Home › Blog › The Hip Bone’s Connected to the Shoulder Bone…

Our approach has always been whole body. As a result, we frequently see patients who are misdiagnosed as having one problem when they really have another cause. An example is a patient with knee pain who has an MRI that shows some arthritis, but his knee pain is really coming from the tendons that attach at the knee which was ultimately caused by problems in his low back. This week a paper was published that continues support our Orthopedic 2.0 approach (read our practice’s e-book to see how we look at using stem cells in the context of figuring out why you hurt). This paper looked at baseball pitchers with baseball shoulder injury problems. While it wasn’t surprising that pitchers with more shoulder issues had less range of motion of the shoulder, what was surprising was that they also had problems with hip extension! This makes sense, as to get maximum speed on the ball you need more than your shoulder. If you’ve ever heard a coach say, “Put your body into it…”, you know what I mean. In fact, during wind up for a pitch, a baseball pitcher stores energy in his hip and spine, so not having enough hip extension means that you can’t store and release energy in the hip. Without being able to tap the rest of his body, a pitcher will overwork his shoulder to try and get the same speed on the ball. Again, our orthopedic care system is focused on the MRI and then the surgery to fix a broken part (a tear in the rotator cuff or shoulder labrum), but this is wholly inadequate to answer the next obvious question, “How did it get broken?”

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