There are many newer, kind of exciting treatments in musculoskeletal medicine and sports medicine.

One that I do frequently here at Golden State Orthopedics & Spine is diagnostic ultrasound. In some situations, it’s even better than MRI for looking at tendon and musculoskeletal injuries. And it’s also real, real helpful for doing injections with ultrasound as guidance so we can see exactly where we are putting a needle to do an injection.

There are also newer treatments for chronic tendon injuries and one of them is platelet treatment or platelet-rich plasma. And the whole theory behind that is we’re using a patient’s own platelets to heal their tissue from the inside out. So, we take their platelets and inject them into an abnormal tendon or scarred tendon, and the body actually heals the tendon with the growth factors from the platelets.

There are also some newer procedures using ultrasound at specific frequencies to break up scar tissue within the tendon and cause it to heal itself.

Another area of interest of mine is certainly concussion. And there are a lot of different kind of testing procedures for concussion, including neurocognitive testing on the computer, balance testing, and other specialized testing that really helps us make the diagnosis and manage concussion more effectively.