Jimmy Graham, the five-time Pro Bowl tight end who has played for the New Orleans Saints, the Seattle Seahawks, the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears across more than a decade in the NFL, became in early 2018 the first serving professional American football player to be named publicly in connection with the Wellbeing International Foundation’s programme. He went on the record on his own terms, in his own words, and the video he recorded that winter is the earliest named-athlete testimonial Wellbeing can point to.
Graham’s account of why he came to Wellbeing is straightforward. By the second half of his career he had accumulated the kind of joint wear that is the occupational reality of his position. His knees, in particular, were no longer recovering between games the way they had in his twenties. His back had become a chronic problem. He had tried the standard mix of options available to a professional athlete: physical therapy, anti-inflammatory medication, the routine modifications recommended by team medical staff. Those options were keeping him on the field but were not addressing what he experienced as the underlying issue.
He had also previously tried an earlier-generation cell-based intervention. Graham described, in his own words, having his own stem cells harvested from his bone marrow and injected directly into his knee, with minimal sustained benefit. That experience matters for context. By the time Graham came to Wellbeing, he had already worked his way through one version of regenerative thinking and had found it incomplete. What he was looking for was something biologically different.
Wellbeing’s programme then, as now, was based on drawing biological material from a patient’s own body, preparing it under controlled laboratory conditions to elicit the relevant biological signalling, and reinfusing the resulting preparation intravenously. The specific cell source Wellbeing used in 2018 was different from the source the current research programme is based on. The underlying principle, that the active biology lives in what cells release rather than in the cells themselves, has remained consistent across that evolution.
After working with Wellbeing’s programme Graham described sustained improvement in both the knee and the back. He continued to play through the following NFL seasons, moving from the Seahawks to the Packers and onward. In his own words at the time he expected to continue the programme through the rest of his playing career. Wellbeing does not make claims on Graham’s behalf. The video record from January 2018 stands as Graham’s own statement of his own observed experience.
Several things about Graham’s decision to go on the record then were unusual. NFL communications policies in 2018 did not generally encourage players to discuss specific medical interventions outside of the team’s own medical channels. There was, and to some extent still is, a stigma attached to anything labelled as stem-cell therapy in professional sport, much of which stemmed from the very different work being done by less rigorous operators in unregulated jurisdictions. Graham’s choice to be named, and to describe his experience in detail, was a decision he made on his own.
It also began a small shift in how Wellbeing thought about public communication. For most of the previous decade and a half the work had been almost entirely private, conducted patient by patient, with no public testimony at all. Graham’s video did not represent a strategic decision by Wellbeing to seek athletes for publicity purposes. It represented a decision by Graham, supported by Wellbeing, to describe his own experience in a way that he believed could be useful to other athletes considering similar choices.
The Graham video remains available on request and is one of the earliest artefacts in Wellbeing’s public archive. The four other athletes who have since chosen to be named publicly, Cliff Avril, Jameis Winston, Garratt McNamara and Doug Baldwin, came to that decision in their own time.