Peptides to speed recovery from rotator cuff repair surgery

It's unknown whether peptides would speed healing of a rotator cuff tear at the shoulder without surgery to repair it, but could peptides like BPC-157, Thymosin Beta-4, CJC-1295 with ipramirelin, and others speed recovery from the rotator cuff surgery? My name is Dr. David Geyer, orthopedic surgeon, 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, first, before we get into whether peptides would be helpful, let me at least discuss, if you're not really familiar with rotator cuff tears, what that is. So those are tears of the tendons of four muscles that come off your shoulder blade, and what those tendons do is they help stabilize the shoulder while you reach up overhead, out away from your body, or behind your back. Typically, they either occur just degeneratively over time with age or from overuse. It can be a traumatic injury, one specific event that led to it, but typically it's not. It's repetitive wear over time. Somebody does tons and tons of tennis serves or baseball pitching, that kind of thing, over a very long period of time. And they're typically problems more in people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and older rather than teens and 20s. At least as far as full thickness tears. Now, as that goes, at least as of yet, there's not a lot of definitive evidence that regenerative treatments, whether it's peptides or PRP or stem cells or exosomes, are going to reattach that torn rotator cuff tendon back to where it inserts on the proximal humerus without surgery. Suppose it's possible that that could happen, but we don't have studies that necessarily could show that. And if I expected that that could happen, it would be with more of the PRP or exosomes or stem cells and not so much the peptides. But I get a lot of questions from people, especially adults in their 40s, 50s, and older that have rotator cuff issues, whether that's rotator cuff impingement or partial tears or even complete tears that wonder if peptides would be helpful. And when I say this, as always, I'm not giving you medical advice. I'm not talking to you about peptides in a way to talk you into doing it. They're considered experimental by the FDA, as I've talked about in numerous videos and I've talked in other videos about, if you decide to do peptides, please talk to your doctor and get them through your doctor and not just trying to buy peptides online. It's not really the point of this video. But having said that, my thoughts about peptides would be, yes, it could be potentially helpful with pain. It's hard to know how much it would be helpful for, again, getting that tendon to heal and regenerate and be as strong as it was. Anything inside a joint, I've talked about this with meniscus tears and labral tears. And again, with rotator cuff issues, that would tend to be in the same thing. It's hard to know how much peptides would actually even get in there. Now, it may help with the pain and yeah, maybe it would help strengthen the tendons and ligaments, whether it's BPC or thymus in beta-4 or in the case of something like CJC, strengthen the muscles around the shoulder. So, it could be very beneficial. It's just hard to know how much that leads to healing of the rotator cuff tear, even if it's a partial tear. You could MRI the shoulder a year later or two years later. My guess is that even if the shoulder pain was better, it's hard to know how much improved that rotator cuff tendon would look on MRI. Maybe I'm wrong and I hope I would be. My guess is to get more of a healing, it would be going to your doctor or orthopedic surgeon and having something injected in your shoulder like PRP or exosomes or stem cells. And even that, again, like I said at the beginning of this, it's hard to know definitively how much that would work. The trick with rotator cuff problems as you get into the 50s and 60s is especially when you read these MRIs, there's multiple things going on in terms of sometimes there's a degenerative labral tear. Sometimes there's early arthritis at the AC joint, the joint at the tip of the shoulder. Yes, there may be some internal signal within the supraspinatus or infraspinatus. It could be a partial tear. It could be a complete tear. And with all these different things, it can be hard to know where the pain is coming from. So, I think there could be definitely a role for peptides in the role of shoulder pain, especially as you get older. It's just tricky to know how much relief it's going to get. One of the things that is beneficial potentially about peptides is they're generally very safe. Assuming you take them correctly, you get them from appropriate compounding pharmacies and that you administer them properly. Having said that, it's just hard to predict what kind of benefit you're going to get. But other than the cost, and you may get three months, six months in and be like, I can't really tell if it helped, really not much in the way of side effects. Now, if you do undergo surgery for a rotator cuff repair, it does make sense that peptides would be helpful at helping you recover. There's still a lot of work protecting that repair. The surgeon's probably going to put you in a brace for four, maybe even up to six weeks before you really start doing range of motion. And the peptides I wouldn't expect would have much of a role there. But where I do feel like potentially they could be helpful is getting your muscle strength better, the tendons and ligaments supporting the shoulder a little stronger as you go through recovery. I expect, especially with something that helps muscle growth like CJC 1295, maybe there would be a role in using peptides to recover from the surgery. Still going to be a long process. The repair from rotator cuffs, what I used to tell patients when I was doing surgery is it's about a year before that shoulder really feels like it did before surgery, like it feels like the other surgery or like the other side. But peptides might have a role there in, all right, I'm still going to do physical therapy, do everything my surgeon says, but maybe use the peptides to get the muscle strength better, get the sports specific activities, the exercise specific activities better than you were before or than you would if you didn't do the peptides. That's never really been studied, but at least from a basic science and a theoretical sense, it would make sense peptides would help speed the recovery and improve the recovery. Now, I'd love to hear your experience with your shoulder injury, or maybe your experience with peptides for a shoulder injury. If you've tried it, leave those in the comments below. Just understand, if you leave a question in the comments, I can't offer you medical advice, just like I said at the beginning of this video. But what I try to do is answer that question in future videos. Make sure to subscribe to my channel. Click the bell to be notified when I release a new video and when I start my live streams, including my Ask Dr. Geyer live shows. Thanks so much for watching. I look forward to helping you feel, look and perform better than ever.