Prof Paul Lee - MSK Regeneration Blog on MSK Doctors In my practice, I see a wide range of knee patients with sporting injuries, in the knee injury clinic. If you want to avoid a sporting injury it’s very important to understand when they can happen, so here’s a round-up of some of the most common injuries we see: Patellar knee injury There are many different causes of pain in the front of the knee – including from the tendons, the cartilage or the fat pad itself. It can be c

Prof Paul Lee - MSK Regeneration Blog on MSK Doctors In my practice, I see a wide range of patients with sporting injuries, particularly in the knee and ankle. If you want to avoid a sporting injury it’s very important to understand when they can happen, so here’s a round-up of some of the most common injuries we see: Muscle injury By far the most common types of sports injuries is a muscle injury. Bruising and contusion around the muscle are very common in most types of inju

Prof Paul Lee - MSK Regeneration Blog on MSK Doctors How does cell therapy work? Cell therapy is often misunderstood as just a series of injections. While cell therapy certainly does involve injections, it’s much more than that. The best way to think about cell therapy is to imagine that you’re repairing a patch of your garden. There is a patch of dead grass (the damaged cartilage in your knee) that you’d like to repair. If you just threw some seeds on top of the dead grass,

Prof Paul Lee - MSK Regeneration Blog on MSK Doctors What’s the evidence that cell therapy works? There is different evidence out there for cell therapy. It depends on what we are looking at. In some sectors of cell therapy, there are over 20 years of experience and many randomised control trials to show that it is superior compared to traditional treatments, for example, micro-fracture. There are also studies that suggest it makes no difference. This variety is to be expecte

Prof Paul Lee - MSK Regeneration Blog on MSK Doctors What can cell therapy be used for in the Knee? In the knee, typically cell therapy is used to treat a large cartilage defect. It is also possible to use cells to enhance meniscus repair. With recent advances in technology and experience, we are also now able to treat osteoarthritis, and in some cases, ACL injuries. The advantages of cell therapy To understand why cell therapy is so exciting, we need to look at the limitatio

Prof Paul Lee - MSK Regeneration Blog on MSK Doctors What is cell therapy? Cell therapy is a type of biological treatment using the body’s own building blocks to regenerate and regrow an injured part. When part of the body is damaged, cell therapy techniques can help restore that part to its “original” state. The problem with the human body is that we don’t always recover fully from injuries. Broken bones can heal and bruises eventually go away, but when you cut yourself badl

Prof Paul Lee - MSK Regeneration Blog on MSK Doctors Depending on the nature of the injury and the nature of what we would like these bioactive materials to do, the way they work is very different. Sometimes these materials can provide a scaffold or a foundation for our body to heal and for the cells to grow. Sometimes these products are to produce and promote the growth factors around the injured site. Sometimes these biological products deliberately try to induce an inflamm

Prof Paul Lee - MSK Regen Blog on MSK Doctors Types of PRP It depends on where the blood derived materials are used. It can either be given through injection or it can be given as a surgical procedure. Usually with injection we would guide it by ultrasound or perhaps sometimes by a direct needle camera. We are proud to offer our patients in the Keep Clinic, Grantham, and 108 Harley Street, London, this cutting edge medical technique with a needle camera to help guide our tre

Prof Paul Lee - MSK Regeneration Blog on MSK Doctors There are many different types of blood derived biomaterial. The most common biomaterial that we see used in clinic is platelet-rich plasma. There are many different ways to process platelet-rich plasma and the quality of the platelet-rich plasma varies between clinics and between devices. Some clinics are still using the first generation device and currently, at MSK Doctors, we are using the 5th generation device. The 6th

Prof Paul Lee - MSK Regen Blog on MSK Doctors Over the past few years biological regenerative therapy in musculoskeletal conditions has come on in leaps and bounds. A very popular treatment of biological therapy is platelet-rich plasma (PRP). With current technology, it is now possible to process blood in a clinic room in a completely sterile environment with the specialist gel separator which will ensure the quality of the plasma. Compared to a few years ago, with older tech