient’s own bone marrow from an area in the body like the lower back and then injecting it into the patient’s injured site. The entire procedure takes up to 45-minutes and requires no anesthesia. Patients will feel some pain and may experience swelling and soreness for up to a week after the procedure.

 

“As a fairly new, rather expensive procedure and insurance not covering it, but with promising results, we felt it necessary to try anything possible to help get the knees to become as healthy as possible. This procedure could possibly take away the need for much more invasive surgeries,” Lynn Seidel said.