Scott Greenberg, MD

My name is Scott Greenberg, MD, and I am a specialist in the regenerative medicine/stem cell field. But it didn’t start that way….

When I was younger, all I wanted to do in life was to be a retinal surgeon, as my grandmother had macular degeneration. Being my altruistic self, I wanted to discover a cure for blindness and help someone who I loved so dearly. This was my childhood dream, but it all changed at age 18 when I was struck by a drunk driver. I was fortunate enough to walk away from the collision, coming just feet from death, but I would spend the next 10 years suffering from this injury.

Little was known about post-concussion syndrome at that time — being the summer of 1989 — but I saw orthopedic surgeons and did physical therapy for 9 months during my second year in college, and nothing seemed to help. I suffered from chronic headaches but no one knew why.

My concentration became an issue. I knew I was intelligent, but learning the material needed to get into medical school became increasingly difficult. Nevertheless, I persevered; working extra hard, I was accepted into medical school in Philadelphia.

Unfortunately my headaches began to worsen while I was working around the clock to keep up with a vigorous schedule. The pain felt like someone was drilling over my right eye. It became increasingly difficult to stay in school; I would go to the doctor at student health and tell her what was happening with me, but they offered no solution as the MRI of my brain was essentially normal. She offered me pain medication, but this answer did not sit right with me — I wanted to find out what the root cause of this problem was. I thought the purpose of being a doctor was to find a problem and then to fix it, and clearly this was not happening in my case.

During my third year of medical school, my dreams of being a retinal surgeon were crushed, as during my ophthalmology rotation I couldn’t even see through the ophthalmoscope into the back of the patients’ eyes… but again no one knew why.

Yet, this rejection was only a redirection. I finished medical school and entered a family medicine residency. I completed my residency while visiting more neurologists and having more MRIs, but to no avail.

Ten years after my accident, now as a practicing physician, I had heard that there was a technique to use your immune system to heal damaged tissue, used by former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop in the 1960s to heal his chronic lower back pain. Since these were the days when the internet was in its infancy, I needed to pull actual research papers on the technique and find a doctor who could teach me its principles of administration. This technique, known as prolotherapy, interested me because it allowed me to do what I thought a doctor should do — solve a patient’s problem. But at the time I did not know it would solve my own.

Having spent another restless night awakened with that drill-like feeling in my head, I decided to investigate my body. I asked myself, what if the pain in my head and temple was not from my head, but was referred from my neck? As my headaches were all right sided, I examined the joints of my neck and head and found the right side to be tender, and the left not to be…

In a brazen move, I drove to my office, devised a formula to stimulate my immune system full of dextrose, B vitamins and lidocaine, and started to inject the joints of my upper cervical spine and in the base of my skull. After awakening that next morning I felt drowsy from not having a full night of sleep, but something had felt different for the first time in 10 years.

My pain would come and go, but eventually after a few months of treatment, my years of misery ended and I began a quest to help others who suffered from chronic pain.

Over the past 23 years I have dedicated my life to treating people who suffer from chronic pain and post-concussion syndrome. Since this time, we have developed more advanced treatments using platelet-rich plasma (PRP) and autologous (from the patient) stem cells to further help relieve the effects of nerve damage and other painful conditions. Now, we have helped anyone from pro and Olympic athletes to those who have suffered for over 50 years of their life in pain. And, to come full circle, Dr. Koop eventually became my patient when his back began to hurt again, some 40 years after his initial regenerative treatment.

I feel so fortunate to have solved my own problems and to have helped so many others in my 23 year career in medicine. I now share my story in the interest of helping others end their suffering.