Peptides for osteoarthritis of the knee, hip and shoulder

Osteoarthritis affects millions of people in this country, and many of them are active and want to avoid surgery like joint replacement as long as they possibly can. Would getting a prescription for peptides like BPC-157 and giving it to yourself every day to help your arthritis pain, or would it even reverse the arthritis damage? My name is Dr. David Geyer, triple board certified orthopedic surgeons, sports medicine specialist, and anti-aging and regenerative medicine expert. I help you feel, look, and perform your best regardless of age or injury. Now, I've done a number of videos in this modern medicine section about regenerative treatments for knee arthritis and hip arthritis, and that would all apply to arthritis, say the shoulder as well, where more of what I would expect to help would be things like PRP or exosomes or stem cells injected into the knee by a doctor, by an orthopedic surgeon. And that's very important to have that done. You don't ever want to inject inside a joint on your own because the risk of infection is really great. And a joint infection is a devastating problem that leads to issues way down the road. So you don't ever want to try to inject in a joint on your own. But I've talked about that in other videos. Yes, PRP, stem cells, exosomes are considered experimental by the FDA. There is a lot of data behind PRP for osteoarthritis of the knee and other joints. And with some good results, but those are sort of the more conventional options. Having said that, with huge numbers of people with arthritis and with the growing interest in peptides, there are growing interest in, hey, would peptides help my arthritis, whether it's the hip or the knee or the shoulder? And there really isn't a lot of data. I would have concerns that if you went to your doctor, got a prescription for, say, BPC-157, got the syringes, you're going to give it to yourself daily. I don't know how much any of that would actually get into the knee, certainly to help heal bone or cartilage. Maybe there might be some benefits in improving pain, strengthening the muscles, tendons, and ligaments around the knee to take pressure off the worn out cartilage and bone. So it could be beneficial from a pain standpoint. It's just hard to necessarily know. BPC, maybe you inject it closer to your knee, maybe the skin of the lower thigh, just under the skin. But it's really hard to know necessarily how that much, how it would help. There is one study looking at, that I'm aware of, that looked at intra-articular BPC-157 given by a doctor. And it was not a well-done study. But it was interesting in the sense it was 16 patients, if I remember correctly, maybe 12. It was just BPC-157. Another four was a combination of BPC and thymus and beta-4, TB4, TB500 injected into the knee. It wasn't just osteoarthritis. It was just people with knee pain. There was no effort to figure out, was it arthritis? Which it was older patients, so I would expect a lot of it was arthritis, but did they have degenerative meniscus tears? They didn't know. So the conclusion that it offered some regenerative capability, there's no proof of that. Having said that, it was pretty impressive, the pain relief that they reported. And so, yes, having your doctor inject BPC, there may be some benefit to that for somebody with knee osteoarthritis or hip osteoarthritis or shoulder osteoarthritis. Just there aren't studies looking at it specifically for that, especially comparing it to the more conventional treatments like steroid injections, which I have some concerns with, and I've done tons of videos about that. And certainly, would it help you prevent needing a joint replacement? But it may be in combination with something like exosomes or PRP, it may be beneficial. And yeah, maybe as something that you give yourself, in addition to some of those, there may be some benefit. A lot of this, again, as I say, all of this is considered experimental by the FDA. The science is very early on all this. I'm not promoting it. I'm not telling you you should do it. I just want to give you more information out there because, again, so many people have arthritis and so many people are trying to avoid surgery. So it's worth talking to your doctor, talking to your orthopedic surgeon about other options than just surgery or cortisone and see if potentially it's right for you. And if you decide it is, get those treatments from your doctor, from your orthopedic surgeon. Now, I'd love to hear your experience, especially if you've used regenerative treatments of any kind, with your hip arthritis or knee arthritis or shoulder arthritis. Leave those in the comments below. Just understand, if you leave a question in the comments, I can't respond and give you medical advice. So what I try to do is answer your question in a future video. Make sure to subscribe to my channel and click the bell to be notified when I release a new video and when I start a new live stream, including my Ask Dr. Guy live shows. Thanks so much for watching. I look forward to helping you feel, look and perform better than ever.