I Went to Turkey for Stem Cell Treatment on My Shoulder

Everybody who follows this hip story assumes the hip is the problem.

The hip is fine. The hip has been fine for twenty-one years. In 2024 the thing that nearly stopped me was my shoulder.

2024

I had a SLAP tear — a tear in the labrum, the ring of cartilage that sits around the shoulder socket and helps hold the joint together.

What that meant in practice: my arm hurt every single time I threw. Not a soreness that loosened up. Not something that showed up at pitch seventy. Every throw, all season, at forty and then forty-one years old, still competing.

If you've never pitched through something like that, the part that grinds you down isn't the pain itself. It's the arithmetic you start doing before every outing. How many can I give today. What's this going to cost me tomorrow. Is this the one where it goes.

I'd spent two decades being told what my body couldn't do and proving otherwise on the hip. The shoulder was a genuinely different feeling, because this time it wasn't a prediction. It was happening.

What I did

At the beginning of 2025 I went to Turkey and had stem cell treatment on the shoulder.

I want to be careful here, so let me say plainly what this post is and isn't.

This is not medical advice and I am not a doctor. Stem cell therapy for orthopedic injuries is not settled medicine. The evidence base is thinner than the marketing around it, results vary enormously between people and between clinics, and it is largely not something you can get through standard care in the United States — which is exactly why I was on a plane.

I'm one person. I am not data. What I can tell you is what happened to me.

What happened

It worked.

I've been pitching great since. I'm writing this in September 2026 — well over a year and a half out — and I still feel good. Not managing it, not working around it. Good.

The specific difference: the arithmetic stopped. I don't do the calculation before an outing anymore. I throw, and then I throw again the next time, and my arm is not the thing I'm thinking about.

For a forty-one-year-old who makes his living and his identity out of throwing a baseball, that's not a small improvement in a symptom. It's the difference between still doing this and not.

What I'd actually tell you

If you're where I was — something torn, told your options are surgery or stop, doing the math before every session — here's the honest version.

Nobody can tell you it'll work for you. Mine did. That's a single data point at the far optimistic end, and you should weigh it exactly that lightly. I've written the same caution about how long a hip replacement lasts: a person in front of you is proof something is possible, never proof it's likely.

Ask hard questions about the clinic, not the technology. The variable that actually differs between good and bad outcomes is who is doing it and what exactly they're doing. "Stem cells" describes a category, not a procedure.

Do the work after. I don't think this is separable. I've spent twenty-one years learning that a joint with real strength around it is protected and a joint without it isn't. Whatever I got from the treatment, I got it into a body that had been maintained. I wouldn't expect the same result dropped into a shoulder nobody had prepared.

And talk to your own doctor, who knows your shoulder and has nothing to sell you.

The pattern

Twenty-one years apart, the shape was identical.

At nineteen: a joint that was failing, a consensus that said wait or accept the ceiling, and one person who showed me another road existed.

At forty: a joint that was failing, a set of options I didn't like, and a willingness to go look somewhere outside the standard answer.

I'm not recommending you get on a plane. I'm saying the ceiling people describe to you is an average of everyone, and you are one person — and finding that out usually requires going and asking somebody who hasn't already sorted you.