StemCell Therapy

Share this story with your network

By Chris Centeno, M.D., CEO at Regenexx April 16, 2017

In 1897, Mark Twain was on a speaking tour in London when an American newspaper started a rumor that he was gravely ill. This was soon followed by an obituary. When asked by an American reporter in London about his death, Twain quipped, The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. I feel thesame about C1-C2 facet injections. The radiofrequency mob has been trying hard to kill off cervical facet injections for years and C1-C2 is low hanging fruit, but like Twain, I have to report the death of this procedure has been greatly exaggerated.

Sometime around the turn of this last century, we began to see the use of radiofrequency ablation (RFA) for neck pain due to damaged facet joints take off. What is RFA and what is a damaged facet joint?

You have 14 joints in the back part of your spine (7 on each side). These joints help to control neck motion. These little articulations about the size of a finger joint are commonly called facet joints. They can become injuredor can get arthritis like any other joint in your body. When this happens they can become chronically painful.

While the injection of anti-inflammatory steroid into these joints was the most common way to treat this pain, about 2000 or so we began to see the rise of another form of treatment called RFA. This procedure uses a probe that heats up to burn away nerves around the painful joint. The idea is that once these pain carrying wires are cut, the pain will stop because its no longer being transmitted to the brain. This works pretty well and has been well researched to help chronic neck pain caused by a damagedfacetjoint. However, as you mightimagine, you cant just burn nerves that carry pain signals and not have consequences. This procedure can cause the joint to become more damaged (a Charcot joint) and in my experience can cause a cycle where the patient needs to be treated every 5-18 months forever. In addition, my personal observation is that these patients get more brittle with time. By that, I mean that when their pain returns its worse and easier to provoke than before RFA was begun.

Radiofrequency is a great medical business. Not only do these patients need to come back every so often for a repeat treatment, but insurance companies pay more for RFA than a simple facet injection. In addition, theres a third party vendorwho gets to charge outrageous prices for disposable needles and new RF probes, which means that theres lots of moolaharound to sponsor conferences, pay physician thought leaders, and medical directors. Hence, knowing that money talks in medicine, its not hard to figure out why those thought leaders have been trying to get rid of facet injections (i.e. injecting a substance into the joint rather than burning the nerves around the joint). as the idea competes with RFA. However, with the advent of orthobiologics like PRP and stem cells, everything changes.

READ THE REST HERE

Josh Sandberg has been an executive search consultant focused exclusively on orthopedic and spine start-ups since 2004. He has had a tremendous impact in helping his clients avoid costly hiring mistakes by his deep industry knowledge and network. In 2010, Josh co-founded Ortho Spine Companies, which is the parent company of Ortho Spine Distributors (OSD), Surg.io and Ortho Sales Partners (OSP). OSD a searchable database that helps ease the frustration of finding orthopedic distributors throughout the country. Surg.io is the ultimate distributor toolkit that offers distributors the tools necessary to build the foundation of a scalable and highly functioning sales organization. OSP is an end-to-end solution that helps companies approach the Global Market in a cost efficient way. Our team has hundreds of years of experience and can help you navigate the many challenges present in bringing new technologies to the market.

Originally posted here:
Reports of the Death of the C1-C2 Facet Injection have Been Greatly Exaggerated - OrthoSpineNews

This entry was posted on April 18, 2017 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Death by Stem Cells. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |