Home › Blog › A Hip Stem Cell Treatment In An Aikido Master

Lynne is a force to be reckoned with, or shall I say a “redirected” force. Her love is Aikido, the Japanese martial art of redirecting your attacker’s forces back on him or her, using their energy to allow the smallest defenders to thwart the largest attackers. So when she realized that she had hip arthritis, she wanted to use her own little stem cells to avoid the need for a massive hip replacement surgery. Her hip stem cell treatment became her personal journey to redirect her own internal forces to help her hip.

I love talking to patients while they’re getting stem cell or other procedures, in part to ease their minds and in part to learn who it is I’m treating beyond the MRIs and examination. Lynne is an Akido master who once had some guy in the Battery in New York try to mug her – suffice it to say that it didn’t go well for the mugger, who left more with a bruised pride than actual bruises. This is the way of Aikido, where redirected forces from the attacker are used both to end the attack and to protect the attacked and attacker.

Late last year Lynne began to get hip pain when she stood for a long-time or took a big stride. She was forced to dramatically cut back on her love – Aikido. While she had moderate hip arthritis on MRI, our clinic recognized that there was more to the story. She also had a chronically irritated spinal nerve in her back and spondylolisthesis, a condition where one vertebra slides forward on the other. So treating the MRI of her hip with stem cells wouldn’t be enough. So what did we do? We treated her hip with one Regenexx-SD stem cell procedure, recognizing that the tendons around the hip were as much a source of pain as the joint (we treated both under precise imaging guidance). In addition, we treated her low back twice with the Regenexx-DDD procedure. The results? Even though she’s only about 4 months out, here’s her e-mail to me:

“Dear Dr. Centeno, Thought I would just check in with you, and send a photo of me back on the Aikido mat. Have started to teach and take class, but cut back on frequency. Have started to fall very gently. Am feeling good and giving myself enough days of rest time between classes. My hip has definitely improved in mobility and lessening of pain,  and the work we are doing with my back and sacrum ligaments has helped me dramatically in my strength, posture..The second treatment really made a difference…”

The upshot? I’m glad that I could help Lynne by recognizing that the “back bone is connected to the hip bone” and using the redirected force of her own stem cells to help get her back to torturing those two poor guys in the pictures above! She may need some more work on the low back, but getting her back on the Aikido mats exemplifies what we do at Regenexx, we help people to continue what they love to do!

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