Chronic pain often results from conditions that cause tissue to deteriorate faster rate than your body can repair it. The exciting field of regenerative medicine looks at ways to help your body heal naturally.
One strategy that can often produce results seeks to augment the resources available to your body’s healing systems. With raw materials for repairs in greater supply, these systems can work more quickly, faster than the rate of decline, reducing pain and improving your health.
When you consider how a cut or scrape heals and then all signs of the injury disappear, you’ll begin to understand the wonder of your body’s healing abilities. It takes a range of systems, working in chemical coordination, to manage all the details needed to repair damage from injury.
When you’re faced with a degenerative condition like osteoarthritis, your body still works to fix the deterioration, but on its own, it starts to lose the race against further wear and tear. Your bloodstream is the main conduit for the materials needed to make these repairs, so blood supply has a critical influence on how fast these building blocks arrive at the point of healing.
At the same time, resources are needed throughout your body, further limiting the availability of raw materials at any one point.
Your body has several types of cells that serve as these raw materials. Called stem cells, they share two important characteristics. First, they can make copies of themselves, and second, they can transform into different types of cells needed to repair damage.
In the case of arthritis, for example, some stem cells may convert to cartilage cells while others convert to bone cells, each helping to fix part of the damage caused by the condition.
Though not yet fully understood, some stem cell types have ranges of cells that they can convert into. That is, not all stem cells can convert into all types of body tissue. Perhaps closest to “universal” stem cells are those recovered from amniotic tissue donated after healthy births.
Amniotic stem cells possess a property called multipotent differentiation. They can transform into many of the cell types needed for body repair. Yet this is only one reason why they show so much promise for stem cell therapy.
Some tissue transplants suffer from rejection by the new host’s immune system. Amniotic stem cells don’t create an immune reaction, so they’re free to aid body repair without the host’s interference.
The amniotic tissue that provides stem cells also contains high levels of growth factors, the hormones that carry chemical messages that manage the healing process. Just as more stem cells mean faster healing, more growth factors contribute to more efficient cell conversion.
Amniotic stem cells have a trio of anti-properties:
The regenerative abilities of amniotic stem cells are still being discovered. As a natural, drug-free treatment for chronic pain, amniotic stem cell therapy offers major potential benefits with little to no risk of treatment side effects.
Contact Dr. Nassiri and the team at Westside Pain Specialists, by phone or online, to learn more about amniotic stem cells and their uses for your chronic pain condition.
