The New Lexicon of Healthcare: Terms for the 21st Century of Wellness

By Dr. Chris Renna

Weekend warriors dedicated to fitness for play and performance are beginning to see the signs of aging wear and tear. Osteoarthritis can cause pain to crucial areas like elbows, hips, knees and back. Advances in healthcare are giving new options and alternatives to surgery. This next generation of medicine is integrative bringing all medical modalities to patient care.

This holistic, alternative approach merges complementary and functional medicine bringing pharmaceutical, behavioral and nutritional aspects together to address the root cause of health issues. The result is allowing athletes to continue to do what they love longer without the long recovery time and a plethora of preventative measures.

With these new advancements comes a new language of medical health terminology. Here, I break it down and explain the new trends.

MEDICAL LEXICON

Integrative medicine:

Integrative medicine brings together 4 principles in creating a unique medical approach:

1. “Holistic”/ Comprehensive: everything in the body affects everything else. Nothing is separate or isolated.
2. “Inclusive” /Integrative: invites the best medical practices worldwide with an emphasis on cultural norms or how each person was conditional.  For example acupuncture might be a second choice treatment for an American individual but a first choice treatment for a Korean individual.
3. Functional:  looking for the origin of problems, treating causes not symptoms
4. Complimentary/synergistic:  Using treatments or techniques that are beneficial when used individually but are more beneficial used together.  For example:  Healthy diet + exercise + sleep produces better health than one or two of these alone.

Prolotherapy: A treatment technique used for chronic myofascial pain, back pain, osteoarthritis, or sports injury. It involves repeated injections of dextrose solution or other irritating substances into or around ligaments, tendon, or painful tissue in order to provoke a regenerative tissue response.

Translational medicine: Incorporates conventional medical recommendations, alternative remedies and new, research-based treatments to improve health and prevent disease. Employ practices of translational medicine to close the gap between discovery of new treatments and methodologies and their implementation in clinical practice.

Regenerative: Believe the body’s natural ability to heal coupled with the world’s best technologies is where non-surgical orthopedics really makes a difference in the health and lives of those in pain.

Regenokine Program:  A breakthrough treatment for osteoarthritis, chronic back and joint pain. Prior to its introduction in the US, Regenokine was used by thousands of individuals in Europe including Pope John Paul II, pro athletes, celebrities, politicians and business magnates. Regenokine uses a small volume of the patient’s own blood to create a serum that reduces inflammation, was met initially with fierce resistance by the medical establishment. Ultimately, the remarkable results achieved for patients, some of whom had given up all hope of treatment for their chronic back and joint pain, turned the tide of opinion.

Bone Marrow Concentrate Therapy (BMAC): BMC therapy is a promising non-surgical regenerative treatment used to treat various orthopedic injuries, including moderate to severe osteoarthritis and tendon injures. BMC is a concentrate of regenerative stem cells obtained from a patient’s own bone marrow. The physician removes a small amount of the patient’s bone marrow and spins it in a centrifuge in order to generate a powerful concentrate that is injected into the injured area.

Platelet Rich Plasma Therapy (PRP): Begins with collection of patient’s blood and the sample is placed in a centrifuge to separate the platelets from the other components of whole blood.  Doctors then inject the concentrated platelets into the site of the injury. Platelets function as a natural reservoir for growth factors that are essential to repair injured tissues.  The growth factors that the platelets secrete stimulate tissue recovery by increasing collagen production, enhancing tendon stem cell proliferation, and tenocyte-related gene and protein expression. These growth factors also stimulate blood flow and cause cartilage to become more firm and resilient.

A2M Therapy: A2M stands for Alpha 2 Macroglobulin, a naturally occurring protein found in blood plasma. It acts as an inhibitor of a wide variety of proteinases, which are enzymes that break down proteins. In particular, it’s A2M’s ability to inhibit the action of Matrix Metalloproteinases (MMPs) that may make it useful as a possible treatment for arthritis. One type of MMP breaks down the collagen that makes up cartilage and is believed responsible for how arthritis can destroy cartilage in a joint. Hence a naturally occurring protein that blocks the action of this and other MMPs would be potentially a good thing.

Radio Frequency Ablation: A procedure used to reduce pain. An electrical current produced by a radio wave is used to heat up a small area of nerve tissue, thereby decreasing pain signals from that specific area. RFA can be used to help patients with chronic (long-lasting) low-back and neck pain and pain related to the degeneration of joints from arthritis. Pain relief from RFA can last from six to 12 months and in some cases, relief can last for years.

Nutritional IV Therapy: Delivers targeted, bioavailable nutrients in super concentrations directly to cells and parts of the body where they are needed most.  LifeSpan offers a variety of IVs to support athletic performance, surgical prep/recovery, healthy aging, disease conditions and immune function.  Benefits include improvements with energy, hormone function and balance, overall health, chronic conditions and risk factors, immune health, detoxification, antioxidant protection, stress protection and improved athletic performance.

Biologic Medicine: Biological therapy is treatment designed to stimulate or restore the ability of the body’s immune (natural internal defense) system to fight infection and disease. Biological therapy often involves the use of substances called biological response modifiers (BRMs). The body normally produces these substances in small amounts in response to infection and disease. Using modern laboratory techniques, scientists can produce BRMs in large amounts for use in the treatment of cancer and other diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease. Biologics have been shown to help slow progression of rheumatoid arthritis when all other treatments have failed to do so.

Concierge Medicine: The LifeSpan approach to concierge medicine encompasses health-based, preventive medical care when and where you need it.  Whereas most concierge programs only include access to a physician or provider, our LifeSpan approach couples comprehensive, preventative health based medicine with 24/7 access to your healthcare team along world-class care-coordination support.

Dr. Chris Renna is a board certified primary care specialist in practice for more than 30 years.  He has pioneered the field of integrative and preventive medicine at his busy Dallas and Los Angeles LifeSpan medicine clinics that count among their patients NBA and NFL players, Olympic athletes, movie stars and Fortune 500 executives.  Dr. Renna has co-authored two books, The End of Pain and Balance Your Brain, Balance Your Life.  He is a former clinical faculty member at several medical schools and has discussed his work internationally and on the Dr. Oz radio show.

LifeSpan medicine is an integrative, functional medical practice with a team of doctors that offer the most advanced technology for non-invasive medicine. The practice has two locations in Santa Monica and Dallas. Clients range from the average person looking to be healthier to NFL, NBA, and Olympic athletes to movie stars and Fortune 500 executives. For more information on LifeSpan medicine visit www.lifespanmedicine.com.