The Centeno-Schultz Clinic was recently featured in Snowshoe Magazine, looking at the promising procedures performed at our clinic to assist athletes in recovering from common injuries. Here’s and excerpt: For winter sports athletes, nothing can ruin a season quite like a knee or other joint injury. At best, you’re looking at 6-12 months on the sidelines: going under the knife, working through months of rehabilitation and then trying to get back in shape before the snow melts. But a doctor in Colorado is promoting a somewhat new technique as a way to treat athletic injuries with minimal down time and little or no rehab. His secret? Stem cells.
“What we do here is try to help people avoid the need for surgery,” explains Dr. Chris Centeno, who has been offering stem cell-based regenerative treatments at his Centeno-Schultz Clinic in suburban Denver for the past five years. Unlike the far more controversial embryonic stem cell procedures, which rely on cells harvested from unborn fetuses and remain a highly contentious back-and-forth issue in the courts, these treatments are based on cellular materials taken from the patients themselves, which are then reinjected and can be used to repair a range of injuries.
“We’ve treated everything from meniscus tears, to arthritis, to partial ligament tears and partial ACL tears,” says Centeno, who has treated some 450 patients and estimates he has completed more than 1,000 procedures over the years. “The most common treatment site, though, is the knee, and we’ve found that the procedure works particularly well there.”