If you are or were previously an athlete of any kind, you possibly have some injuries and are looking for effective ways to treat them, such as PRP treatment. If you’re sick of taking pain medication and trying to rehab your injuries, then looking to other options that are available to you is an important step to take in order to speed up your recovery and get you back to doing what you love.
If you haven’t heard about PRP treatment, that’s ok. In this post, we are going to discuss what PRP treatment is, how it works and why it can help with recovering from sports injuries and eliminating pain.
PRP therapy is the process of infusing the site of an injury with plasma that has been given a large number of platelets. For those who don’t know, platelets are cells in the blood responsible for the body’s healing process. Whenever we are injured, the body rushes blood containing thousands of these tiny platelets to the site of the injury to help us heal. The problem is that our blood typically only carries so many platelets in it for a given amount of blood in a particular area of the body.
What a doctor does when administering PRP therapy is to take a normal batch of blood, separate all the platelets from it, and then add those platelets back to another batch of blood and plasma. This new blood now has many times more platelets in it and is injected into the site of an injury to magnify the healing process, relieve pain, and promote cell growth.
This increases the body’s default recovery speed, but it can help reduce inflammation, pain, and swelling by slowing the body’s response while it heals. This massive dose of platelets helps the body focus on healing the injury and promoting cell growth so that the damage done can be more fully repaired. This is important for athletes who suffer a drastic injury that may normally take months to heal, and spending on the type of injury may leave them unable to compete the way they used to.
Compared to pain relievers that only hide the pain and traditional therapy, which is much slower and more painful, PRP therapy is much better at getting athletes and ordinary people back to doing what they do best.
PRP therapy has been shown to be successful in helping treat muscle injuries, damage, and tears to ligaments and tendons, as well as bone and joint problems. By being injected directly into the site of the injury, it is possible to concentrate the recovery on just the affected area.
A PRP infusion treatment is incredibly safe because it uses the body’s own cells to help it recover.
In fact, compared to surgical options, PRP therapy is many times safer as it doesn’t run the risk of reacting with other substances in the body, potential mistakes during the surgery, or complications due to other existing health problems.
The entire process for PRP therapy involves the doctor drawing some blood, removing the platelets using a special machine, and then injecting the blood into the site of the injury. This means it is minimally invasive, and there is no need for recovery time like with surgery. Best of all, most people see noticeable results within just a few weeks.
Another benefit of PRP therapy, besides the speed of recovery, is the fact that there is a risk of complications, substance use problems, or other issues that may come with treating an injury with medication. Medication may help to cope with the consequences of the injury, but there is the potential for side effects and even addiction if the medication is used long-term.
Using the body’s own platelets does not pose a risk of complication, and athletes, in particular, have to be careful about the types of things they put into their bodies if they want to continue playing their sport. This makes platelet-rich plasma therapy the better option to use when recovering from an injury.
Sports injuries must be treated appropriately. If you’re ready to look for the safest and most effective way to recover from a sports-related injury, then now is the time to talk to your doctor about whether platelet-rich plasma therapy is the right option for you.
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