Cartilage is funny stuff. It’s a shock absorber and filled with cells, so it’s alive. For a long time, we doctors believed is was so much inert filler so we developed a surgical culture of trimming it and cutting it out. This was called debridement. The problem is that arthoscopic surgery for knee pain doesn’t work. The reason, cutting out living cells turns out to be a bad idea. So the next step is actually trying to fix cartilage. We have demonstrated on MRI that using the patient’s own stem cells can help the appearance of knee cartilage (as seen on high resolution MRI) as well as the pain reported by patients. The secret appears to be taking the patient’s own stem cells and growing them to bigger numbers. The FDA has taken a strange position on all of this, but doctors and patients have other ideas. In the meantime, fixing cartilage with stem cells seems like a better idea than cutting it out.
Joint Preservation Blog 