Can Biologic Therapy help knee pain even with severe arthritis?
Knee arthritis pain and biologics
You have knee arthritis. You are in pain. Your surgeon tells you that you have severe arthritis and you have tried:
- physical therapy
- anti-inflammatory medications
- knee braces
- knee injections
AND YOU STILL HAVE PAIN!
Now your surgeon is telling you that your only option is Knee replacement surgery. Is there anything else that can help?
In short, there is a good possibility that there is something else that can help.
Bioplasty Procedure
Knee arthritis affects hundreds of thousands of people in the United States. Those patients all do the same things to treat their pain and it includes the list above. When all else fails, most often they are told they need knee replacement, a surgery with a difficult recovery and a one in three chance of chronic pain afterwards. The surgeons who evaluate these patients use x-rays as their imaging of choice, knowing that it is unlikely that any surgery other than replacement will help.
When we look at the correlation between x-ray findings and pain, we find that there is little. Some patients with severe knee arthritis findings have little pain and some with less severe findings have much more pain. However, there are findings on MRI that correlate highly with the degree of pain.
This includes the finding of subchondral edema, a swelling in the bone matrix that may happen from mild fracture, persistent bone bruises, osteoarthritis, and early stages of avascular necrosis. This is quite often the cause of pain in chronic knee arthritis and when treated, can relieve pain.
Arthrex is a major orthopedic equipment supplier and developed a procedure to treat this issue. The IOBP® procedure treats these pathologies through a core decompression and use of platelet-rich plasma concentrate (cPRP) from bone marrow aspirate (BMA) using the Arthrex Angel® cPRP and bone marrow processing system. The IOBP procedure encourages physiologic bone remodeling and repair. It can provide rapid pain relief.
At Southcoast, we believe the IOBP procedure can be miraculous in relieving pain for patients with edema. The use of biologics is gaining traction in medical fields in the U.S. and we believe it is the future of medicine. These treatments heal tissue and do not require big surgeries, general anesthesia, prolonged post op pain and difficult rehabilitation.
If you have knee pain and have been told you need knee replacement surgery, why not consider an alternative treatment that can relieve your pain first. Once total knee replacement is done, if you have a poor outcome, there is little that can be done at that point to help. Contact us for more information, or come in for an assessment. Let us help!
