Home › Blog › Back Playing Ice Hockey After Years in the Army with Regenexx-C

Greg Reith underwent the Regenexx-C procedure as an alternative to total knee replacement surgery because the next step was to replace the knee.

 “After 20 years with the U.S. Army Special Forces unit, my knees had been through jumps and other things for which a person’s body is just not made. My doctors told me at some point I’d have to go through knee replacement.

Right before I met with Dr. Centeno for the first time, I had just gone back in to get my knee re-evaluated. My physician planned to inject the knee with Hyalgan and there was nothing else they could do. The next step was to replace the knee.

Then one of my neighbors told me about the treatment he had undergone at Regenerative Sciences. After Dr. Centeno’s team did an MRI and explained the procedure to me, I went ahead and had the Regenexx-C procedure done.

Three weeks after the procedure I started feeling something. It was really quick. At six weeks, my MRI results showed that I had re-growth in the surface area of the cartilage in my knee, and I also had growth in the volume. During my exams, my results were getting consistently better. I gained 39 degrees of additional range of motion in the knee that they treated.

Now, 8 months later, I’ve experienced considerable improvement. At first, I couldn’t walk without a limp and had a hard time going up and down stairs. Now, I just started playing ice hockey again. I’m much more active now than I used to be, and I don’t have nearly as much pain. In fact, I’ve gone from having chronic pain every day to many days of having no pain at all.

I’ve only had one knee treated, and we’re thinking about doing the other one. When patients get to a point in their treatment where they’re out of options, Regenexx-C is definitely worth exploring.”

NOTE: This patient was treated with the Regenexx-C cultured stem cell injections and not Regenexx-SD. Because Regenexx-C is a medical procedure and all medical procedures have success and failure rates, not all Regenexx-C knee patients can expect this same result.

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