Many mild sports injuries can be successfully treated conservatively with R.I.C.E., or rest, ice, compression, and elevation. More severe sports injuries, on the other hand, may require surgery. What about sports injuries that don’t require surgery, but simply aren’t getting better quickly enough with conservative treatments?

Treating injuries to structures such as tendons, ligaments, and joint cartilage is difficult because they lack a robust blood supply, unlike muscles and bones. Because of this, the factors in your blood that promote healing are significantly fewer and far between. But a growing area of medicine is seeking to solve this problem.

If you follow professional sports, chances are you’ve heard of some big names who have utilized a therapy called regenerative medicine in some way, shape, or form to recover from a sports injury quickly, and without surgery. From Tiger Woods to Rafael Nadal, to Peyton Manning, to the late, great Kobe Bryant, regenerative medicine has been and continues to be used to treat a variety of sports injuries in elite athletes.

But now, regenerative medicine therapies are readily available to everyday people who value a healthy and active lifestyle, like you! Depending on your specific injury, and the urgency to get back to your normal level of physical activity, regenerative medicine could be the difference in allowing you to participate in the next competition, the next marathon, or the next hike that you’ve been preparing months for.

How does it work? The key is in your own blood. At Ascension Pain Specialists, we utilize platelet-rich plasma, or PRP, to augment the healing process for various sports injuries. By taking your blood and spinning it down with a centrifuge, we separate the blood into layers containing different cell types and molecules. Plasma is the layer that contains platelets and growth factors that, when injected directly into muscles, tendons, ligaments, and joints, can help repair damage to these structures quicker than R.I.C.E. alone.

Sports injuries with evidence-based research to support treatment with PRP injections include rotator cuff tears, tennis elbow, golfer’s elbow, hamstring strain, and medial collateral ligament (MCL) sprains. Be careful of people who claim that PRP injections can help treat other pain conditions such as degenerative disc disease of the neck and back, or bone-on-bone arthritis – there is no evidence to support PRP injections for these problems.

At Ascension Pain Specialists, we pride ourselves on providing treatments that are transparent and ethical. Because regenerative medicine is considered experimental by health insurance companies, PRP injections must be paid for out of pocket. However, we offer PRP injections at highly competitive rates and will work with you to obtain this cutting-edge therapy if it is right for you.

Call Ascension Pain Specialists at 626-514-1188, or email us at info@ascensionpain.com to schedule a regenerative medicine consultation today!