Dr. Joy Kong explains how stem cells from umbilical cord and placenta can rebuild damaged knee cartilage and help patients avoid replacement surgery. She uses a two-injection method to reach different cartilage layers, and a 12-year study showed 97% of stem cell-treated knees avoided replacement versus 20% of surgically replaced knees needing revision.
OK, a lot of people are asking, what happens if I have joint osteoarthritis? So knee pain, other joint pain, shoulder pain. So what can one expect when someone wants to get stem cell treatment for these? Stem cell treatments can really help people prevent having to go through surgeries, and recovery time is really long. And there's almost no downtime with stem cell treatment. So basically, stem cell therapy utilizing especially mesenchymal stem cells, the type I use are derived from umbilical cord, is actually a blend of very comprehensive cell types. But a majority of them, or a huge percentage of them, is mesenchymal stem cells. So these cells are very anti-inflammatory. They help modulate the immune system. They help wake up local stem cells like in the cartilage or bone can be woken up and start to regenerate and divide. And they also have, you know, anti-apoptotic, which means if the cells are about to die because they're damaged, they can salvage them. And it has you know, anti-cancer properties. So a lot of different properties. But the things we're looking at for joint regeneration is these anti-inflammatory and regenerative signals to local stem cells, and also helping the immune system, sending the signals to the immune system so the immune cells can remove damaged cells, get rid of them, so new cells can come replace it. The treatment is very simple, right? Simple injections. It's considered tissue transplant from one person to another. And we use birth tissue-derived stem cells, and these are very, very young cells. There's nothing to issue with fetal cells, you know, some people are worried about abortions, and that's completely, you know, that's, that's not based on reality, at least not in this country, because fetal cells are not allowed. They're not legal. So what we use are birth tissue stem cells. So these are from live, healthy births, babies born, and the tissue that came with the baby, which are the placenta and the umbilical cord, are usually tossed in the biological wastebasket. But now we know how much regenerative potential there is in tissue. So we're not throwing them away. We're actually taking it to lab, extracting the cells. These are the cells that we put into the joint space to help the body heal. Of course, my approach is to attack from both angles to help the joint heal. Because when you look at the joint, especially a larger joint like the knee, the outer 1/3 of the cartilage is nourished by the blood supply. The inner 2/3 is nourished by the synovial fluid, you know, within the joint capsule. So if I just inject into the knee, I can nourish the inner two-thirds part of the cartilage, but the outer one-third is not getting the signals. That's not what the perfusion is. And for the, whatever that's in the blood to get into the joint space, to get into the synovial fluid, that kind of exchange is going to take a very, very long time. So the best way is to attack from both angles. You're putting it directly into the joint space, and when you put something into the blood, the blood can nourish the outer one-third of the cartilage, and that can produce a very synergistic healing benefits. So that's something that I do in the clinic. I think that produced the best results. There's really no downtime. Sometimes a person may notice a little bit of stiffness or just fullness in the joint space after the injection. That usually lasts 1 to 3 days and they will go away. Just remember that the swelling stage is actually your body is mounting an inflammatory reaction. It's telling the immune cells come in and the fluid is coming in. So that inflammatory reaction actually can help boost the healing. So that is a stage of the so don't be too alarmed by that. That's just one of the stage. And then after that calms down, the healing process would take, it would take weeks. Just think about building tissue. So there's acute aspect of stem cell therapy, which is the anti-inflammatory aspect, and then there's a tissue rebuilding aspect, which means that you're growing new tissue. So the tissue doesn't grow in one day. It's a process. So it may take weeks. So during the process, when the new tissue is getting formed, you don't want to be pounding onto the joint because think about the new tissue, they're very fragile, just like you're forming a new scab, right, on your skin and you can just knock on the, you know, corner of something and then you knock it off because it's not fully, you know, at its mature stage. So it can be very fragile. So you want to be gentle with it. You don't want to do high-impact activity, you know, for that joint. And then you can just, you know, destroy the new tissue that was just being formed. So I would say for something like the knee, you want to do at least 4 to 6 weeks of being very gentle when the tissue has been formed. And I, you know, I've seen this happen to people a lot. You know, they do so much better, all of a sudden they're feeling better, they don't have much pain, and they feel kind of bionic. And within a couple weeks, then they start to do really high-intensity things, and then they hurt themselves. So then we're going back to having to build that again. So that's something that, you know, just Be careful. Think about the new tissue, you know, being very fragile. And so be very gentle with it. But I would say in 4 to 6 weeks, the person should more or less go back to normal activities. In our clinic, you know, we've seen people, you know, just getting great results and it offers so much hope. I've seen people who were told they absolutely have to have a knee replacement and they ended up they don't have to. So this just offers so much hope. And it's not just, you know, that I'm saying this in a clinic. This is backed up in a study. I just talk about study real quick. It's really fascinating. They they did this particular study. They had 30 people that had osteonecrosis of their knee joint because of steroid use. So on both sides. So what they did was that they divided these 30 people, you know, in the middle. So one half the body, right? So if you would look at this person, one half the body, you know, that knee will get knee replacement. The other half, we're injecting stem cells into it. So 30 people, 30 knees are injected with stem cells and 30 knees are replaced, you know, with knee replacement surgery. So and they tracked these people, I think, for about 12 years. And at the end of the study, they realized that, first of all, the 30 knees that got knee replacement surgery, 6 of them had to have revision surgery, which means things weren't going well. There has to be, you know, repair, you know, some, some kind of correction done to that surgery. But out of the 30 knees that got stem cell treatment, only 1 needed knee replacement surgery at all. So to me, that's a very powerful study. So before you start thinking about going through something that invasive, you know, maybe do something that's, you know, very gentle for your body and see if you can heal that way. Okay, thank you very much.
