It's really cool technology. I can't wait to see where it goes in the next few years!
Speaking anecdotally, I've had 4 wrist surgeries over the past 5 years (coming up on my fifth next week). I've never once heard of the stem-cell injection treatment, despite having 3 surgeons and 9+ other consulting doctors. Did your doctor give you any papers to describe the procedures that made his knee "all better now"?
That's because stem cell therapy is not generally approved for use yet. It is still in the research stage. There was one company that did it for a while in Colorado, but nobody could really figure out whether they were legit or a scam, and the FDA ended up putting a halt on their stem cell injections.
http://www.geistlich-pharma.com/en/orthopaedic/therapeutic-a...
The technology isn't "hard" per say, nor is it patented. You can find doctors willing to do "prolotherapy" procedures for you today.
The problem arises with trying to study it. I assume that they do phase 1 trials for therapies like this, which means that they have to find healthy individuals willing to get bone marrow removed, and then get that injected into joint spaces. Not many people want to sign up for that study, unfortunately.
I still do them, and try to do them with proper form, but it's always in the back of my mind that I might hurt my back due to the load.
Could you give me more detail on how you hurt your back? How heavy of a load was it? Was it during a deadlift?
The key to deadlifts is good form and not letting your back arch at all. I would recommend getting an expert trainer or an advanced lifter to help you practice your form if you are worried about it. It's worth the time to prevent an injury.
Bench press at any significant weight just flat-out isn't safe without a spotter.
You should always use good form and always have respect for the weights (don't get cocky), but maybe have a bit more respect for the squat :P
DLs are complicated, but you'll see a lot more uniformity when you take your advice from people who are strong themselves.
When I ran track in college, I somehow developed focal cartilage defects in both knees. This brought my running career to a halt and made walking extremely painful for about a year. In an attempt to fix this, I had a type of surgery known as the OATS procedure performed. This is where the surgeon takes a plug of undamaged articular cartilage from a low load bearing region of the knee and swaps it with the damaged cartilage. Walking is mostly pain-free for me now, but it still hurts too much if I attempt to run.
As though one cartilage injury weren't enough, I somewhat stupidly decided to take up weight lifting after I couldn't run anymore and attempted to set down a barbell that was way too heavy for me. In doing so, I triggered a mild lower lumbar disc herniation. So now I have two permanent injuries. Luckily, neither injury is very severe, so some days I don't even notice the pain while other days it approaches mildly annoying "background noise".
These types of cartilage injuries are common, and arthritis is even more common. But the issue with cartilage is that once it's damaged, it doesn't heal on its own because cartilage has no vascular system. You can break all the bones you want and eventually they will heal, but damaged hyaline cartilage will not. The best that your body can do is to produce "low-quality" fibrocartilage in place of the damaged hyaline cartilage.
Fortunately, there's been a lot of research over the last decade on using mesenchymal stem cells (taken from your own bone marrow) to regrow true hyaline cartilage as opposed to fibrocartilage. The stem cells have actually been shown to differentiate into hyaline cartilage. For me, this has the potential to permanently alleviate both knee and back pain. Moving this research away from clinical trials seems to be taking forever for some reason though...