Adult Stem Cells – Roses of Texas (written by Biloine Young @ OTW)
Texas docs are at it again! When 37-year-old Dallas firefighter Chris Youngman found he could barely bend down to put on his shoes because of back pain he went to Forest Park Medical Center neurosurgeon Rob Dickerman.
Dickerman fused Youngman’s spine but in doing so he used an established process but with a new twist. Instead of inserting cadaver bone or cutting off a portion of the patient’s hip bone to use, a painful process, he used Youngman’s own stem cells to grow new bone.
The less invasive procedure took place in the operating room where Dickerman extracted stem cells from his patient’s hip with a long needle. After running the cells though a centrifuge, a process that took only a few minutes, Dickerman mixed them into a putty-like material and stuffed it into spacers which he then inserted between the degenerating discs
According to Dickerman, it is that cell mixture that turns into bone. “Now we don’t need to take a chunk of your hip,” Dickerman said.
With technology, we can pull the bone marrow directly from the hip, concentrate it to get more stem cells, put it inside of a cage to hold it, then it does its job.
“It’s like a cinder block that you build houses on, and you pack concrete inside the cinder block,” Dickerman explained. “We’re packing stem cells inside this cage and then it grows from bone to bone through the cage. I’m using your bone to grow your bone, so there’s nothing really any safer,” he said.
Dickerman says that he is seeing high rates of success in that patients are healing in half the time of the traditional spinal fusion.
Four months after his surgery, Youngman reports that his spine is solidly fused. He is working out again, pain-free, is able to tie his own shoes, and says that he is ready to return to full duty again as a firefighter.