Although musculoskeletal disorders are basically nonlethal, their high prevalence and relative ease of performing clinical trials have facilitated the clinical application of stem cells in this field. However, few reliable clinical studies have been published, despite the plethora of in vitro and preclinical studies in stem cell research for regenerative medicine in the musculoskeletal system. While randomised controlled clinical trials undoubtedly would produce the most reliable data, they are difficult to conduct because of high cost related to performing those studies. Therefore, most clinical data comes from case reports/cohort outcome studies which have problems in reproducibility and should be interpreted with caution.