Jeff LangmaidFounder, The Evidence Based Chiropractor

You Can’t Regenerate What’s Already Gone

7 Feb 2026 · 1 min

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In this monologue, the speaker—likely a clinician specializing in regenerative medicine—explains how shockwave and similar regenerative therapies work and where their limits lie. He describes that busy, immobile, or unhealthy lifestyles can lead to the formation of scar tissue, which the body may accept as stable. Shockwave therapy aims to reactivate the body’s natural healing phase that normally occurs around two weeks after injury, by stimulating collagen synthesis, increasing blood flow, and promoting stem‑cell proliferation. However, the speaker stresses that these treatments cannot create new tissue from nothing. If a joint is completely bone‑on‑bone with no remaining cartilage, even the most potent stimulus like shockwave cannot restore the missing structure. He warns against the common misconception that regenerative modalities can fully rebuild lost bone or cartilage, emphasizing that the outcomes are constrained by the existing biological substrate and the body’s innate response to the applied stimulus.

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And oftentimes with how busy we are or how immobile we are, or how unhealthy we are, we can just lay down scar tissue and the body says, that's enough, I'm stable, we're good. And our job then with the shockwave and other regenerative therapies, we go into that old and decrepit tissue, we stimulate that process that's supposed to happen at that two week mark, which is getting the collagen improvement, getting the blood flow improvement, and proliferating the stem cells. So there are some people who are too far gone. And I can't just go in and build tissue from nothing, which is sometimes a misconception. People get really over the ridge, over the bridge of like, hey, no matter where I'm at, I can bring back collagen or bone. I can reformat that tissue. No, unfortunately we can't go that far. If somebody is completely bone on bone with no cartilage whatsoever, regardless of the stimuli that I create in there, and shockwave being one of the best at proliferation of regenerative cells, there's nothing I can do about it. But definitely that's what I'm looking to do. And it's not the therapy, it's the human body's nature in the of that particular stimuli.