bone graft

[hematosis]

---

Members don't see this ad.

I've heard from a few recent talks about podiatrist and their complications when trying to obtain bone grafts from certain regions of the lower extremity. I read an article today about using stem cells to regrow new bone. This has been talked about before ( dr. Mark Myerson ) but it looks like its really being put to use. Any thoughts on how this might be of use for f/a surgery? could this change reconstructive surgery?

http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/medicalcenter/features/2011-2012/12/20111208_stem-spine.html

 

[347932]

This is very exciting technology for sure.

The one thing that always brings a question to my mind, is why isn't the patient healing? Although there are many reasons a patient doesn't fuse physiologically, I've seen the non union occur because of patient related issues that have nothing to do with their inherent physiology.

Things like smoking, non compliance, injury and other non physiologic factor have a huge impact on non healing of fusion sites.

Stem cell research is very important in our development of new technologies imo. There are many potential applications for patients that are immunocompromised, and hopefully the research will advance our knowledge about bone healing in general. It doesn't present a miracle cure, however and can't help us with patients who are hell bent on proving to us that they really have no interest in healing, but being disabled. The only cure for those patients is not to get involved with their care in the first place.