A fitness expert’s long-used formula, now validated by orthopedic surgeons, is helping patients heal faster, with stronger tendons and fewer complications.
NEW ORLEANS — People with a torn rotator cuff have weeks, even months, of healing and rehab after shoulder repair surgery. But now doctors have validated supplements that a well-known fitness expert has used for years to help his professional athletes recover and stay in the game.
For decades, Fitness Expert Mackie Shilstone has trained some of the greatest pro athletes. Even as he got older, he trains with them. So tennis great Serena Williams asked him this.
“And we would run 72 sprints of anywhere from 10 to 50 yards, and she says, ‘How do you recover so quick?’ It was my nutrition,” Shilstone said.
Since the early 1980s, Shilstone had been combing through nutritional scientific studies on replacing, repairing and regenerating. He came up with a supplement formula and, overtime, shared it with one of the top shoulder surgeons in the world, Tulane Chair of Orthopedic Surgery Dr. Buddy Savoie.
“So, you can see how thick it is. It actually measured about eight millimeters from here to here. Normal is six millimeters,” said Dr. Savoie, pointing to the ultrasound image of a healed tendon of a patient who’s taking the supplements.
Meanwhile, Dr. Savoie and one of his colleagues also noticed something else in patients, young and old.
“We started drawing some blood work and found on the, basically two-thirds to 70% of all of our people, adults, kids, everybody’s coming in and they are vitamin D deficient,” said Dr. Savoie.
Shilstone had been telling Dr. Savoie how well it helped his international professional athletes and members of an elite department of the military recover. But it wasn’t until Dr. Savoie went through a shoulder injury and surgery that he tried Mackie’s protocol and noticed faster healing and recovery.
Tulane Orthopedics started testing the difference in shoulder repair patients — those who took the Mackie formula along with vitamin D before and after surgery.
Now there is newly published data in the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) that it works.
There is a difference in healing time.
“So, they heal, it probably cuts it in half, minimum. The tendon at six weeks is usually at least a millimeter thicker when you’re taking the supplements than when you’re not, and our crosslinking is phenomenally better,” said Dr. Savoie.
Taking the supplements a week before surgery and at least six weeks after showed a difference in patients from children to senior citizens. There was less muscle loss and better, quicker healing, with fewer complications.
Shilstone says this supplement combination is also good for people who work out.
Dr. Savoie said people also reported feeling better, with more energy and better fingernails.
