WHAT IS PROLOTHERAPY?
Do you suffer from headaches, neck or back pain, sore shoulders elbows wrists or fingers, painful hips or knees, ankles or feet? Prolotherapy is a technique that is used to stabilize sprained or painful joints by strengthening the ligaments that hold the joint together. It can also be used to repair tendon tears, such as in rotator cuff injuries or tennis elbow. It is particularly useful in osteoarthritis as it can help regrow worn cartilage.
Prolotherapy involves injecting certain growth promoting solutions into injured or diseased tendons, ligaments or joints. These solutions either contain growth factors themselves or produce inflammation which causes the release of growth factors which help these tissues to proliferate (re-grow and get stronger) and, therefore, to heal.
The most commonly used solutions are 10 to 25% dextrose (sugar water). For more serious cases people have been using the patient's own blood or his own platelet rich plasma, which is the patient's blood which has been centrifuged and the plasma layer that has the most platelets extracted.
If you want to know more, go to the “how does it work?” page.