Have you ever woken up with a crick in your neck? It’s painful, right? And it doesn’t just hurt, it often affects the way you move your body and interferes with common, everyday activities like driving, sleeping and even eating. Fortunately, for most people, neck pain is temporary, the result of a muscle injury or prolonged tension that can be alleviated by rest and medication. For others, though, neck pain becomes constant, a daily reminder that something is significantly amiss within the cervical spine. In these cases, there are treatment options that go beyond time and a drug prescription. Here’s when one of those options — stem cell therapy — could be a legitimate neck pain treatment:
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Your Pain is Chronic
As mentioned, many types of neck pain result from injury or from sitting, sleeping or positioning the body in an awkward way. In these types of instances, neck pain is usually short-lived and able to be alleviated with rest, massage and/or pain relieving medication. But if your neck pain is ongoing, stem cell therapy for neck pain is often a superior treatment since by their very nature stem cells facilitate lasting bodily repair and decrease ongoing degeneration, thus, providing enduring pain relief.
You Have Arthritis
Stem cell therapy is most effective as a treatment for degenerative joint disease. As mentioned above, stem cells don’t just generate new cells; they replace dying and dead cells, as well as decayed and/or injured ones. Further, stem cells can also counteract the effects of many inflammatory chemicals in the body while producing TNF-stimulated gene/protein 6 (TSG-6), a protein with anti-inflammatory activities. Therefore, using stem cell therapy for neck pain actually offers the body access to cells that are able to repair the damage that cells suffer as a result of repetitive joint overuse. This can be an excellent treatment for facet arthritis often initiated following whiplash type injuries.
You Want to Treat (the Root Cause of) Your Neck Pain, Not Just Alleviate It
Oftentimes, chronic neck pain stems from damage to cervical disc tissue. Healthy discs (which naturally don’t have an adequate direct blood supply) receive nourishment via osmotic pressure; fluid within the disc presses against the disc’s wall and acts as a pump, pulling in oxygen and other nutrients and pushing out waste material. As you age, however, cervical disc tissue naturally deteriorates, losing volume and weakening so that the exchange of nutrients and waste across the disc wall becomes compromised and discs become unhealthy and unable to function properly. Studies show that stem cell therapy for neck pain can be used to help restore osmotic pressure to the disc by introducing not just stem cells to repair the tissue itself, but growth factors and platelet-rich plasma (which are added to the stem cell solution before injection into the patient). Together, all three components of the stem cell treatment work to rebuild:
- Healthy disc cells
- Robust disc cells
- Improving disc volume
All of these allow the cells to function normally again and the result: organic alleviation of pain.
Want to Learn More?
Of course, all patients should consult a trusted healthcare professional to decide when (or if) stem cell therapy for neck pain is a valid option for their own unique cervical disc issue. To learn more about the procedure, including its risks and limitations, please contact our medical team at ThriveMD.
Meet Our Doctor, Dr. Scott Brandt
Dr. Scott Brandt completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and attended medical school at Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He then completed his anesthesiology residency training and internship at the University of Illinois and Michael Reese Hospitals in Chicago. Dr. Brandt has trained extensively across the country and become one of the nation’s top stem cell therapy doctors. He provides the highest quality patient care available. He continues to incorporate advancements in the field as rapidly as scientific evidence supports their addition. This combined with Dr. Brandt’s unparalleled expertise in minimally invasive injection techniques, utilizing live image guidance, allows him to ensure the best biologic solutions are placed exactly in the areas of tissue damage.