Stem cell therapy compared with cortisone, PRP and surgery

How to read the table

Pick the joint or region you are dealing with and the table shows only the options that genuinely apply to it. Hyaluronic acid appears for the knee and not the shoulder because that is where it is used. Fusion appears for the back and not the knee. Filtering by the actual clinical question keeps the comparison honest, where one table listing every intervention for every body part would not be.

Costs are per course, not per appointment, and each cell says what it covers. Recovery is the time to a normal day rather than to full sport, which is a longer and much more variable number for every surgical row.

Where the figures come from, and where they do not

Every cost on this page is indicative: a broad United States self-pay range from our own reference table, carrying the date it was last reviewed. It is an order of magnitude for comparing options, not a quote, and it is not the output of a price survey.

It would be neater to price the regenerative rows from what clinics in this directory publish, and we do not, for a reason worth stating. A clinic's published range covers everything that clinic charges for, so filtering it by treatment tells you what clinics offering PRP charge in general, not what PRP costs. Built into a table like this it produces a PRP figure several times the real one, sitting directly above an identical stem cell figure, because they are the same clinics. A wrong number in the exact column you are using to tell the options apart is worse than an honest estimate. For pricing that does come from listings on this site, the cost calculator is the tool, and it shows how many clinics stand behind every band.

The caveat that matters most on any list price: what an insured patient actually pays has almost no relationship to it, and the same procedure varies several fold between facilities in the same city. Use these figures to see the shape of the difference between options, then get a real quote for your own situation.

Why there is no best option column

Because the columns are not comparable in the same way. Cost compares cleanly. Recovery compares cleanly. Likelihood of benefit does not, and pretending otherwise would be the most misleading thing this page could do. Joint replacement is tracked by national registries that follow implants for decades. Corticosteroid injection has been through large randomised trials. Most regenerative protocols rest on small studies and observational series, and are not approved by the FDA or the EMA for the conditions they are marketed for. Putting four stars against three in an effectiveness column would flatten that difference into something that looks like a score, so the evidence column is a sentence instead and the conclusion is yours to draw.

The comparison people usually skip

Conservative care sits at the top of the table for a reason, and it is the row most people scroll past. Structured exercise and load management is what clinical guidelines recommend first for osteoarthritis, on consistent trial evidence, and it is the cheapest option by a wide margin. It is also unglamorous, slow and requires you to do something several times a week for months, which is why it loses to an injection in most people's decision making long before the evidence does.

That is not an argument against considering anything else. It is an argument for knowing what you are comparing against, because a treatment that beats doing nothing is not the same as a treatment that beats the option your physiotherapist already offered you.