The opioid crisis has made finding alternative options for pain management more critical than ever. All-natural pain relief is often your best alternative as they are non-addictive and provide relief in hand with healing properties. Regenerative medicine is growing in popularity as more medical professionals choose to offer the treatment, and more patients see outstanding outcomes from injections.
What Are Opioids?
Opioids include a variety of drugs that range from legal prescriptions such as oxycodone, codeine, and morphine to illegal drugs such as heroin and fentanyl. Although the legal drugs in this class are prescribed by physicians, they have proven to be highly addictive. Many drugs in this class can be effective when used correctly under a doctor’s care; however, because they pose a high risk for addiction, they are prescribed with great caution.
What is the Opioid Crisis?
The opioid crisis resulted when misinformation was provided by pharmaceutical companies who assured the medical community that opioids were not addictive. They became the pain relief medication of choice throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, as they were effective in resolving pain.
Unfortunately, it took time to discover just how addictive opioids were, as more and more patients became habitual abusers of both prescription and non-prescription opioids. By 2017, the situation had become so dire, the Department of Health and Human Services declared a public health emergency that came to be known as the Opioid Crisis.
The consequences of the crisis led to opioid misuse and related overdoses. It also introduced newborns experiencing withdrawal syndromes due to mothers using or misusing opioids during pregnancy. In 2016, there were 42,000 deaths due to opioid-related overdoses, with 40 percent of those deaths associated with prescription opioids.
What is Regenerative Medicine?
All-natural pain relief offers an excellent alternative to opioids. Regenerative medicine has become more attractive to many chronic pain sufferers as it uses mesenchymal cells to enhance the body’s natural ability to heal. Not only does it address the symptom of pain, but also manages the underlying causes of pain.
Injections are made directly to problem areas providing a boost of healthy healing components such as cytokines, collagen, proteins, and peptides. It accelerates the tissue regeneration process encouraging healing and reducing pain.
The mesenchymal cells used for injections are derived from Wharton’s jelly obtained from birth tissue found in the umbilical cord or tissue allografts. The treatment depends on consenting mothers who donate healthy tissue at the time of birth. No harm comes to mother or baby.
PRP, or platelet-rich plasma, is another form of regenerative medicine that is effective when it comes to relieving pain naturally. This treatment is made using a sample of your own blood that is spun in a centrifuge. The platelets and plasma are separated, then the highly concentrated platelets are injected into the damaged area to facilitate healing.
How Regenerative Medicine Works
The injections contain bioactive agents that begin to repair and heal injured, damaged, or degenerated tissue at the time of injection. As a result, you receive a boost from the components that quickly trigger your healing mechanisms to effectively provide pain relief.
If you would like more information on regenerative medicine treatments for pain, speak to our team today.
References:
https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/index.html
https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/prevention/index.html