The human body is a wonderful thing, holding many secrets for our health and longevity. Unlocking these secrets and applying them to medical science through both homeopathic and traditional methods offers patients the chance to live a better, healthier life. The Guyer Institute of Molecular Medicine in Indianapolis, Indiana is here for you and your health. The Guyer Institute offers a number of regenerative medicinal therapies for your needs.
What Is Regenerative Medicine?
Regenerative medicine is the field of medical study and treatment dedicated to using the human body’s inherent healing abilities to help patients find treatment for numerous medical concerns. These therapies can be used for everything from organ replacement and cancer treatments to skin rejuvenation treatments, erectile dysfunction, and cosmetic surgery. Regenerative medicine also provides patients with a dedicated focus on their ongoing and overall health in addition to their immediate medical needs.
With this wide array of applications, regenerative medicine has two notable subsections to be aware of when discussing the field with your doctor.
Organ Replacement and Tissue Engineering
This fascinating area of regenerative medicine is focused primarily on the upkeep of the body using its own materials and methods to avoid organ transplants by maintaining the health of the organ itself. This branch of medicine seeks to make organ transplants obsolete by having the body grow and repair its own organs.
While this aspect of treatment is highly experimental and still has a way to go before it even comes close to realizing its noble goal, it has been highly promising in lab experiments so far.
Cellular Therapy
This is the aspect of regenerative medicine that we practice and the everyday person would see and experience right now at our clinic. The treatments detailed further in the article would fall under this aspect of regenerative medicine.
These treatments usually focus on harvesting cells from certain parts of the body and sending them to a part of the body that needs those cells and their healing properties. This treatment can speed the healing process or offer other benefits to injured or cell-deficient areas of the body. Cell deficient areas are often caused by events that kill cells, such as certain diseases and treatments like chemotherapy.
Clinical Testing
Clinical testing is a huge part of this branch of medicine as so much of its potential is still undiscovered. Clinical testing is how new and ambitious treatments go from good ideas to active trials helping patients. Clinical testing matters a lot in such a young and evolving field that is constantly coming up with new ideas and treatments. The evolution of these therapies is key to the improvement and ongoing benefit of this whole-patient approach to medicine.
What Treatments Does This Include?
At the Guyer Institute, we offer a range of cellular regenerative therapies for our patients and their medical needs. The following sections contain brief descriptions of our more common treatments and try to answer a few frequently asked questions. You can also contact The Guyer Institute of Molecular Medicine by phone or online and our staff will do their best to answer any other questions you might have!
Neural Therapy and Prolotherapy
These are two methods of therapy that treat different aspects of medical concerns. While these therapies are different, they go very well together when treating certain medical concerns. The Guyer Institute likes to combine these two unique treatments together to offer comprehensive treatment for patients.
What Is Neural Therapy?
Neural Therapy is primarily a treatment for chronic pain, digestive disorders, and mood disorders related to the autonomous nervous system. This the system which controls things humans automatically do under normal circumstances, like breathing. Some injuries and diseases can harm this system, causing pain and discomfort due to electrical imbalances in the neural system.
Neural therapy seeks to correct these electrical imbalances in order to relieve the pain and discomfort.
What Is Prolotherapy?
Prolotherapy is a treatment that focuses on building the health of the connective tissues in joints, particularly the knees, hips, shoulders, elbows, and ankles. The breakdown of connective tissue in these joints can lead to unnatural movement and therefore a good bit of pain. This condition is known as tissue laxity.
The goal of prolotherapy is to build up and strengthen connective tissue to help heal the damage of tissue laxity.
How Do They Work?
Prolotherapy is the more simple treatment of the two. The ailing joint is identified, and the doctor will make an injection or series of injections containing simple glucose and an anesthetic agent. This simple treatment often proves quite effective at relieving and preventing pain by improving the strength of connective tissue as glucose helps connective tissues retain water; which is key to maintaining their strength and flexibility.
Neural therapy is a bit more complex as it involves the nervous system, but the treatment is still simple. Your doctor will take a localized anesthetic and certain nutritional agents and inject them into the places where the electrical imbalances are occurring. This injection will help balance out the nervous system and its electrical imbalances after a few treatments.
How Long Do These Treatments Take?
The timing of individual treatments varies from person to person. In general, prolotherapy patients will require between five and eight injections for a single joint. Neurotherapy patients usually receive a weekly injection for a time period of three to five weeks. The period or timing of treatments might be changed based on the patient’s health condition and needs.
Stem Cell Therapy
Stem Cell Therapy is one of the regenerative methods that has received a good bit of media attention. This therapy makes use of stem cells and their amazing healing properties to help heal damaged or cell-deficient regions of the body.
What Are Stem Cells?
Stem Cells are cells inside the body that have no assigned purpose. The body can make use of these unassigned cells when it needs them. These cells exist in the brain, bone marrow, blood and blood vessels, skeletal muscles, skin, and liver. These cells can change their type in whatever way the body needs to heal or repair something.
Embryonic stem cells, the stem cells of a living embryo, can transform into an even wider variety of other cell types since they help a child grow and mature within the womb. With the correct stimulation, doctors can control the kind of cells that stem cells transform into when the body needs them. Stem cells can even regenerate damaged tissue under the correct circumstances.
What Is This Treatment?
Stem Cell Therapy is an injection-style therapy designed to help regrow damaged tissue in the body. Stem cells, or their derivatives which have been specially grown and prepared for this purpose, are injected into damaged organs or parts of the body. Under the right circumstances, these stem cells should be able to repair or regrow the damaged part of the body as if they were the original cells from that organ or part of the body.
Is It Safe?
Our knowledge of stem cells is growing every day, but medical science still knows very little about how stem cell treatments work or will continue to work in patients. Doctors are still discovering how our bodies deal with stem cells. Be sure to review with your doctor whether these treatments are right for you. Only certain kinds of treatments have so far been tested and proven safe for specific diseases and conditions.
We encourage you to speak to your doctor before undergoing any stem cell treatments. This is a growing and evolving field of medicine and an eye always needs to be kept on patient safety.
Platelet-Rich Plasma Therapy (PRP)
Platelet-rich plasma therapy is a sub-treatment of stem-cell therapy, but it is a little different and can be utilized for different medical purposes. This kind of treatment uses the patient’s own blood to help rejuvenate and heal parts of their body. This treatment has a very wide range of applications. It can be used for things as common as aesthetic skin treatments and baldness, but it has also shown some success in helping patients recover from surgery, sports injuries, and male sexual dysfunction.
Like the other therapies, this is also an injection-based therapy for healing or regenerating tissue.
What Is Platelet-Rich Plasma?
Platelet-rich plasma is blood that has been extracted from a patient and gone through a preparation process involving a centrifuge. Once it has completed this preparation, the blood will have a higher concentration of platelets and growth factors. These growth factors promote cell creation and division as well as attracting stem cells to help aid in the healing process.
One of the great attractions of this therapy is that the patient’s own blood is used for the treatment without the need for other drugs or prescriptions. The amount of blood extracted from the patient is quite small, but it can make a big difference in healing.
Is It Safe?
PRP treatments utilize the patient’s own blood and can be combined with a wide variety of other treatments with a lower likelihood of interacting poorly with existing medical conditions than nearly any other treatment you can seek. This style of treatment has been used medically for over a decade and has continued to grow in popularity as it establishes a solid safety record.
Please be sure to speak to your doctor before undergoing these treatments. There are risks with any medical treatment. Please note that while there are medical PRP processes approved by the FDA, medical and commercial solutions are not always regulated in the same fashion. If you have concerns about the solution or method being used, please consult with a medical professional at our clinic.
Regenerative Medicine Can Help You
Whether your problems are aesthetic or chronic, restorative medicine offers you a wonderful opportunity to be on the cutting edge of medical science. This approach to medicine offers a whole-body perspective for health and wellness that has helped many people. Using the body’s own healing powers not only heals wounds but also helps us understand ourselves and our bodies on a more intimate level.
While we are only beginning to understand the uses of stem cells and platelet-rich plasma, these treatments may be able to help you with your own medical issues. We encourage you to research this exciting field for yourself and be amazed at what this branch of medicine can do you for you.
Contact Us
We have many treatments to aid you in your journey to health. If you have any questions or would like to undergo our regenerative treatments, please reach out to The Guyer Institute of Molecular Medicine in Indianapolis, Indiana. You’ll be glad you did.
