Whether you’re dealing with tendon or ligament damage or you’re recovering from orthopedic surgery, you want to get back to moving freely and without pain as quickly as possible. Your body, however, has its own timeline when it comes to recovery, and healing might not be as fast as you’d like.
That’s where platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy can be so useful — it can speed up the healing process using your body’s own powerful regenerative resources.
The board-certified orthopedic surgeons at New Braunfels Orthopaedic Surgery & Sports Medicine excel in repairing damaged musculoskeletal tissues. While these interventions are effective, we also believe in relying on your own healing powers to finish our work, and that’s where PRP therapy comes in.
Here’s a look at how an extra boost of platelets can speed up your healing and make you more comfortable in the process.
The human body is equipped with a powerful healing system that jumps into action when there’s damage. Called the healing cascade, there are four main stages:
The platelets in your blood essentially kick off the wound healing cascade. Once they stop any bleeding, these cells release growth factors and cytokines to promote regeneration.
With our PRP therapy, we draw a sample of your blood and use a special centrifuge to isolate the platelets. We then mix this concentrate of platelets back in with some plasma and inject the PRP solution directly into your damaged tissues.
This addition of regenerative resources serves to amplify and speed up the healing processes in your body. Not only does PRP call on stem cells and facilitate cell proliferation, the additional platelets can also better control inflammation. As a result, healing can become more comfortable.
As orthopaedic specialists, we deal with musculoskeletal issues of all kinds, and we’ve found that PRP can play a supportive role in many of them, such as:
PRP therapy has been used for decades to ease the surgery recovery process. One meta analysis of the use of PRP therapy for post-surgical wound healing concluded that, “PRP can heal surgical wounds. Also, PRP could be useful in reducing wound infection, pain, hypertrophic scar, and hematoma.”
Another key advantage of PRP therapy is that the treatment is generally quite safe because we’re using your own cells, so your body readily accepts the injections.
If you’d like to explore whether PRP therapy can help with your recovery process so you can heal faster, we invite you to contact our office in New Braunfels, Texas, by calling 830-341-1386. You can also request an appointment online.
