One of the most frequent misconceptions encountered in the field of regenerative medicine is to think of PRP (Platelet Rich Plasma) therapies as the equivalent or the same as Stem Cell Treatments. In this blog post I will go over the differences between PRP Therapy and Stem Cell Therapy.
Popular news shows like to start with something sensational or frightening in order to keep their audience tuned in. The need to do this is so entrenched with them that, in the absence of any current scandal, they’ll happily recycle earlier work and present it as if it had just happened.
Such was the case with a news program in the USA.
Lately, we’ve noticed that some of the clinics that limit themselves to liposuction for their stem cells have been disparaging bone marrow as a reliable source – they’re calling it “old-fashioned”. Don’t they see the fallacy in their reasoning? There’s nothing old-fashioned about our bone-marrow protocols. A medical technique younger than the Internet can hardly qualify as old in any sense.
People who remember the cancer scares from the 1950s to the ’70s avoid diagnosticians because they don’t want to be told they have a fatal, incurable disease. The kindly doctors in the soap operas and Hollywood movies of that era were forever summoning up the courage to deliver the death sentence, and the people who remember those scenes would just as soon not be on the receiving end in real life.
In adults, stem cells are created in the bone marrow and then distributed to the rest of the body through the blood system. It stands to reason that stem cells might be harvested from either location, but there is an important difference both in quantity and in quality between the stem cells found at the source and those found on the periphery of the body.
Barely twelve months ago, the University of California San Diego opened their $127,000,000 stem cell research center to a blitz of media hoopla. And yet, just a few miles down the road, ProgenCell had already spent more than a decade quietly bringing stem cells to patients who need them. What might explain such a contrast?
The German word for “hospital” gives us the unvarnished truth: Krankenhaus, the place where sick people dwell. Its very purpose is to collect up every sort of medical problem and let them stew together. You will find more germs and viruses and bacteria there than you will on a city street, which is why hospital administrators are at pains to sanitize as much as they can.
Over the twelve years that we have been helping people with stem cell therapy in Tijuana, we have noticed an interesting phenomenon in our patients’ recoveries. With every treatment, the patient’s bone marrow produces more stem cells than it did the time before.
For the first treatment, we have measured an average of 8,520,000 units per milliliter.