Keeping Healthy Feet and Ankles
Foot and ankle injuries are a common complaint that we see in our clinic. There are many causes of foot and ankle pain such as: osteoarthritis, ligament injuries, Achilles tendinopathies, and plantar fasciitis. As our feet are vital for us to stand, walk, and play, pain can be both debilitating and exceedingly frustrating.
The most common treatments for foot and ankle injuries are oftentimes steroid injections and/or surgical interventions. While these options are “tried and true”, they also have many drawbacks. For steroid injections, they are a “band-aid” that does not promote long-term healing and may need to be repeated periodically. Surgical options include ankle arthroscopy, fusions, and tendon grafts. Surgical interventions often involve lengthy recovery times with casting/boots, intensive physical therapy, and pain medication usage. After surgical interventions (especially fusion surgeries), biomechanics are altered which can lead to accelerated degeneration (i.e. wear and tear) in other joints and structures which must compensate for the increased load creating a ripple effect of pain and injury.
An alternative to these surgical procedures is the field of regenerative medicine. Regenerative medicine or interventional orthobiologics involves injecting your body’s own healing factors and cells in concentrated doses to the specific injured structures with the goal of slowing down the degenerative process and to promote a local healing environment. The benefits of these types of procedures are that there is very little down time post-procedure, minimal need for pain medications, and you are able to return to work the next day!
The two most common types of regenerative solutions that we use in our office are extracting your blood and spinning it down to separate out the healing factors in a process called platelet-rich plasma, and bone marrow aspirate concentrate where we extract regenerative cells from your bone marrow and similarly separate and concentrate them. With either solution, we then use precise imaging guidance to inject the cells directly into the damaged structures to promote healing. These agents can be used to treat common foot and ankle injuries including osteoarthritis, tendon and ligament laxity and tears, plantar fasciitisand other degenerative conditions involving the foot and ankle.
If foot and ankle pain has been holding you back in life, or if you are considering foot and ankle surgery, consider evaluating your regenerative options and scheduling a consultation with us to discuss a customized treatment plan.