Do you find yourself wishing that your body was better at healing itself, or that you could slow down the clock on the aging process? Do you have an ache from an injury years ago and just won’t heal? Do you wish you could harness your body’s healing powers? With regenerative medicine, you can. And with Jason Emer, MD in West Hollywood, CA, you can experience the exceptional.

What Is Regenerative Medicine?

When you have an injured organ or tissue, most medical approaches seek to minimize the symptoms. The easiest route is often through prescription medications. Medications can control the pain and treat the systemic shifts that may happen in your body. It makes sense to take medications to help illnesses and injuries, but doesn’t it make more sense to simply heal the injuries so you don’t require long-term medication?

Regenerative medicine, unlike other fields of medicine, focuses on healing or replacing damaged areas of the body. Rather than simply treating the symptoms, this branch of medicine tries to eradicate the problem completely. It seems like a pretty simple idea. Isn’t it always better to treat the problem rather than the symptoms?

Why Now?

This approach hasn’t been popularized before now because it aims to heal problems that previously have been thought of as un-healable. This new field of medicine combines biology, chemistry, genetics, engineering, robotics, computer science, and other fields to find answers to some of the most challenging medical problems. This field of medicine is allowing the future to happen, now. And as researches, scientists, and doctors begin to learn more about what this field of medicine holds, our ability to heal ourselves will only get stronger.

How Does This All Work?

This type of medicine seeks to regenerate human cells to replace and repair the damaged ones. There are three main branches of the medical field that work in different ways to heal and repair damaged areas of the body. Therapies tend to fall under one of these branches.

1. Tissue Engineering and Biomaterials

This strategy works to recreate damaged tissues by using scaffolding. The scaffolding is created in the size and shape of the piece of tissue that needs to be regenerated.

The scaffolding is created using collagen that will be reabsorbed into the body once the tissue has been healed. The scaffold usually utilizes stem cells to encourage new tissue growth. As the scaffold deteriorates and new tissue grows, the result is tissue of the correct type, size, and shape.

Cellular Therapies

This branch involves regeneration without the scaffolding. Studies show that collected stem cells can be reintroduced to the system at the point of damaged tissue and work to heal the tissue. Adult stem cells can be collected from blood, fat, bone marrow, dental pulp, and other places. Once these stem cells have been collected, they can be injected into the site of diseased or damaged areas to promote true healing.

Medical Devices and Artificial Organs

This exciting exploration into the field of medicine is perhaps the most promising. When an organ fails, the most common choice is to find a donor organ that can be transplanted. While that practice has saved innumerable lives, we can do better. Rather than replace a damaged heart with a transplant, this field of medicine will soon allow us to replace it with a medical device or an artificial organ.

When a patient in need of an organ is finally given one, the doctors make sure that both the donor and the recipient match in important genetic factors to lessen the chance of rejection. However, even individuals who are a perfect match on paper can result in organ rejection. To lessen the likelihood of this, patients have to take immunosuppressant drugs that can have a multitude of side effects. Furthermore, the difficulty of finding a transplant in time is a struggle for many patients. Using medical devices and artificial organs will eliminate these risks.

Rather than wait for an organ to be available, why not simply make a new organ? That’s what doctors are trying to do here, and successfully. One example is the Ventricular Assist Device. At one point, this medical device was created simply to keep people going as they waited for a heart transplant. However, now there are long-term options. Instead of waiting for a heart, some patients can opt for the medical device.

Regenerative Medicine With Jason Emer, MD

Jason Emer, MD seeks to use the ever-evolving science of healing to reduce the signs and symptoms of aging. Here, you can access state-of-the-art therapies to revitalize your body, rejuvenate your mind, and create a healthier, younger you. Jason Emer, MD offers Advanced Cellular Optimization, IV Infusion Therapy, Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy, Laser Therapy, Photodynamic Light Therapy, and Topically Applied and Injectable Growth Factors and Stem Cells. We’ll briefly review each of these to help you understand how they can better your health.

Advanced Cellular Optimization

This type of cellular therapy focuses on optimizing the results based on the type of stem cell used. Adult stem cells, also known as tissue stem cells, can be found in several parts of an adult body. These stem cells are specific to each type of tissue. That is, muscle stem cells can regenerate muscle fibers, and only muscle fibers, and liver stem cells can regenerate liver tissue.

Embryonic stem cells, on the other hand, are called pluripotent because they have the ability to become any type of tissue. There is one other type of stem cell: induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs. This type of stem cell has the ability to become any type of tissue, like embryonic stem cells. However, they are derived from adult tissues and induced to be pluripotent using new technology. Through genetic manipulation, iPSCs can be reprogrammed to broaden their use.

Advanced cellular optimization introduces healthy stem cells into an area of tissue that is damaged to help your body heal itself and to reduce the effects of aging.

IV Infusion Therapy

This therapy helps the body regenerate by introducing necessary components directly into the bloodstream. IV infusion therapy was initially created by Dr. John Myers several decades ago. He was a renowned nutritional medicine expert and a forerunner of the regenerative movement. He began treating patients with a range of ailments with what became known as the “Myers’ Cocktail.” This cocktail included magnesium, calcium B-vitamins, and Vitamin C. Delivered through an IV, this infusion works to heal the body from the inside out.

Today, vitamin infusion therapy is becoming more and more popular, with spas popping up that exclusively offer IV therapy. IV infusion therapy can even go a step further by utilizing stem cells to deliver a dose of healing to the whole body. Depending on your needs, there is the perfect IV infusion mix to get you on your feet and feeling younger!

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy

This therapy involves being in a pressurized room or tube and breathing in the pure oxygen there. In a chamber used for hyperbaric oxygen therapy, the air pressure is three times higher than normal air pressure, which allows your lungs to gather more oxygen than possible at normal air pressure. The increased oxygenation of the blood allows your cells to be nourished, helps them to fight bacteria, and works to stimulate stem cells to promote healing.

Obviously, the tissues in your body require oxygen to survive and remain healthy. When tissue gets injured, it requires even more oxygen to repair itself. By utilizing hyperbaric oxygen therapy, your body’s capacity for oxygen is increased, which promotes healing and your body’s ability to fight infections. This therapy can be helpful for treating decompression sickness, serious infections, wounds that won’t heal, anemia, embolisms, burns, carbon monoxide poisoning, and many other ailments.

Laser Therapy

Laser therapy is a non-invasive option to treat many issues. Lasers, unlike other light sources, are tuned to specific wavelengths, allowing them to be focused into powerful beams. This allows doctors to focus on a small problem area with a high level of precision so that the surrounding tissue isn’t damaged.

Laser therapy has a wide application in the medical field. It can be used for cosmetic purposes, as well. Lasers can be utilized to remove warts, moles, birthmarks, and sunspots. They can remove hair in unwanted places or reduce the appearance of wrinkles or scars. They can even be used to remove tattoos.

This therapy can be used to shrink or destroy tumors, polyps, and precancerous growths. It can destroy kidney stones or relieve symptoms of cancer. It can be used to repair a detached retina or improve vision. One of the most promising areas of use is in treating pain, including nerve pain that isn’t treated by other therapies.

This therapy can also be used for cauterizing or sealing. This can be helpful to use on nerve endings to reduce pain after surgery or on blood vessels to help reduce blood loss. It can even be used on lymph vessels to reduce swelling and limit the spread of tumor cells.

Photodynamic Light Therapy

This therapy is effective for destroying unhealthy or harmful cells, and can even be used to destroy cancerous cells. It uses specialized drugs called photosensitizing agents on the places where harmful cells exist. When these drugs are exposed to light, a chemical reaction is activated that destroys any harmful cells.

During the treatment, health care workers either apply photosensitizing drugs onto your skin or inject them into your bloodstream. The photosensitizing drugs concentrate on the unhealthy cells so that these cells are more sensitive to light. Depending on the type of photosensitizer used, your doctor may use a normal light on the specific area or may use a low-power red laser light, a blue light, or even natural sunlight.

Once exposed to light, the photosensitizing agent reacts with oxygen and destroys the unhealthy cells. Photodynamic light therapy is an effective treatment for psoriasis, Barrett’s esophagus, esophageal cancer, non-small cell lung cancer, precancerous growths, acne, and warts.

Topically Applied and Injectable Growth Factors and Stem Cells

This type of therapy works to introduce stem cells and growth factors directly to the skin to improve its appearance and to heal blemishes. Growth factors work to stimulate biochemical pathways and regulate cellular growth. This helps to promote new collagen and elastic fiber formation, revitalizing your skin and helping you look younger.

Our body uses the same mechanism to heal wounds as it does to slowly age, meaning that these pathways can be treated in similar fashions by introducing growth factors and stem cells to your skin. By giving your skin the necessary growth factors and stem cells to promote effective healing, your skin is also receiving the nutrients necessary to reverse the effects of aging.

Regenerative Medicine and Aging

As much as we fight it, we are all aging. Our bodies and our organ systems are not designed to last forever. And as we grow older, the mechanisms that keep us alive slowly wear out. That’s why this type of medicine is so exciting. As this type of medicine expands and is refined, it becomes possible to actively slow down the aging the process.

Other types of medicines work only to alleviate symptoms of ailments that come with old age. Instead of working to repair the actual issue, they work to make you more comfortable and to reduce the symptoms. For instance, other fields of medicine may work to reduce the depth and severity of wrinkles or acne, while this field works to erase the wrinkles altogether by healing the skin.

Aging can be looked at as the lessening ability to heal oneself. Think about it – almost every disorder that coincides with aging is, at some level, the body no longer able to heal itself. By harnessing the body’s power to heal and giving it direction, we can slow down the aging process. We can heal issues that were previously thought to be untreatable. By refocusing medicine to not simply treat issues, but erase them, we can change not just how we treat patients, but restructure the goal of medicine altogether.

Join Us

When it comes to using regenerative medicine, there is no limit to what we can accomplish. This field of medicine is changing the way that doctors look at treating patients, and it’s enabling patients to heal in previously unheard-of ways. If you are looking to increase your quality of life by reaching a new pinnacle of health, this field of medicine is the only way.

Rather than simply treat the symptoms, rather than add an innumerable amount of prescription medications to attempt to treat an issue, why not go to the source? Why not eradicate the need for treatments by simply healing the problem itself? Why not utilize the body’s own powerful healing abilities, and harness them to heal specific problems?

This field of medicine is the future. As research in this field grows, we are understanding more about the human body’s capacity to heal and the ways in which this can be applied to slow down the aging process. Don’t settle for treatments that won’t actually cure the problem. Invest in your body; invest in your future. To learn more about how regenerative medicine can revitalize your life, contact Jason Emer, MD in West Hollywood, CA. today. We are happy to answer any questions you have.