PRP and stem cells herald a new age in orthopedic treatment options … an age when cutting open knees, shoulders, and hips may not be necessary due to effective alternatives to knee surgery. Remember when LASIK vision correction procedures began to enter the mainstream in the U.S. in the 1990s? Prior to LASIK, if you were in the 33 percent of the U.S. population suffering from nearsightedness, you had three basic options: the nearsighted patient who wanted to escape the limitations of glasses and contacts faced a surgery that involved cutting the eye with a knife- something that makes many of us cringe at the thought! Most of us, uncomfortable with having our corneas cut open, opted for glasses or contact lenses, so imagine the excitement this alternative to scary surgery inspired in those of us who knew the annoyance of having your glasses fog up while exercising, the helplessness of walking through the house bent over with your face ten inches away from every counter top, night table etc. looking for misplaced glasses, or the irritation of contacts that sometimes folded over and floated around under your eyelid. Years later, LASIK Lasix still is surgery, just small incisions has shifted the paradigm, helping 800,000 people a year with a greater than 95 percent patient satisfaction rate- and now the knee surgery landscape is changing in a similar way with the introduction of adult stem cells and PRP for knee pain.

Now, people who feel pain in their knees every time they stand up, get in or out of a car, struggle with stairs at home and on vaction, etc.,………… Have something to get excited about: alternatives to knee replacement involving stem cells and PRP. However, patients seeking PRP for knees must navigate their way through a market flooded with highly variable products and people who are not board-certified orthopedic surgeons advertising “stem cells for orthopedics” or “PRP for orthopedics”. Many of these people get certificates from vendors or their own associations that use words like “orthopedics” or “sportsmedicine”, however many of these people offering to inject your joints, ligaments, and tendons are not licensed orthopedic surgeons! Patients are faced with trying to discern the best credentials in an environment of misleading marketing.

Back when LASIK first came out, many people were nervous about the procedure going wrong or potentially losing their eyesight or seeing “halos”. Thankfully a PRP injection into your tendon, joint, or ligament won’t make you go blind; the main risk is that the procedure simply won’t work. However, the very same advice for choosing a doctor when LASIK came out can be applied now to choosing a doctor to perform a PRP or stem cell treatment knee injuries: PICK AN EXPERIENCED, BOARD-CERTIFIED SPECIALIST. There is a learning curve for these procedures, and you can improve your chances of a good result by (1) finding a board-certified orthopedic surgeon, (2) especially one with a fellowship in knees or sportsmedicine as opposed to a generalist, and (3) one who has been using stem cells and PRP for many years and is not new to these emerging applications. Dr William F. Bennett, of Bennett Orthopedics and Sportsmedicine, has been using PRP to successfully treat a variety of knee conditions, including osteoarthritis of the knee, ACL injuries, MCL injuries, and cartilage damage. By following so many patients and their results over many years, Dr. Bennett has been able to customize his PRP treatments using three different types of centrifuge equipment he owns and specific PRP (with or without white cells, stem cells, cytokines, etc.) tailored to specific injury types. Unlike a lot of “one size fits all” PRP places that have just jumped on the bandwagon or completed a training course recently, Dr. Bennett, as a surgeon who has operated upon thousands of living human knees (something many other types of providers who are not surgeons cannot do), has expert knowledge of the knee that enables his to optimize his use of customized PRP.

Another important distinction between Dr. Bennett and other providers of PRP is that he has successfully used PRP both with and without surgery. Using PRP with surgery (something doctors who are not board-certified surgeons cannot do) has afforded Dr. Bennett the experience of seeing PRP at work from an interior perspective. Often and because he uses PRP, he can perform less invasive surgical procedures with an arthroscope that may have not had the same outcome without the PRP and/or stem cells and may have needed an open procedure.

Additionally, when PRP is used in his surgical procedures, he has noticed rehabilitation times cut in half!, marked decreases in pain, with some patients following a total knee replacement needing only Tylenol, superior healing situations and the return to sport at blinding speeds.

When it comes to PRP, there are factors that influence its effectiveness. Some of these, like your unique biological factors, cannot be controlled. However, you can control whether you choose an orthopedic specialist, a board-certified knee surgeon, to perform your PRP or stem cell procedure.

Due to demand for shoulder, hip, and knee surgery alternative, and his commitment to personally spend adequate time with every one of his patients, Dr. Bennett performs PRP procedures during evening and Saturday hours by appointment, in addition to his normal office hours. At Bennett Orthopedics and Sportsmedicine, you will never be sent to a physician’s assistant or a student doctor- you will always see Dr. Bennett himself!

Scheduling a consultation is easy- you can fill out the form on our web page, call 941-404-2703, or email Info@ShoulderSurgeonSarasota.com. If you are calling after hours, leave a voice message and one of our staff will call you back to schedule an appointment.

Consider that it might be more cost effective to spend $300-$400 on a plane ticket to see the right highly experienced orthopedic surgeon with a high PRP success rate the first time rather than spend over $1,000 on a failed PRP treatment locally.