About Hawaii Island Stem Cell Therapy and Regenerative Medicine
Founded by Dr. Christopher Lawinski, MD
Hawaii Island Stem Cell Therapy and Regenerative Medicine is a regenerative medicine practice on the Big Island of Hawaii, founded and led by Dr. Christopher Lawinski, MD, a board-certified integrative and holistic physician.
We offer ultrasound-guided orthobiologic injection for joint, tendon, ligament, and nerve-related concerns, and we have been doing this work on the island since 2015. Our primary clinic is in Pahoa, at the Vitality Integrative Medicine Clinic, and we see patients at satellite clinics in downtown Kailua-Kona and on Maui.
Where This Practice Came From
Dr. Lawinski spent the first years of his Pahoa practice as a family physician, which meant he watched the same conversation happen several hundred times.
Someone would come in with a shoulder or a knee that had stopped working properly. He could manage the pain. He could refer them for rehabilitation. If there was a surgical answer, he could point them toward it. And when there wasn’t one — or when surgery had already been tried and had not been effective — he was left offering what physicians offer once the toolkit is empty. Sympathy, and a prescription.
That is an unsatisfying way for a doctor to spend a career, and over time he stopped accepting it as the natural end of the conversation. Connective tissue heals badly for reasons that are structural and specific. Reasons that specific can be worked with rather than merely worked around.
Finding out whether that was true is what this practice was built on.
Where it was built mattered too. When he began this work in 2015, anyone on this island wanting it had to leave to get it — and leaving means airfare, time away, and recovering somewhere that is not your own home. Making that unnecessary was a deliberate decision, and it is why there are now clinics in Kailua-Kona and on Maui as well as Pahoa.
About Dr. Christopher Lawinski, MD
Dr. Lawinski personally performs the regenerative procedures offered here — every ultrasound-guided injection, and every consultation about whether someone is a candidate for one.
His training was entirely conventional, and rigorous. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Oberlin College and worked as a research assistant at Rockefeller University in New York before earning his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 2006. He completed his Family Medicine residency at the University of Hawaii on Oahu in 2009 and opened his private practice in Pahoa the following year. What came out of that path was not a rejection of conventional medicine but a working sense of where it runs out of options — and a stated intention to expand medical thinking beyond the conventional model.
His first orthobiologic procedure was in 2015. It combined concentrated platelets with cellular material harvested from the patient’s own fat, and it set the pattern for everything since: use the body’s own repair machinery, and put it precisely where the repair has stalled.
An orthobiologic, in his own definition, is “a material that has a biologic activity that stimulates the body’s healing response.” That is the whole premise. It is not a drug that overrides a process, and not a compound that masks a signal.
He trained in the Prolozone technique with Dr. Frank Shallenberger in 2013, and took up ultrasound guidance roughly six years ago. That second change altered the work more than any other. On screen, the needle tip is simply visible — there is no judging its position by feel and surface landmarks, and no wondering afterward whether the material arrived where it was meant to.
Beyond this practice, Dr. Lawinski serves as medical director for a network of Big Island healthcare organizations, including the Hawaii Whole Person Healing Collective and the Vitality Integrative Medicine Clinic, where our Pahoa office is located.
Education and Training
- MD, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, 2006
- Family Medicine Residency, University of Hawaii, 2009
- Oberlin College — Phi Beta Kappa
- Research Assistant, Rockefeller University, New York
- Prolozone technique training with Dr. Frank Shallenberger, 2013
Board Certification
- American Board of Integrative and Holistic Medicine
Professional Memberships
- American College for the Advancement in Medicine (ACAM)
- American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M)
- American Academy of Ozonotherapy
Wondering whether any of this applies to you?
Send your MRI, X-ray, or radiology report. Dr. Lawinski reads it himself, there is no charge, and he will tell you plainly if the answer is no.
Beyond Regenerative Injection
Injection work is not the whole of what happens here.
The practice was built in 2010 around functional, integrative, and holistic medicine, with early emphasis on intravenous nutrients, chelation, detoxification, anti-aging medicine, and bioidentical hormones. That work continues alongside the regenerative side, and the two inform each other. A joint does not go bad in isolation from the metabolic, nutritional, and inflammatory environment around it.
We are also part of the Hawaii Whole Person Healing Collective. In practice this means the conversation tends to run wider than the complaint that brought you in.
What Being a Patient Here Is Like
Care begins with a consultation, not a procedure.
The first appointment exists to work out whether this applies to you. We go through your history, look at prior imaging and records, examine the structures involved, and talk frankly about what this approach can and cannot address in your situation.
That evaluation costs $150, takes about an hour, and you leave with a written plan and a cost estimate. If you decide to proceed, the $150 comes off the price of your first treatment.
Treatment itself is booked separately. These are outpatient procedures and you will not need anyone to collect you afterward. What follows is slower than most people expect: the aim is to restart your body’s own repair process, not to switch off a symptom, so the useful question is how things feel in a few months rather than a few days. Individual results vary, and no outcome can be guaranteed.
Where to Find Us
PRIMARY CLINIC
Pahoa
At the Vitality Integrative Medicine Clinic, 15-3039 Pahoa Village Road, Pahoa, HI 96778. About forty-five minutes southeast of Hilo Airport.
SATELLITE CLINIC
Kailua-Kona
Downtown Kailua-Kona.
SATELLITE CLINIC
Maui
Maui location.