A physician that practices Sports Medicine treats patients that have suffered musculoskeletal injuries. This would include professional and amateur athletes but also regular people. If I were to sum it up, a sports medicine doctor specializes in taking care of patients with all types of musculoskeletal injuries.
My philosophy is that many injuries will not heal unless we perform some type of active treatment. A good Sports Med doctor will integrate multiple modalities of treatment that can help repair or stimulate a healing process. Many times, these procedures will involve Regenerative Medicine.
Regenerative medicine is on the cutting edge of treatment especially for sports medicine doctors. It allows us to perform interventions that can activate the body to initiate it's own healing process. Some of the treatments we use include PRP, Stem Cell therapy, and regenerative peptides to stimulate the body’s natural healing process.
What is PRP:
PRP stands for platelet-rich plasma. Platelets are a type of cell in your blood and their job is to initiate the healing process after an injury by releasing growth factors that are signaling molecules that attract local stem cells and initiate a healing process in that area. To extract your platelets, we first draw a small amount of blood from your arm, process it to remove just the platelets and then reinject it into the site of injury. Once this is done, the platelets will start the healing process in the injured area we target. When performed with a proper recovery program, this can result in excellent healing.
Stem Cells:
Stem cells are cells in your body that have the ability to grow into a variety of different tissues. We all have many stem cells in our own body, but sometimes they're not getting to where they need to go, or we may not have highly active stem cells due to age or chronic illness. Stem cells can be obtained from a lab which specializes in making them or can also be harvested from your own body through a variety of different ways. Stem cell therapy is the gold standard of regenerative medicine and one of the most promising therapies in medicine.
