Blog Archive
Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) is an injectable substance. Although it contains no pharmaceutical medications, a PRP injection can accelerate and enhance the natural healing process for various injuries. If you’re looking for a more natural treatment for a painful musculoskeletal condition, consider PRP at Naples Regenerative Institute in Naples, Florida. Double...
older and more susceptible to injuries, you are looking for treatment solutions. Healing after an injury can take time, but you want to return to the activities you love. Fortunately, modern medicine offers many nonsurgical treatment options. Regenerative therapies are widely used to help musculoskeletal injuries heal faster. At Naples...
Chronic pain calls for attentive care and management to minimize its impact on your quality of life. Without an effective care plan, chronic musculoskeletal pain can restrict your mobility, drain your energy, and deprive you of quality sleep. At Naples Regenerative Institute in Naples, Florida, interventional spine and pain specialist...
Sciatica is a symptom that can be due to various other conditions causing nerve impingement in the lower spine. The shooting pain, numbness, or tingling of sciatica appears when your sciatic nerve — the longest nerve in your body — becomes compressed. This can happen due to spine conditions, such...
Athletic injuries often worsen over time because many sports require repeated movements as part of practice and gameplay. Staying in shape with an athletic pastime offers health and wellness benefits and increased muscular strength. Still, you should be mindful of overuse injuries common in your sport. Overuse injuries occur when...
You might be able to blame arthritis for a painful or stiff joint, or there may be another injury to the tissues supporting it. In any case, joint pain and stiffness are limiting and may not always respond to at-home care efforts. Double board-certified pain management specialist Glenn M. Flanagan,...
Many people assume a nerve block only helps with pain. While that is true, it’s not the sole purpose of a nerve block injection. It can also be a valuable tool for locating the source of pain and identifying an underlying cause. If you’ve undergone multiple imaging tests, blood tests,...
Elbow injuries are slow healing and highly limiting because of how often you use the joint daily. Even with stabilization, over-the-counter medications, and other conservative care options, your elbow injury could cause long-lasting symptoms. One option for treating a specific elbow injury to the ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) is called...
If you haven’t heard of platelet-rich plasma (PRP), this is your chance to learn about its revolutionary recent developments. PRP is a substance that a medical professional can derive from a sample of your blood, isolating the platelet growth factors (PGFs) that make tissue healing and regeneration possible. By injecting...
Daily life is much more challenging when back pain persists beyond all of your efforts to heal. While long-term back pain is frustrating, you’re not alone. In fact, around 39% of adults in the United States experience back pain. Thankfully, orthopedists have more resources than ever to treat chronic back...
Foot pain can limit your mobility. As the most common cause of heel pain, plantar fasciitis is a likely culprit when you feel discomfort in your heel or foot, and it’s one of the first possibilities we explore when diagnosing you at Naples Regenerative Institute in Naples, Florida. Glenn M. Flanagan, MD, is...
Avoiding a tendon strain can spare you months of recovery and extensive medical costs. Strain injuries happen when you overstretch or tear a tendon, which is the fibrous strips of tissue that attach muscle to bone. You use your tendons daily to move and bend your joints. Tendon tears can...
Your neck doesn’t have as much support as the rest of your spine. It consists of seven stacked vertebrae called the cervical spine, along with supportive muscles and ligaments around it. Intervertebral discs sit between your vertebrae to absorb shock when your neck rotates and bends. Any of the structures...
Your facet joints are the joints between your vertebrae that allow for movement so you can twist, turn, bend over, and arch your back. Like any other joints in your body, these are susceptible to arthritis and can become painful and stiff as the condition progresses. While many people with...
Hyaluronic acid (HA) is a slippery substance found all over your body, especially in your eyes, joints, and skin. Its molecules bind with water molecules, keeping your body parts hydrated. It also provides lubrication, similar to the grease you might apply to a wheel to keep it spinning. The hyaluronic...
Around one in four American adults experiences joint pain or stiffness regularly, often due to chronic conditions like osteoarthritis or gout. When joint pain strikes, it’s time to review the behaviors that might be making them worse, like poor posture, and consider treatments with joint pain management. Many regenerative therapies, including prolotherapy and platelet-rich plasma (PRP)...
Your temporomandibular joints are located on either side of your head, connecting your lower jaw to the rest of your face. Every time you yawn, bite, or gasp, you use the two hinge joints to open and close your mouth. Painful jaw joints are often due to temporomandibular joint disorder...
Chronic joint pain can be extremely limiting in terms of activities and daily responsibilities like housework. When conventional treatments for back and joint pain, such as physical therapy and over-the-counter medications, can’t provide relief, it’s time to consider stopping the pain at the source. Double board-certified pain management specialist Glenn M....
Epidural injections are a helpful tool during childbirth and a treatment for pain originating around your spine. The epidural space surrounds nerve roots in your spinal cord and is the targeted area for epidural injections. The injections contain a steroid to fight inflammation and a local anesthetic to provide immediate...
The most common type of arthritis, osteoarthritis, causes joint pain and stiffness just like all other types. It’s a “wear-and-tear” issue, which means the damage it causes worsens over time the more you use your joints. The joints begin to break down as the condition causes changes to the cartilage...
Sciatica is a symptom of a pinched or compressed nerve. The sciatic nerve — the longest nerve in your body — runs through your buttock and down your leg. When the root of this nerve is compressed in your lower back, the resulting radiating numbness, tingling, or pain is called sciatica. ...
When your head forcefully flings forward and backward again, the resulting injury is called whiplash. Among the most prevalent causes of neck pain, whiplash can damage multiple structures within your neck, including muscles, tendons, ligaments, and even discs and nerve rootsof your cervical spine. Any time you suspect a whiplash injury,...
The novel Intracept® procedure by Relievant® is sweeping the nation as a treatment for chronic back pain. Now covered by Medicare, it has passed numerous research trials, showing exceptional safety and superb effectiveness ratings. You might worry about possibly needing surgery for a painful back, but the Intracept procedure may...
Whether it affects one or both of your hips, hip pain is more than a minor inconvenience. It can worsen with time, causing stiffness and limited mobility along with the pain. Our medical expert, Dr. Glenn M. Flanagan, investigates the possible causes behind your hip pain and evaluates the damage...
Any radiating sensations down the back of your leg are often painful. Often, the cause is sciatica. The issue that causes sciatica is the irritationof the sciatic nerve, the longest nerve in your body, and it runs down each of your legs. Sciatic nerve compression can be due to bone...
Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) is a remarkable and widely-used injectable substance containing platelets, growth factors, and liquid plasma from your own blood. A medical provider obtains the sampleby a simple blood draw in the office and places the blood in a machine called a centrifuge. The centrifuge spinsthe sample very rapidly,...
Cortisone injections are a popular minimally invasive treatment for joint pain, stiffness, and inflammation. Relatively reliably, the steroid cortisone reduces inflammation even in cases where joint pain has not responded well to other treatments or management strategies. Despite their success in treating musculoskeletal pain, it’s possible to overdo it on...
Chronic pain due to injuries and degenerative conditions can appear in almost any part of your body. While lifestyle changes are often the first recommendation, advanced therapies in the office are also often necessary. Radiofrequency ablation is a minimally invasive treatment for chronic pain that uses the heat from radiofrequency...
Your neck doesn’t have the same level of support as the other areas of your spine. While it supports your head, it’s also prone to neck pain due to the strains of sitting in a single position for hours at a time. People who work from home are especially at...
Joint and muscle pain can last for weeks or even months despite your efforts at caring for your injury at home. Prolotherapy, a stimulating treatment for various types of pain in the joints or back, offers a reduction in pain plus improvements in the function and mobility of targeted joints....
Knee pain is often due to arthritis, a degenerative joint condition, and dealing with it can be challenging. You rely on the knee joints to sit down, stand up, and walk around all day, which aggravates the pain and stiffens the joint. Knee pain specialist Glenn M. Flanagan, MD, uses...
Radiofrequency ablation is one of many ways to manage back and joint pain. Unfortunately, not many people have a full understanding of how it works and why it’s an excellent choice for treatment. Here at Naples Regenerative Institute in Naples, Florida, interventional pain specialist Glenn Flanagan, MD, often recommends radiofrequency...
Anyone who has ever experienced sciatica is well aware of the pain it can cause. Sciatica is a condition in which the sciatic nerve becomes irritated or compressed, sending shooting, stabbing pain into the lower back and down one leg. Finding the right treatment or combination of treatments is key...
Natural healing relies on blood flow to an injured area. If we cut ourselves, the area gets red, hot and swollen because of the acute inflammation with a primary goal of healing that tissue. FIRST - Platelets in our blood moving past the injury are activated to form a clot...
photo credit from an article by LEONID SCHNEIDER Are all stem cell treatments the same? Of course not. That's the simple answer. But what may surprise you is how different the treatments really are from clinic to clinic, patient to patient, and provider to provider. First of all, and most...
Integration of treatments from different types of providers who manage pain should be the primary goal in all cases. Sounds easy, right? Unfortunately, it's not. We're at a point where all the different providers who can help you are growing further apart, instead of learning to work together. Who knows...
This is a very, very, very interesting topic WHO is a pioneer in this field? A leader? An expert? WHAT criteria exists to help determine this? WHERE can you find these experts? The reason this topic is so interesting is because juuuuuust about everyone advertising they provide regenerative medicine services...
You can see the needle starting on the top left, pointing down and to the right towards the target of the injection Over the years we have seen drastic differences develop in the ways that injections are provided. I will review the differences in the common types of injections, from...
It's an exciting time to be involved on the cutting edge of orthopedic care. Invasive orthopedic surgeries have proven to be a double edged sword. With surprisingly low level evidence supporting the majority of surgeries, the number of orthopedic spine and joint cases has still sky-rocketed over the last decade....
In its simplest form, this is a field of Orthopedics focused on healing and preserving tissue in your body, instead of masking painful symptoms and replacing your body with prosthetic joints, screws, rods, etc. For decades, managing orthopedic issues that did not respond to therapy and rest led to generations...