Bartolo Colon underwent stem-cell therapy to repair his elbow and rotator cuff:

A doctor in Florida would like to take some of the credit. Joseph R. Purita, an orthopedic surgeon who runs a regenerative medicine clinic in Boca Raton, said he and a team of Dominican doctors that he led treated Colon in April 2010. Purita said he employed what he regards as one of his more pioneering techniques: he used fat and bone marrow stem cells from Colon, injecting them back into Colon’s elbow and shoulder to help repair ligament damage and a torn rotator cuff.

Purita said he flew to the Dominican Republic and performed the procedures for free, doing it at the behest of a medical technology company based in Massachusetts that he has done business with for several years. Purita, who has used human growth hormone in such treatments, said in an interview that that he had not done so in Colon’s case. The use of human growth hormone is banned by baseball.

“This is not hocus-pocus,” Purita said in an interview here. “This is the future of sports medicine, in particular. Here it is that I got a guy back playing baseball and throwing pitches at 95 miles an hour.”

The article seems too focuses on whether the doctor used HGH. If this actually worked, if he used Bartolo’s own cells to regenerate an injured part of his body, this is huge. Maybe pitchers won’t need Tommy John surgery anymore, just an injection and time. That has to be better for everyone.

I find it interesting that if a player undergoes surgery to fix an injury, no one considers it performance enhancing, but if you inject something to do the same thing, people get in a tizzy.