If you’re among the 20% of Americans struggling with chronic pain, you understand the negative impact it can have on your life. From making it difficult to meet family obligations to affecting your ability to perform at work, chronic pain makes nearly everything miserable.
While many treatments exist to ease chronic pain, from medications to massage to surgery, there’s one minimally invasive therapy you may not have tried — prolotherapy. At LA Pain Doctor, with six locations across Louisiana, our pain specialists use prolotherapy to effectively manage pain stemming from damaged ligaments and tendons in many areas of the body.
Take a moment to learn what you need to know about prolotherapy and whether it’s the right treatment option for you.
Prolotherapy gets its name from the word proliferative, which means to quickly grow new cells or tissues. This minimally invasive treatment involves injecting an all-natural solution into the soft tissues in the area affected by pain. The solution stimulates your natural healing and eases discomfort.
The prolotherapy solution acts as a mild irritant and triggers a small wound in the area with chronic pain. This “smart injury” causes inflammation, triggering your body’s natural healing process and growing new tissue growth as it heals.
The natural substances in prolotherapy vary, and your LA Pain Doctor selects the solution best suited to match your needs. Some of the most common ingredients include dextrose, a simple sugar, saline, stem cells, platelet-rich plasma (PRP), and sarapin.
Simply put, prolotherapy is an amazing innovation in regenerative medicine and pain treatment.
Many chronic pain treatments, like muscle relaxers and pain medication, ease the discomfort of chronic pain for a short while. But they don’t address the underlying cause and they bring unwanted and unpleasant side effects and risks.
Prolotherapy gets to the root of your pain by stimulating new tissue growth and permanently strengthening the damaged soft tissues that triggered your chronic pain. Recent research supports prolotherapy as an effective treatment in easing chronic pain. Plus, this treatment doesn’t bring the risks and side effects associated with drugs or surgery.
At LA Pain Doctor, we’ve used prolotherapy to treat many different conditions that cause chronic pain, including:
In general, prolotherapy works best as a piece in your comprehensive chronic pain treatment plan. Your LA Pain Doctor provider evaluates your unique condition and develops a personalized, comprehensive plan so you get the best pain relief possible.
During your prolotherapy treatment, your provider applies a topical anesthetic to help keep you comfortable. Your LA Pain Doctor team member then uses real-time imaging to inject the prolotherapy solution into the correct areas to encourage new growth that helps restore your tissues and ease your pain.
Since prolotherapy uses your body’s natural healing, multiple courses of treatment are common. Your provider reviews how many sessions you’ll need based on your condition. Outpatient treatment sessions are usually short and recovery time is brief, with most patients resuming their usual activities the same day.
If you’re ready to say goodbye to chronic pain, schedule an appointment online or over the phone with a provider at LA Pain Doctor at one of our six locations across Louisiana.
