Bone Marrow Regeneration

© By Dr. David A. Steenblock, USA
(Explore Issue: Volume 16, Number 3 and 4)

Wow! Did you know that you have literally millions of stem cells contained in your body just waiting to be released so they can go to work healing your aches and pains? Research is proving that stem cells are by far the most promising and exciting hope for a cure in even the most dreadful diseases. For diseases or conditions like osteoarthritis, non-healing wounds, heart attack, stroke, multiple sclerosis, etc. or to enhance your healing of plastic surgery, simply extracting your own bone marrow stem cells and giving them back to you intravenously could perhaps provide the miracle you are looking for.

At my office, Personalized Regenerative Medicine is the new “Buzz” phrase which means in part, that we use your own tissue to heal you. That’s right, your tissues, not drugs! For example, using your own bone marrow to assist your body to heal is the most advanced method we now offer. We can now take stem cells from a leg bone and give them right back to you via an intravenous drip. The procedure by all accounts is quick and virtually painless. It is also much more affordable compared to traveling to another country for umbilical cord stem cells. While you might be asking, “If they are my own stem cells, why doesn’t my body release them for repair without any intervention?” The answer is, your body does…but not in the amounts needed to have a dramatic, rapid and complete healing. In addition, as we age (you knew this was coming) less stem cells are being released and sent to the site of the injury which is the main reason we don’t heal as quickly when we get older.

Stem cells have the unique property of being able to reproduce indefinitely. While stem cells can create more of themselves, they also give rise to specialized cells, tissues, and even organs when these need repair or replacement. Early stage embryos consist mainly of stem cells, while in adults, stem cells are not as abundant but are found in nearly every tissue and organ of the body. The bone marrow, however, appears to serve as the major reservoir for stem cells.

Every day, your blood vessels are injured and need repair. This blood vessel damage results from the wear and tear on these delicate inner linings from high cholesterol, fats, sugar, hypertension, etc. and leads to their degeneration into atherosclerosis, heart attacks and strokes. These blood vessel injuries have been shown to be healed by stem cells that come out of the bone marrow and circulate in the blood. Indeed, one of the reasons that we grow old and die is due to aging of our stem cells which lessens our body’s ability to repair these daily inner blood vessel injuries. This creates ever-escalating blood vessel disease after the age of 60 with increased calcium deposition and the formation of atherosclerosis.

A person’s own bone marrow stem cells have been shown to be helpful in treating heart attacks and congestive heart failure. Bone marrow stem cells injected into damaged tissues such as those found in a heart attack or brain attack (stroke) have a number of healing properties. Scientists have discovered now that bone marrow stem cells have actually become identical to the surrounding tissue, depending upon which cell type they are injected into. Another way stem cells help injured tissues to heal is by the release of growth factors into the damaged tissues.

In this article of Regenerative News^SM, we are focusing on osteoarthritis, which is otherwise known as degenerative joint disease or DJD. Osteoarthritis is one of the most common causes of pain and disability in middle-aged and older people. The mechanisms responsible for osteoarthritis remain poorly understood, but researchers have learned that the degeneration of joint cartilage is not simply the result of aging and mechanical wear, but also due to a lack of repair of the weight-bearing joint cartilage and the underlying bone due to depletion and/or functional alteration of stem cells. This would suggest that in joint diseases such as osteoarthritis, providing the deficient stem cells would contribute to normal healing. Up until now surgeons could only clean up and remove either the whole joint or joint surfaces with the hope of decreasing symptoms and restoring or maintaining a functional joint. But now that your own bone marrow stem cells are available, this has all changed — recent work has shown the potential for the restoration of a joint surface! We believe that the use of your own bone marrow stem cells, especially in combination with other healing and anti-inflammatory therapies could be of tremendous benefit for you now as an arthritic — not in some unknown future time after all the debates about embryonic stem cells die down.

For example, when 10 million bone marrow stem cells were injected into the knee joints of animals with induced osteoarthritis there was evidence of marked regeneration of the medial meniscus, and implanted cells were detected in the newly formed tissue. The degeneration was reduced in the cell-treated joints compared to joints treated with a placebo. Additional studies are showing that bone marrow stem cells’ repair of cartilage defects may be enhanced in elderly patients who have a loss of stem cells and cartilage-forming cells that occurs with age. Clinically, most people have more than one joint that hurts. In these cases, simply giving your stem cells back to you by an IV gives relief from pain often within one or two days. In some cases the relief comes within a few weeks.

Before you have a bone marrow transplant, or at least concurrently, avoidance of sugars as well as cleansing of the body of infections and poisons should be done to minimize any toxic or infectious burdens from hindering the newly growing cartilage. Extracting bone marrow stem cells and giving them back to the person, either by an IV drip, or injected in or around an arthritic joint is perfectly legal according to our FDA attorney. So there are simply no excuses for not taking advantage of bone marrow stem cells’ exciting promise right here, right now.

My wife Noyemy was my first patient and her arthritis pain virtually disappeared within 24 hours! Noyemy also had early macular degeneration and a couple of days ago she had a complete eye exam and the doctor and the two of us were very excited to see that now a month after her bone marrow transplant there was virtually no evidence of macular degeneration!

If you or a loved one needs help and have found that standard medical care has been unsatisfactory, you might consider having a bone marrow stem cell transplant. While perfectly legal by FDA and AMA standards, it would be called experimental by most physicians simply because (even though studies have been going on for many years) it is considered a “new” therapy. But don’t wait for their multi-million dollar, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials, and the resultant exorbitant cost of stem cells to pay for those trials. Your own stem cells are affordable, safe and available today.