Dr. Joy Kong discusses a 12-year study of 30 patients with steroid-induced knee damage who got replacements in one knee and stem-cell injections in the other. Six replacement knees needed revision surgery. Only one stem-cell knee did. Kong argues patients should try regenerative options before jumping to replacement.
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'll just talk about study real quick. This is really fascinating. 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 of the body, right? So if you would look at this person, one half of the body, you know, that knee will get knee replacement. The other half, we're injecting stem cells into it. 30 knees are injected with stem cells and 30 knees are replaced, you know, are with knee replacement surgery. So, and they track these people, I think, for about, um, 12 years. And at the end of the study, they realized that first of all, the 30 knees that got knee replacement surgery, uh, 6 of them had to have revision surgery, which means if things weren't going well, there has to be, you know, repair, you know, some kind of correction done to that surgery. But out of the 30 knees that got stem cell treatment, only one 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
