Dr. Joy Kong discusses stem cell therapy for joint degeneration, which combines IV systemic treatments to reduce inflammation with direct intra-articular injections. Cartilage gets nutrition from both blood and synovial fluid, so treating the whole body and the joint together restores the body's ability to heal chronic damage.
Foreign degeneration is really, when you are over the age 50 or so, a lot of the joint degeneration, I mean, it's not so much sports injury anymore, it's not an acute injury. So when you are acutely injuring, but sometimes even 30 year old, you know, 40 year old, they injure themselves. Why is it not healing well is because your body's regenerative potential has been lagging. Maybe you haven't been taking as good care of yourself. Maybe your body has a base level inflammation. You know, your body just can't mount repair as effectively. So when it comes to joint degeneration like osteoarthritis, that's definitely an inflammatory disease. And the inflammation is just not. It's not just in your joint, it's everywhere in your body. It's a reflection of your whole body. So in those cases, I want to address what's going on in the whole body and what's going on the joint, especially when it's a large joint. Because when the joint is very large, the whatever I put in the blood has a very slow rate of exchange with the synovial fluid that bathe the joint, the cartilage. So in those cases I may need to inject directly into the joint space because the exchange rate is so slow, it may take two months for whatever I put in the blood to get into the joint space. So that's when I attack from both angles. Especially when you think about the outer one third, the cartilage is nourished by the blood supply. The inner 2/3 is nourished by the synovial fluid. So when you can attack from both ends, then you get much more complete healing. And not to mention when you are able to utilize the, you know, the approach of an IV that does interact with your immune system. And like I said, it does calm down your inflammation throughout your body and bring up your regenerative potential. It will, you know, talk to your immune system, so immune system will come on board to help you heal. And that's all very crucial. You know, they've demonstrated various conditions, you know, through IV treatment to target local issues. And I've seen that a lot. So, yeah, so for joints, that's my thing that I want to address from both angles. Unless a person's very young and we know the person just, you know, hurt themselves, okay, let's put some more cells locally. That's okay. But majority of the patients who come to me has had the problem chronically. It's just not healing. And I think adding the systemic approach is very helpful.
