If you’re grappling with an injury or musculoskeletal condition that requires surgery, the good news is that you’re on the road to better, pain-free function. The potential bad news is that this road to recovery may get slightly worse before it gets better as your body heals from both the original damage and the repair.
Thanks to new regenerative medicine that taps and redirects the human body’s own powerful healing resources, recovery has become a lot smoother and faster. We’ve been exploring the benefits of regenerative medicine, and we’ve had great success with platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy. Using PRP injections, we’re helping our patients get back to healthy, active lives more quickly after surgery.
Read on to learn more about how PRP injections can speed your surgical recovery.
The Limited Power of Platelets
Although the platelets in your blood are most often associated with clotting, they also contain hundreds of proteins, or growth factors, that help your body heal by promoting regeneration and repair in your tissue. On their own, they make the rounds throughout your body and set up camp in areas where you need extra healing resources. The system works quite well, but it can only handle so much, and it works at its own pace.
If you have an injury or degenerative condition that requires surgical repair, it’s likely that you had to turn to surgery because your body was overwhelmed by the damage and unable to heal itself on its own. Contributing to the problems your overtaxed healing resources are already facing is the surgical procedure itself. Even with minimally invasive techniques, surgery is still surgery, and your body registers the intervention as another trauma it has to heal.
The bottom line is that your natural platelet levels can only do so much and require more time than you’d perhaps like, which is where platelet-rich plasma therapy comes in
Harnessing The Platelet Power
Recognizing the critical role your platelets play in healing, we’ve found a way to harness and redirect them to where you need them most. With PRP therapy, we draw a small amount of your own blood and separate the platelets in a special centrifuge. Once isolated, we mix them back in with your plasma and inject the resulting concentrate into your surgical area to ramp up the resources.
This therapy works in two ways: First, we increase the platelet levels in the immediate area, which release growth factors that reduce inflammation and begin to work on tissue repair and regeneration. The second piece to this recovery puzzle is when your body responds in kind and sends in more platelets. Between the platelets, we introduce and your body’s response, you’re rewarded with faster healing, allowing you to get back to your life more quickly.
Even though PRP is fast becoming a go-to tool for orthopedic surgeons, we can use PRP therapy anytime you have a surgery, even to help your surgical incision heal more quickly. The reason it’s so successful in orthopedic applications is that the PRP injections work double-time, helping to heal both the surgical damage, as well as the underlying musculoskeletal problem.
If you’d like to learn more about the power of platelet-rich plasma injections, especially after surgery, please give us a call, or use the online scheduling tool found on this website to book an appointment.
Precision Pain Care and Rehabilitation has four convenient locations in Richmond Hill – Queens and New Hyde Park, Lindenhurst, and Valley Stream – Long Island. Call the Queens office at (718) 215-1888, or (516) 419-4480 for the Long Island offices, to arrange an appointment with our Interventional Pain Management Specialist, Dr. Jeffrey Chacko.
