Regenerative medicine halts paralyzing hand, shoulder and knee pain.
Frank and Erin Perkins
The days of meeting your spouse through friends and family or by chance at a party, bar or church aren’t over, but they are fading. A recent study shows that since 2015 a majority of all spouses – nearly one in four – met through an online dating app.
One could make the argument that Frank and Erin Perkins were trendsetters. They met online in 2013 and married two years later.
“Erin and I truly are partners in life, and I’m proud to say that during our nearly 10 years together, we’ve never had a single fight,” Frank boasts. “I tell people that and they say, Oh, come on, and we say, No, it’s true. We’ve never had a fight.”
While Frank may not have fought with Erin, he did wage a long battle with paralyzing pain in his hands, knees, shoulders and neck that intensified greatly a couple of years ago after he fell off a ladder, hurt his back and spent three months convalescing.
“I’m not proud to say this, but the pain was so bad that I was taking as many as 20 over-the-counter pain pills just to function, get out of the house and get moving each day,” Frank laments. “And even then, I still couldn’t do a lot of things.
“Things like putting on a pair of pants, buttoning a shirt, or putting on a pair of socks and shoes was hard for me. Cutting up a steak at a restaurant – my hands hurt so much I had to have Erin do that for me. And that was just because of the pain in my hands.
“The pain in my knees, shoulders and neck was just as bad sometimes. We’re very active, and we love to ride motorcycles, four-wheelers and things like that, but I was in so much pain there were days when I asked Erin, Why should I even get out of bed?”
Erin concurs that it was a “terrible situation” for her husband.
“He felt like life wasn’t worth living for him anymore,” Erin says. “We knew we had to do something, so we started searching for solutions and eventually ended up at QC Kinetix.”
State-of-the-Art Treatment
Erin is enthusiastic that the “terrible situation” is over for her husband.
A local practice with a national reputation, QC Kinetix offers concierge-level, drug-free, nonsurgical pain management and state-of-the-art regenerative medicine treatments for soft tissue pain, joint pain and musculoskeletal conditions.
As an alternative to addictive medications and surgeries, QC Kinetix treatments trigger the body’s ability to repair itself from the inside out using each patient’s own healing properties, which are found in their blood.
The blood is gathered during a typical blood draw, then placed in a centrifuge, where healing properties are separated and extracted. The healing properties are then reinjected into the patient’s damaged tissue or joint. The injection sparks a tissue regeneration that allows the body to rebuild itself over a few weeks or months.
“Regenerative medicine is a great alternative for many people who thought surgery was their only option,” says Daniel Sucherman, MD, medical director of QC Kinetix Suncoast, which has locations in Bradenton, St. Petersburg, Lakeland and Brandon.
After years as a key member of an orthopedic surgical team, Dr. Sucherman recognized the need for a better way to help people in pain. As a strong believer in regenerative medicine and the positive impact it can have, he chose to meet that need through QC Kinetix.
“I’m an anesthesiologist, primarily for orthopedic surgery, and I know that people who go to an orthopedic surgeon for pain are commonly told they need surgery,” Dr. Sucherman explains. “And believe me, surgery has its place but is very strenuous on the body. It involves a lot of cutting, drilling, sawing and hammering, and the recovery process is very arduous.”
There is an alternative in many cases, he continues.
“I started dancing a little jig right there in the office to show how much better my knees felt.” – Frank
“That’s why I became involved with QC Kinetix. I want to offer people an alternative to surgery, pain medications or steroids for their joint pain. That is exactly what QC Kinetix and its regenerative medicine treatments do.”
Though it is on the leading-edge of medical science, regenerative medicine is not a new concept. Its most basic principles have been practiced for years. At QC Kinetix, the process has been updated to make it as effective as possible.
For example, QC Kinetix uses state-of-the art equipment that allows for the retrieval of the most useful healing factors from blood. It can also obtain healing factors from bone marrow, which is one of the best sources of hematopoietic stem cells — young blood cells with extensive self-renewal properties.
QC Kinetix works with patients across multiple visits, providing multiple types of drug-free injections that are customized for each case. Symptom improvement is then monitored for several months while patients experience no downtime. Most patients complete their treatments within six months and go on to live pain-free lives.
“Another thing that sets QC Kinetix apart is that we do all of this in-house,” Dr. Sucherman points out. “Your blood, your tissue never leave our office. And we do all of this work while you’re there. When we’re done, you simply go about your normal activities.”
Dance the Night Away
Regenerative medicine can be used to treat arthritis, muscle or tendon tears almost anywhere in the body, including the knees and shoulders, ankles and wrists, hips, low back and neck. That made QC Kinetix an excellent choice for Frank.
He and Erin spend the fall and winter in Lake Wales, so they visited the QC Kinetix location in Lakeland. That’s where they met board-certified family nurse practitioner Christina Turner, FNP-BC, who examined Frank and determined he was a candidate for the QC Kinetix treatment protocol.
“Christina is super down to earth. She explained everything very well and made us feel really comfortable,” Frank remembers. “She was so helpful and welcoming that we began to look forward to our visits to the office.”
During his first visit, Frank learned that arthritis was the cause of his joint pain, and his treatment started with injections into the joints between each of his fingers.
“Everything that can move in the body, whether it’s your fingers, knees or shoulders, has the susceptibility to break down,” Christina notes. “But those things are all comprised of the same components, so we can treat them all in similar fashion.
“With the hands, it might be one singular joint that is problematic, or all 10 fingers. We determine which during our assessment, and in Frank’s case, all 10 fingers were problematic so we treated all the middle joints through our injections.”
During subsequent visits, Frank received injections into both knees and shoulders, as well as his neck. The treatments alleviated his pain to such a degree that he actually danced for joy.
“I no longer need help cutting my steak or doing things with my hands. This has truly been a life-changing experience for me, and I absolutely recommend QC Kinetix to anyone because we could not be happier with the results.” – Frank
“It was during my third visit, when they went into my hip to retrieve the stem cells from the bone marrow,” Frank recalls. “I was joking with the girls and started dancing a little jig right there in the office to show how much better my knees felt.
“I feel so good now that Erin and I recently went out one night and played putt-putt golf and then stood and watched fireworks. I never would have been able to do that before, not with the pain I was in.
“I no longer need help cutting my steak or doing things with my hands. This has truly been a life-changing experience for me, and I absolutely recommend QC Kinetix to anyone because we could not be happier with the results.”
