Prolotherapy Speeds Healing of Chronic Pain
Stimulates Healing for Injured Tendons, Ligaments
Feb 15, 2009
Prolotherapy is an orthopedic procedure that stimulates the body’s natural healing processes to strengthen joints weakened by trauma or injury.
A tendon attaches muscle to bone and involves movement of the joint. A ligament is the structural “rubber band” that connects two bones and is involved in the stability of joints. A strain is a stretched or injured tendon. A sprain is a stretched or injured ligament. Tendons and ligaments often are injured in over-use injuries, accidents, sports injuries and other falls, sprawls, sprains and strains. Once these structures are injured, the immune system is stimulated to repair the injured area.
Ligaments and tendons are also the victims of aging, as many baby boomers are discovering.
Cartilage contains no sensory nerve endings, so a cartilage cannot be the source of pain. If there is cartilage damage, the ligaments are typically the structures that hurt.
Sources of Chronic Pain: Injured Ligaments, Tendons
Because tendons and ligaments generally have a poor blood supply, incomplete healing is common after injury, resulting in these normally taut, strong bands of fibrous or connective tissue becoming relaxed, weakened and the source of chronic pain and weakness. To further complicate this, ligaments also have many nerve endings, so a person will feel pain at the areas where the ligaments are damaged or loose.
Ligaments are weakest where they attach to bone, the fibro-osseous junction. The periosteum (covering of the bone) is the most sensitive area to pain, followed by the ligaments, tendons, fascia (the connective tissue that surrounds muscle) and, finally, muscle.
Prolotherapy Can Speed Healing, Decrease Pain
This is where the prolotherapy injections occur, and eliminate the chronic pain of many conditions, including arthritis, low-back pain, degenerative disc disease, cartilage injury and sports injuries.
Surgical treatment and other traditional methods for ligament wear-and-tear are not fully successful and involve highly invasive treatment techniques. Prolotherapy, on the other hand, is less invasive. The scientific technique, based on anecdotal success rates, emphasizes the improvement of joints, ligaments and tendons healed by promoting the dysfunctional area to heal itself.
Prolotherapy works by exactly the same process that the human body naturally uses to stimulate the body’s healing system — a process called inflammation. The technique involves the injection of a nonsteroidal anesthetic solution (typically water and glucose or dextrose) that causes an inflammatory response that activates the healing process. The growth of new ligament and tendon tissue is then stimulatesd.
After prolotherapy treatments, the ligaments and tendons appear much the same as normal tissues, except that they are thicker, stronger and contain fibers of varying thickness, testifying to the new and ongoing creation of tissue. The ligament and tendon tissue that forms as a result of prolotherapy is thicker and stronger than normal tissue, up to 40% stronger in some cases.
Prolotherapy Mimics Nature
“In general, in pain, we think of scarring as bad,” said Dr. Christopher Chisholm, an anesthesiologist at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, Calif. “In prolotherapy, we think of scarring as good.”
“All we are doing is copying nature,” said Dr. Marc Darrow, a prolotherapist and assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It can help rejuvenate the body and return it to the pre-injury, pre-pain state.”
 |
