PRP & SCT For Knee Pain Treatment

Knee pain treatment is the set of remedies that treat the most common knee ailments that affect adults. We offer several types of non-surgical, regenerative treatments to alleviate knee pain and restore functionality.

Treat the Cause, Not the Symptoms of Pain

Knees are tricky things. For the active individual, the knee is a prime area of complaint when it comes to injury. It’s all too common for an active individual to injure the meniscus, cartilage, ACL or MCL ligaments. Many also have chronic knee pain due to a past injury or arthritis.

At Personalized Regenerative Medicine, we look first to a complete regimen of improving wellness and fitness, reducing weight, and customized, targeted application of biologics—Platelet Rich Plasma Therapy (PRP) and SCT—to aid in recovery for people suffering from knee injuries. We also might recommend physical therapy, if necessary.

Just reducing the load on a knee through modest weight loss, for example, can result in dramatic improvements. Surgeries like arthroscopic procedures or whole knee joint replacement are often seen as the only option but come with a set of risks and a guaranteed rehab time of months to return to even a basic fitness level. We look first to less invasive methods to get you back to doing what you love. Dr. David Steenblock is an expert in various regenerative treatments for knee pain. He cares about helping you heal as well as alleviating your pain.

About Treatment for Knee Pain in Southern California

For years, the medical establishment has put an emphasis on reducing inflammation and employed liberal use of anti-inflammatory drugs, typically NSAID drugs like ibuprofen and naproxen and or steroids. We now know that inhibiting or slowing your body’s natural inflammatory response slows healing by preventing naturally occurring repair cells from reaching your injury. Our targeted treatments are designed to provoke an anti-inflammatory response while increasing the number of healing cells in the injured area.

Understanding Your Knees

The knee is a complex joint that consists of multiple moving parts. The knee connects two major bones, your thigh bone and your shin bone with the third bone in front called the kneecap. The knee cap serves as protection and support for the joint.

Cartilage in your joints provides the cushioning and shock absorption ability during movement. Cartilage prevents painful bone on bone interactions.

Ligaments join the bones together and facilitate the movement of your joints. Ligament injuries are common in sports as they often tear during rough conditions.

Tendons connect your knee bones to the surrounding muscles. Muscles provide a key means of taking the stress off your knees but your tendons must also be strong. Too much focus on muscle development without strengthening the tendons can cause the tendons to tear or wear down.

Knee pain results from some aspect of this complex biological machine breaking down or wearing out in some way.

Candidates

Candidates for knee pain treatments are anyone who has a chronic or acute condition that requires more than temporary pain killers to properly heal.

Your Personal Consultation with Dr. Steenblock

The best treatments begin with great consultations. Dr. David Steenblock takes the time to understand all his patients’ needs and conditions. During your personal consultation, he will review your medical history, discuss your condition, and your expectations. Dr. Steenblock has focused on pain management and treatment of joint conditions since the late 1970s. He’s one of the world’s leading experts on regenerative medicine. Once he has a comprehensive understanding of your condition and history, he can create a personalized treatment plan designed specifically for your situation. Dr. Steenblock doesn’t believe in wantonly prescribing potentially addictive pain medication as a viable treatment for conditions that cause pain. Instead, he wants to devise a treatment strategy to help your body regenerate itself.

Knee Pain Treatments

We offer treatments for knee pain that focus on treating the cause, not just the symptoms. Whether you suffer from chronic knee pain, like arthritis, or acute pain from an injury, knee pain usually results from some form of bone on bone grinding or depleted supporting tissue. With regenerative medicine, we focus on trying to boost your body’s natural ability to heal the damaged tissue. The conventional treatments don’t focus on trying to heal the knee, they simply cover up the symptoms for as long as possible with pain medication or short-term treatments. Some short term treatments prove useful, especially for acute injuries, but for long term pain relief, we have to address the underlying issues.

Regenerative Medicine

Regenerative medicine focuses on using the body’s own processes for rebuilding joint and tissue functionality. Depending on your specific condition we can employ a variety of methods to help treat your knee pain. Different treatments or combinations will benefit different individuals so it’s important to take a broad approach to treat knee pain.

Ozone injections are a popular first step to boost the revitalization of knee tissue. Your body naturally contains hyaluronic acid in the knee. Ozone can break hyaluronic acid (HA) into HA peptides that have healing properties and disperse through the knee to aid it in natural renewal. With this method, ozone injections stimulate the endogenous healing of the knee.

For more temporary relief, Synvisc might prove a useful tool in our kit of pain relief. Synvisc uses hyaluronic acid injections directly into the knee. Your knee’s synovial fluid naturally contains hyaluronic acid. Hyaluronic acid helps lubricate the joints and assists the cartilage in cushioning the joint from bone on bone movements. If part of the cause of knee pain is depletion of hyaluronic acid, Synvisc injections can offer temporary renewal of the HA in your knees.

For more long term conditions, Dr. Steenblock can take a regenerative cellular approach. Regenerative cellular medicine first harvests cells from your own adipose tissue (fat) or bone marrow. Then these cells are purified and reinjected into hard to access joints. This process results in an influx of your body’s natural healing properties which initiate natural restorative processes.  

Platelet-Rich Plasma

If treatments such as ozone injections don’t prove up to the task, Dr. Steenblock may recommend platelet-rich plasma. Platelets in our blood serve a powerful function in helping us heal from injuries and illnesses. They contain potent regenerative properties that can be leveraged to boost healing in locations that cause pain. We can effectively repurpose your platelets to enlist for the treatment of joint pain.

For PRP treatments, we extract your own blood, then spin it at a rate of thousands of RPMs to distill the blood into a serum of platelet-rich plasma. PRP injections can aid in healing locations where blood has trouble flowing into, such as the joints. PRP promotes the migration of mesenchymal cells that aids in the body’s natural cellular rejuvenation.^[1]

Results

Regenerative medicine sits at the forefront of medical advances. Unlike the pharmaceutical industry which operates under incentives to profit from just treating the symptoms without healing the root cause of pain, regenerative medicine is patient-centered. Platelet-rich plasma has been shown to be simple, safe, show high levels of patient satisfaction at providing relief.^[2] They are minimally invasive and have extremely low rates of adverse events and complications. Particularly in the early stages of the onset of arthritis, regenerative treatments show a lot of promise in treating pain and advancing our understanding of the complex interaction of factors that cause it.^[3]

FAQ

References 

1. Lu, L., Dai, C., Zhang, Z. et al. (2019). Treatment of knee osteoarthritis with intra-articular injection of autologous adipose-derived mesenchymal progenitor cells: a prospective, randomized, double-blind, active-controlled, phase IIb clinical trial. Stem Cell Res Ther 10, 143. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13287-019-1248-3
2. Glynn, L. G., Mustafa, A., Casey, M., Krawczyk, J., Blom, J., Galvin, R., Hannigan, A., Dunne, C. P., Murphy, A. W., & Mallen, C. (2018). Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy for knee arthritis: a feasibility study in primary care. Pilot and feasibility studies, 4, 93. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40814-018-0288-2
3. Cook, C. S., & Smith, P. A. (2018). Clinical Update: Why PRP Should Be Your First Choice for Injection Therapy in Treating Osteoarthritis of the Knee. Current reviews in musculoskeletal medicine, 11(4), 583–592. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12178-018-9524-x
4. Messier SP, Gutekunst DJ, Davis C, DeVita P. (2005). Weight loss reduces knee-joint loads in overweight and obese older adults with knee osteoarthritis. Arthritis Rheum. 52(7):2026-2032. doi:10.1002/art.21139