Home › Blog › Annual Regenexx Network Conference This Thursday!

As I blogged this weekend, this is a big week here in Colorado and part of that is welcoming our network providers for a conference on Regenexx and then two advanced skills courses next week. In preparing for these CORE skills courses this weekend, I realized just how special what we’ve accomplished really is – as like Regenexx, our provider network is full of firsts. At a time where everyone and his brother is trying to copycat what we do, when the rubber meets the road, for many reasons, there is no substitute.

At this point, if we were building a provider network simply to maximize profit, we would have about 200 national providers. I know that number well, because through the years we’ve turned away almost 200 physicians who wanted to join that network. Why turn willing providers away? The reason is that the goal is to keep procedure quality high to produce the best possible results and then everything else will fall in line. The vast majority of the physicians who we turned down simply didn’t have the core skills needed to practice interventional orthopedics – the precise placement of platelets or stem cells into a specific damaged area of the musculoskeletal system. Since it’s hard for patients to understand why just any doctor can’t do this, I wanted this morning to show you a small part of one of our 20 or so training videos. The goal is to give you a peek (without putting you to sleep) at the complexity of the skills and knowledge needed to practice in the Regenexx network.

The clip above is from a network training video on the wrist TFCC. This is an important structure that allows you to use that opposable thumb that separates you from the rest of the animal kingdom. If this area gets injured, it’s hard to use the hand and wrist without pain. In addition, surgery here is pretty barbaric and in our experience, rarely turns out well. The video begins at the start of the lecture and then switches to a clip that goes over the parts of the structure that have to be paid attention to if platelets or stem cells are being considered to help heal damage. Now most provider networks who are trying to copy and paste Regenexx don’t even understand what the TFCC is, let alone have an entire course devoted to how to help the area. In fact, the injection skills needed to do a good job with these precise injections or even how to diagnose this as the problem wouldn’t be in the wheelhouse of 95% of the doctors on these networks.

The upshot? This little snippet of one of our 20 or so Regenexx Network physician education lectures is important because it gives patients a peek into why we turn down so many physicians who want to join our provider network. In addition to these lectures, each doctor must demonstrate to us in a cadaver course that he or she knows how to perform this procedure and almost as important, how to properly diagnose when this procedure is needed. This is why this week’s provider Regenexx Network Conference here in Colorado is so important. So you can get care from a Regenexx provider who has been hand picked and extensively trained, or you can get care from a doctor who isn’t quite sure what the TFCC is and certainly has no idea how to place stem cells precisely inside any one of it’s 7 or so component parts that might be damaged! Even if you have nothing wrong with your wrist, all of the procedures we offer are at the same or greater level of complexity. So as I always say, there’s Regenexx, and then there’s everything else…

Chris Centeno, MD is a specialist in regenerative medicine and the new field of Interventional Orthopedics. Centeno pioneered orthopedic stem cell procedures in 2005 and is responsible for a large amount of the published research on stem cell use for orthopedic applications. View Profile