David Plante: An Incredible Recovery

All right, Well, I am Dr. Joshua Schachter. I'm the founder and medical director of Pinnacle Integrative Orthopedics and Sports Medicine in Wichita Falls, Texas, where we take our patients to the peak of wellness. And here I'm sitting here today with Mr. David Plant. He is an amazing patient of ours. We are in our laser room. We've got MERV, which is an MLS M6 laser. That's our cold laser therapy that we do on a lot of patients before and after surgery. We do it before and after our biologics procedures. And so, Mr. Plant, would you. Would you mind giving me your full name and age, if that's appropriate?

Sure. David Plante, 69. Soon to be 70.

That's right. 69 years young. All right. So we did met him when you come to meet us here at Pinnacle.

I'd been having a problem with my shoulder for many years. I'd taken a fall from about 8ft and.

I was able to work my way through it with physical therapy and got to the point where nothing was helping anymore. So it was time to do something different.

Right. And so we actually used the principle of holistic orthopedics with this gentleman. When he came in to see us, we didn't just talk about biologics or wellness, we talked about everything. And for him, unfortunately, he had a very large rotator cuff tear, and so we had to repair that for him. And so you underwent rotator cuff repair and in your shoulder in January of 2024? That's correct. And subsequently we did our. We were in the process of our Pinnacle Gold program. So that is PRP injections, bone marrow aspirin injections. And the idea, as well as MLS laser treatments. And the idea is to augment the healing of our rotator cuff repair and really maximize the benefit that we can give to the patient as far as healing is concerned. So what was life like before your treatment? What were your limitations?

The biggest limitation was anything that I had to reach over my back, I had to reach over my back. It was ice pick.

And he couldn't do that right there. That was what he couldn't do. So, I mean, any movement behind you, any movement over your head. Okay, what finally triggered you to come in and meet us here at Pinnacle?

That pain, That's a. Like I said in the past, because this is a 30 year problem. And in the past, I was always able to kind of work around it. I couldn't work around it anymore. And it was pretty much painful all the time. Certainly anytime that I had to use that kind of a movement, which is.

All day long every day for most people. Right. Like reaching behind you is a big deal.

Yeah.

What kind of concerns did you have prior to the procedure? And I want to really like just the whole process. When we started to talk about not just doing surgery, but also doing these biologics procedures, using a laser, talking about nutrition, all this other stuff that we did, what concerns did you have?

Well, the big concern, my mother had had rotator cuff surgery many years ago and I helped with her physical therapy to get through that because I was a medic in the military and it was a tough goal for her. And so obviously you've got that in your mind.

But.

It'S the short term, long term thing. Long term, if I didn't do anything, I was going to have a lot of pain.

Right.

Short term, if I had the surgery done, I expected to be pain free. As far as the biologics and all that. I've always been a strong supporter of stem cell. I just don't think it's used enough.

It isn't. You're correct.

And so that was, that was exciting to me.

And using your own stem cells, using your own mesenchymal stem cells, the bone marrow aspirate, that is critical.

Right.

That's the most effective thing we have biologically right now. And so what was the procedure like? You know, we did your shoulder scope and that's a fairly standard shoulder scope. We did a pretty big rotator cuff repair. So obviously post operatively had that. But we had you come in and start doing lasers almost immediately.

Right.

And then we did a PRP injection for your shoulder. What was that procedure like?

You know, as far as having the injection, it's another injection. It was a little sore the next day, but nothing major to say that I could feel a major difference. I feel like even by that time I was so far advanced that I was really not feeling any anything.

That's great. So then it just kind of stacked on top of there. You have very little pain now. Great function. And the crazy thing about him is this is usually for a rotator cuff his size, this is usually a year to a year and a half process. We're about five months in and his function is amazing. Now I'm going to caution him. We're going to want to be careful and slow. And obviously we get to look at this with ultrasound every time we do another procedure. So we're really checking the integrity of repair. But very impressive as far as your progress with our Procedure. So what kind of downtime did you have? We know what kind of downtime we have after a shoulder scope, we're in a sling for six to eight weeks. We can't lift more than 10 pounds for three months. But for you, after the interventions like the procedure that we did, the prp, what was your downtime after that, as compared?

The biggest downtime is the sling. I mean, it's. It's a nuisance. Well, correct one thing. We're three months out.

Oh, my goodness.

We're three months out because it was the 30th of January and this is the 29th of April.

I need to get my dates right. That's three months.

But as far as the downtime, once, once I was able to get rid of the sling.

I was in therapy three days a week with physical therapy. And it's easy to say that hurts a little bit or whatever. I pushed hard. In fact, I was constantly telling the therapist, I'm beyond that. You need to move me up. I need to do more. And they were all shocked. They were really shocked in the fact that how fastly I was advancing.

And for us, that's really important. A part of what we can do with orthobiologics and the additional treatments that we do here at Pinnacle is it helps not just patients who've never had an operation, but patients who did have an operation to do a lot better, faster. And in a lot of times, not in your case, but in a lot of times, we can actually present, prevent a surgery. So what's your life like now? What can you do that you haven't been able to do in the past? Obviously, we just saw.

That's a lot of my demonstration for you. And that's the biggest thing, is that I feel like I have total mobility back where before I was limited mobility due to the pain. So now it's just a matter of building the strength. You know, I can feel like if I have to pick something with this arm, I can still tell that it's a little weak. It's not painful, it's just a little weak.

Absolutely.

And so that's my goal right now, is to keep working on strengthening and.

We'Re going to keep reinforcing that with. We reinforce the strength of the tissues with our biologics therapies. Going forward, we're going to continue with laser on him. Obviously, we have supplements and nutritional information that we have for him. What would you tell somebody who's considering Pinnacle Integrative Orthopedics and Sports Medicine and thinking about coming to do some of these interesting, amazing, cutting edge things that we're doing. I like it. Two thumbs up.

Thumbs up.

Yeah. Good deal. And anything else that you'd want to say to somebody who's thinking about, you.

Know, I don't know if everybody would respond the way I've done. I know that the expectation that I had and what was being talked about, even that.

I far exceeded that. And I think I made comment to you once before I put that on you.

I think absolutely. And our programs are not for everyone. I think that's important to acknowledge that this is not the right answer for everyone. But if it's the right answer for you, then it works extremely well. And we're going to do our very best at Pinnacle to make sure that you exceed your own expectations and reach that peak of wellness that we talked about.

I'm there.

Thank you, my friend. Appreciate you so much.