Accelerate Healing Using Your Own Platelets
What Is PRP?
Platelet Rich-Plasma (PRP) stimulates healing of injured or damaged connective tissues using growth factors found in your own blood platelets.
Why Use Your Own Platelets?
- Stimulates your body’s natural healing response to injured ligaments, tendons, cartilage
- Platelets contain an abundance of beneficial growth factors
- Provides a vigorous “kick-start” to the repair process
- Used around the world by professional athletes
- Minimal down time compared to surgery
- Minimally invasive and effective technique with decades of clinical studies
The Science
Platelet-Rich Plasma (PRP) has been used clinically to stimulate tissue repair and improve surgical outcomes since the 1990’s for wound care, oral surgery, hair growth, and musculoskeletal repair. The normal, natural healing cascade that we experience after daily activity is initiated by bleeding from microscopic tissue tears, which activates platelets containing abundant healing proteins including growth factors and cytokines. These proteins direct and coordinate the disinfection, clean-up, and regeneration of injured and degenerative tissue. PRP therapy simulates the 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. The in-house laboratory at CHARM processes your PRP using state-of-the-art techniques to purify and quantify your platelet counts, to optimize your healing response.
Studies Showing The Efficacy of Platelet Rich Plasma Treatment
FAQ's
Many injuries to the joints, ligaments and tendons have been proven to improve and heal with localized injections of PRP directly into the damaged areas. Most chronically painful musculoskeletal conditions are the result of injuries and degeneration coupled with diminished healing at the weak connection sites in these tissues. Other conditions studied that respond to PRP stimulation include hair thinning, scars on the skin, urinary incontinence, and nerve injuries. More uses are being discovered every year as PRP has become much more accepted in the medical community and the research literature continues to expand.
Most tissues that we treat require a series of 2 to 4 treatments, usually 4-8 weeks apart. Some patients respond well to a single treatment but usually repetition is required.
The key is to accurately treat the damaged and degenerative tissues and avoid unintentional injection into more sensitive areas. At CHARM, our practitioners have many years of experience using ultrasound, fluoroscopy (X-Ray), and palpation (examination) skills to target the structures that need treatment, and will choose each of these as needed to produce the best and safest result. The patient benefits from the experience and knowledge gained from the use of all of these modalities.
Your blood is drawn using standard techniques and processed in the CHARM laboratory using a series of steps inside a sterile hood. The platelets are concentrated and cell counts are measured to optimize the purity and quantity of the final solution.
Your body replenishes and renews your bone marrow and platelets constantly throughout your lifetime. You have a virtually endless supply of these beneficial growth factors and cells.
The PRP and BMAC orthobiologic procedures at CHARM use the patient’s own blood and bone marrow, respectively, thus eliminating the chance of allergic reaction, blood cross-reactivity, storage problems, viral or bacterial infection, and other side effects associated with using another individual’s tissue.
