Stem Cells, PRP, or Wharton's Jelly? Inside the Conversation With Dr. Eric Blundy

"Regenerative medicine" gets used as a catch-all for anything involving the words "stem cell," which is exactly the problem Dr. Eric Blundy set out to untangle in this conversation with Mark Anthony. A board-certified chiropractic neurologist who is also a licensed RN and nurse practitioner, Blundy runs an integrated practice where chiropractic and medical providers work side by side — and he came to the field first as a patient, not a prescriber.

He blew out his knee playing football in 1997, at 17, in an injury bad enough that surgeons removed roughly 80% of his meniscus and told him a knee replacement was likely someday. Years later, while working as head team chiropractor for Clemson University's track and field program, the same knee gave out again. That sent him looking for alternatives: a stromal vascular fractioning (fat-derived stem cell) procedure in Ohio around 2014 gave him only modest, short-lived relief, and orthopedists began discussing a partial knee replacement. A few months later, a colleague in Boston pointed him toward umbilical cord blood cells instead — and within about a month, he said, he noticed a real difference. More than a decade and, by his account, thousands of patients later — including his own father's knee and both shoulders, and his mother's plantar fasciitis — he's built a practice around trying to separate what actually works from what's being sold.

Not All "Stem Cells" Are the Same Cell

Blundy's central argument is that the phrase "stem cell therapy" hides enormous differences between products. Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) — blood drawn from a patient and spun down to concentrate platelets — contains, in his words, zero differentiated mesenchymal stem cells. He described it as creating a short-term pro-inflammatory "signaling" response that can ease pain temporarily, but one that also introduces red blood cells and platelets that don't fully separate out in a standard spin, which he said can contribute to ongoing breakdown inside a joint over time. In his practice, PRP is mainly reserved for tendons and ligaments outside the joint capsule, not as a standalone joint treatment.

Bone marrow aspirate concentrate (BMAC) and fat-derived cells (from a liposuction procedure called stromal vascular fractioning) fare better in stem cell count but run into a different limit, he said: raw bone marrow yields roughly 0.001% mesenchymal stem cells, concentrated up to only 1–2% of the final product, and fat-derived samples run in a similar low range. More importantly, he said both sources are overwhelmingly "type one" cells — the kind associated with bone, tendon, and ligament — not the "type two" cartilage cells that joints are actually graded on when a doctor calls a knee "arthritic."

That's where Wharton's jelly — connective tissue from donated umbilical cord, distinct from umbilical cord blood — comes in, in his view. It contains a mix of type one, type two, and type three cells, along with growth factors and hyaluronic acid, and no blood component to trigger the breakdown he associates with PRP and BMAC. He also pointed to "Muse cells," a newer category of highly potent stem-like cells, as present in Wharton's jelly "by astronomical amounts" compared with bone marrow or fat — though even there, he said, they make up only about 0.1% of the product. His typical sequence for an arthritic joint is exosomes first, to calm existing inflammation, followed by Wharton's jelly — "removing the sludge out of a swamp," as he put it, before introducing cells meant to support new tissue.

Why He Doesn't Blame the FDA — and Where the Real Danger Is

Blundy pushed back on the idea that the FDA is blocking effective treatment. In his telling, the agency permits regenerative therapies to be offered in the U.S. but prohibits providers from claiming they "treat, cure, or prevent" specific diseases — because that claim would require a clinical trial, which he estimated costs $50–100 million and can't be patented, so no company has strong financial incentive to fund one. That's why he tells his own patients the goal is to "improve function," not treat a diagnosis.

His sharper warnings were reserved for clinics operating outside U.S. regulation, particularly in Mexico. He said three Americans died in the past year after receiving IV infusions of stromal vascular fractioning (fat-derived) stem cells at unregulated clinics — cells large enough, he explained, to lodge in the small capillary beds of the lungs, causing a fatal condition called ARDS. He also described a case involving a three-year-old with autism who was placed under anesthesia at an overseas clinic so cells could be injected near the brain, resulting in hydrocephalus. He raised both cases as evidence that desperate patients and families are vulnerable to marketing that outruns what's actually safe, not as commentary on regenerative medicine itself.

What a Visit to His Practice Actually Looks Like

Blundy described a deliberately unhurried intake process: a first appointment of about 45 minutes covering a full history, an ultrasound of the affected joint (which he said he prefers over MRI because it lets him see the joint move in real time), and, where relevant, X-rays. Rather than treating the same day, he has patients go home and process the recommendation before deciding — a contrast, he said, to clinics that collect payment and inject on the first visit. Out-of-state patients can do an initial consultation over Zoom and send prior imaging before ever traveling in. He said his office has close to 400 five-star reviews and now sees a steady stream of patients who fly in based on word of mouth.

He offered one recent example without identifying the patient: a retiree in the lake community near his office who had been told he needed a total hip replacement and worried he'd never wakeboard or wake surf again. He treated the hip in the winter of 2024; the patient returned for his knee the following summer. By the next season he was back on the water and had taken up foiling, a balance-intensive form of wake surfing, and had referred much of his neighborhood to the practice. Blundy was careful to frame outcomes like this as case-specific — patients who are truly "bone on bone," meaning the joint has lost its range of motion entirely, are, in his experience, unlikely to respond well, and he said surgery is still the right call in those cases. For everyone else, he said treatment sometimes takes more than one round; a patient who goes from a 10-out-of-10 pain level to a 4 and plateaus there may need a second application to improve further.

Where He Thinks the Field Is Headed

Blundy pointed to exosomes — the tiny excretions of stem cells, small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier — as the area he's most watching, citing early interest in systemic inflammatory conditions like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. He was careful to qualify this: "I am not saying this is going to cure, reverse, or treat any of those diseases... but there's a lot of promise in that direction." He also noted a shift in who attends regenerative medicine conferences — a recent one in Tampa drew roughly a third orthopedic surgeons and pain management specialists, up from a field once dominated by chiropractors and nurse practitioners, which he attributed partly to how joint-replacement reimbursement is structured for surgeons versus hospital facility fees. On a personal note, he said he had cord blood and cord tissue banked for his own twins at birth, describing it as a one-time opportunity available only at delivery, at a cost he estimated around $1,000 per child plus an ongoing annual storage fee.