Platelet-Rich Plasma (PRP)
Accelerate Healing Using Your Own Platelets
What Is PRP?
Platelet-Rich Plasma (PRP) injections use your body’s own natural growth factors derived from the platelets in your blood to stimulate healing of painful arthritic joints and connective tissues, helping you return to a healthy, pain-free, and active lifestyle. PRP treatment often assists in avoiding the risks, costs, and downsides of surgery. Many people experience significant long-term pain and functional improvement after a course of PRP treatment.
The Science of PRP
Platelet-Rich Plasma (PRP) Therapy has been used clinically since the 1990s to stimulate tissue repair and improve outcomes in wound care, oral surgery, hair restoration, and musculoskeletal healing.
The normal, natural healing cascade that we experience after daily activity is initiated by bleeding from microscopic tissue tears. This bleeding activates platelets, which contain abundant healing proteins—such as growth factors and cytokines—that direct and coordinate the disinfection, cleanup, and regeneration of injured or degenerative tissue.
PRP injection therapy simulates this natural healing process by saturating your injured and degenerative tissue with your own concentrated platelets to dramatically enhance tissue repair. It provides a vigorous “kick start” to the regenerative process.
At CHARM, your Platelet-Rich Plasma is processed using state-of-the-art techniques to purify and quantify your platelet count, optimizing your healing response.
How Does Platelet-Rich Plasma (PRP) Therapy Work?
Most chronically painful musculoskeletal injuries and degenerative joint conditions, including arthritis, are associated with incomplete connective tissue healing and the accumulation of micro-injuries. The normal, natural healing cascade we experience after daily activity is initiated by bleeding from microscopic tissue tears, activating platelets containing numerous proteins, including growth factors and cytokines. These proteins direct and coordinate the clean-up and regeneration of injured and degenerative tissue. PRP injection therapy simulates the natural healing process by flooding your injured and degenerative tissue with concentrated platelets to dramatically enhance tissue repair. Essentially, PRP injections provide a vigorous “kick start” to your body’s natural regenerative process.
Benefits of Treatment with PRP
- Stimulates your body’s natural healing response to injured ligaments, tendons, cartilage
- Contains an abundance of beneficial growth factors
- Provides a vigorous “kick-start” to the repair process
- Used around the world by professional athletes
- Minimal downtime compared to surgery
- PRP injections are a minimally invasive effective technique with decades of clinical studies
FAQ'S
Many injuries to joints, ligaments, and tendons improve and heal with localized injections of PRP directly into the damaged areas. Commonly treated structures include meniscus and ACL tears of the knee, rotator cuff tendon and labral tears of the shoulder, tendon and labral tears of the hip, elbow tendon tears, arthritis and joint instability and pain in the spine, finger and thumb pain, and foot and ankle pain from ankle sprain, plantar fasciitis, and Achilles tendon injuries.
PRP has been studied extensively for over 30 years with thousands of published articles and over 165 published randomized-controlled trials proving safety and effectiveness with most joints and structures throughout the body. Regenerative Medicine using PRP injection treatment has become more accepted in the medical community as the published research continues to expand.
The PRP procedure takes about two hours in the CHARM clinic, including the blood draw, the in-house laboratory processing, and the image-guided placement of your PRP into identified ligament and tendon injury or degenerative joints. It is common to be sore for 2-5 days after the procedure. We encourage regular activity as tolerated after the treatment in most cases. Many patients will begin to feel measurable benefit within 4-6 weeks. Most tissues we treat require 2 to 4 treatments, usually 4-8 weeks apart. Some patients respond well to a single treatment, but repetition is usually required for complete healing. The majority of patients will experience significant pain improvement and functional capability that often lasts for years.
The physicians at CHARM have over three decades of experience using Regenerative Medicine to treat and resolve musculoskeletal pain. Comprehensive evaluation and pre-treatment testing optimize the identification of the source of your pain. The laboratory at CHARM uses premium-grade equipment throughout the process, including our internally developed in-house processing for PRP and an array of additional regenerative medicine solutions. Platelet and cell counts are measured before and after processing to optimize the final PRP solution’s purity, quantity, and reproducibility. Advanced imaging, including fluoroscopy and ultrasound, provides precision placement of the regenerative solutions.
