Tired of Being Sidelined by a Persistent Overuse Injury? Try PRP Therapy

Physical activity is very important for our bodies. The energy we exert from performing physical tasks helps us to keep a healthy weight, reduces our risks of disease, and can even make us feel better emotionally. It’s also good for muscles, bones, and skeletal tissue that help us do basic things like walking, running, swimming, and other stuff we take for granted. 

However, our muscles and joints can get damaged because of movements we repeat over and over, leading to things like overuse injuries.

Overuse injuries can prevent you from the very activities you enjoy, and can take time to heal. There are many ways to treat these injuries, but platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy is an all-natural way to simulate healing in affected areas while using your own blood to do the job. 

To better understand how PRP therapy can help, let’s explore what overuse injuries do to the body, how this treatment manages the damage, and what it’s like to receive it.

Residents of the Fort Worth, Texas area looking for ways to relieve the pain of overuse injuries or other muscle and joint problems can find help with Dr. Joseph Daniels and his dedicated medical team at Southwest Orthopedic Associates.

Defining overuse injuries

Also known as repetitive strain injury, this is the term for the damage done to parts of your body resulting from continuously performing the same motions over and over, leading to strain and other harm. 

Overuse injuries are common in work and home environments, as well as athletic competition, when you’re doing the same things repeatedly, such as sitting in the same position, typing, lifting objects, running, jumping, and bending over. 

These injuries are very common in your shoulders, arms, elbows, wrists, fingers, thumbs, and knees, causing conditions like carpal tunnel syndrome, tendonitis, bursitis, shin splints, tennis elbow, and many types of strains and sprains.

How PRP therapy helps

The platelets in your blood are produced in your bone marrow and are responsible for preventing blood loss, performing the process of clotting to help close an injury when bleeding starts. 

Platelets’ function is essential for both wounds to heal and surgeries to work without severe risk to the body, and PRP therapy uses these properties to help by creating an intense amount of platelets in a dose of blood plasma to stimulate faster healing. Cytokines are a chemical in your platelets that signal cells to repair injuries and reduce inflammation, and this method uses this to treat overuse injuries. 

PRP therapy is administered by way of injection of your own blood plasma after it goes through a centrifuge to separate platelets from everything else, concentrating a large amount of it to help your body heal.

What to expect from the process 

As the treatment itself suggests, we gather your blood plasma (generally from your arm) and place it in a centrifuge. 

Once the platelet-rich plasma is gathered from the other blood cells, it is then injected into the injury. Anesthetics are used to help with any discomfort from either the injection to draw the blood or the one used to insert the platelets. 

The entire process can take about a half hour, and because it’s being taken from your body, the risks of side effects are minimal.

Overuse injuries can be frustrating, but treatments like PRP therapy can help you get things back to normal and move forward free of pain and inflammation. If you’re ready to see the benefits of this therapy, make an appointment with Dr. Daniels and Southwest Orthopedic Associates today.