Suffer from sprains, strains or arthritis pain? Here’s why you should consider prolotherapy.
What is Prolotherapy?
Prolotherapy, which is short for “proliferative therapy,” is a sophisticated, but minimally invasive, method of Regenerative Injection Therapy where natural solutions, such as high concentration dextrose, are delivered to areas of injury to restart and maximize the body’s own injury-healing processes. This healing technique is most often applied to painful and injured joints, ligaments, and tendons to encourage the restoration of normal, healthy tissue. Prolotherapy can help people to postpone and even eliminate the need for surgery in some cases such as rotator cuff surgery or joint replacements, including hip and knee replacement.
How does it work?
Prolotherapy stimulates your body’s own internal healing response in any joint, ligament, or tendon. The healing response itself is triggered when the prolotherapy solution – a plant-based sugar that is not a synthetic chemical foreign to the body – causes the injured tissue to release specific growth factors that attract tissue-healing cells to the injury site.
Health Benefits
Prolotherapy has been in use since the 1930’s, and has proven to be a safe and time-tested treatment for virtually every joint area of the body from head to toe. The amount of clinical research on prolotherapy has increased substantially over the last several years, and dozens of studies have demonstrated its effectiveness in treating a myriad of painful problems. Prolotherapy can be successful in healing the following conditions:
• TMJ (jaw) pain
• neck pain and whiplash injuries
• rotator cuff injuries
• shoulder instability and labral tears
• tennis elbow (lateral epidondylosis)
• golfer’s elbow (medial epicondylosis)
• wrist sprains and tendinitis
• hand and finger arthritis
• mid-back and rib pain
• low back pain
• sacroiliac dysfunction (which often causes sciatica and pain radiating down the leg)
• groin strains
• hip arthritis and bursitis
• hamstring injuries
• arthritis of the knee
• knee tendon, ligament and meniscus injuries
• ankle sprains
• Achilles tendon injuries
• plantar fasciitis
• toe sprains and arthritis
Following prolotherapy, many patients are able to return to their everyday activities with less pain, more mobility, and greater endurance.
Recuperation from a prolotherapy session is generally quick. In most cases, the patient is advised to take it easy for about two to three days following treatment before returning to normal activity levels.
Choosing your prolotherapy provider
The Kaplan Center is truly an integrative medical clinic in that we can provide a service like prolotherapy in the context of getting the person back to peak overall health. Many other practitioners of prolotherapy are focused on treating only the musculoskeletal structure, without addressing other important issues such as diet, sleep, hormone balance, and mental/emotional well-being. We want the whole person to be optimally healthy, so we offer additional therapies such as acupuncture, herbal remedies, in-house physical and massage therapy, and nutritional and/or psychological counseling. Prolotherapy can also be offered in a tailored combination with other therapies such as osteopathic manual treatment.
The beauty of prolotherapy is that it heals injury, and potentially provides a long-term benefit as compared to other treatments which only cover up the pain temporarily.
