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CHRISTOPHER CAMP: Shoulder and upper extremity care at Mayo Clinic is really sort of a comprehensive package.
ELENA JESLING: It's a collaborative nature between all of the physicians here. So whether that's non-operative, operative.
CHRISTOPHER CAMP: Not only for the common problems, but even for the uncommon problems, we have a lot of different world leaders. And so we're used to dealing with some of the more complex issues. So for the shoulder, there's a lot of new things that are emerging. One of the biggest are the orthobiologics and regenerative medicine.
ELENA JESLING: Regen medicine in general is harvesting the body's potential to heal.
KELECHI OKOROHA: It is drawing the patient's blood, spending it down to get the platelets and healing cells, and injecting it back into that patient's shoulder.
ELENA JESLING: To hopefully help stimulate some healing of the labrum.
CHRISTOPHER CAMP: To help reduce inflammation and improve healing in patients that have some of those milder disease like rotator cuff tendonitis or tendon opothies. The relationship with the Twins has been very beneficial, and I think it gives us a very unique perspective on how to treat patients. Some of the research we're doing now is finding ways that we can take that same technology that's used for elite athletes and make it more practical for the recreational athletes. In addition to that, on the surgical side, we can now do in minimally invasive techniques.
JACOB SELLON: It's moved into the realm of ultrasound guided surgical procedures. One of the great things about that is because you can see right through the skin, and the patients are left with a smaller scar and a much faster recovery.
CHRISTOPHER CAMP: Some of the big focus areas for the shoulder include rotator cuff injuries.
KELECHI OKOROHA: Normally we try to treat this conservatively with physical therapy to strengthen the other muscles of the shoulder, but sometimes patients can have residual pain and weakness. In those patients, we can perform a minimally invasive surgery to reattach that tendon to the bone and return that range of motion and strength.
CHRISTOPHER CAMP: Common things we see in the elbow are medial or lateral epicondylitis, which is also called golfer's elbow or tennis elbow. And with some focused and specific physical therapy, we can generally get folks back to doing all the things that they want to do.
DAVID SOMA: If you're a baseball player, we see more common overuse injuries with the shoulder or the elbow. So understanding what things are OK to do and what are not OK to do is a big part of our treatment plan.
CHRISTOPHER CAMP: If you do start to have a problem or an injury, you want to catch it soon.
ELENA JESLING: For patients to not wait until they're in a 10 out of 10 pain and can't do the things that make them happy. I have patients as young as six and I have patients that are over 100, but they all have some type of recreational activity that they enjoy and our goal is to keep them doing that for as long as possible.