The human body is designed to be self-sufficient — it contains the resources it needs to heal and repair itself. There are times, however, when we can overburden the body’s ability to heal itself quickly and correctly. Through regenerative medicine practices, such as platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy, our goal is to concentrate and amplify the body’s natural resources to encourage and accelerate healing and regeneration.
The skilled team of musculoskeletal experts here at Los Angeles Orthopedic Surgery Specialists prides itself on staying on the cutting-edge of orthopedic care. While we excel at surgical solutions for helping you to regain function, we also believe in the power of regenerative medicine in the healing process.
In the following, we explore how our PRP injection therapy can help you heal more quickly and soundly from your musculoskeletal damage.
Your blood contains four main components: red blood cells, white blood cells, plasma, and platelets. Your platelets fulfill an important role in the four phases of the wound healing cascade:
Your platelets are flat cells that quickly come together to plug the breach in the walls of your blood vessels to prevent you from bleeding out.
During the inflammation phase, your platelets release growth factors and cytokines that contain the damage, seal the wound, sanitize the area, and encourage cellular migration.
During this phase of your wound healing, your platelets help form new tissues and encourage vascularization.
In this final phase of healing, the remodeled tissue gains strength.
As you can see, platelets are incredibly important when it comes to healing damaged tissues.
With PRP therapy, we harvest and concentrate your platelets to help accelerate healing. To do this, we draw a sample of your blood and then separate out the platelets in a centrifuge. We then mix this concentrate with a small amount of your plasma and inject the mixture directly into your damaged tissues.
Since the platelets are autologous (they come from your own body), your body readily accepts the treatments. The platelets go to work quickly to accelerate the healing cascade.
As orthopedic surgeons, we often turn to PRP injections to help our patients heal more quickly after surgery.
We’ve also found that PRP therapy can be beneficial in nonsurgical situations, and we routinely turn to the treatment to address:
To get the most out of your PRP therapy, we typically recommend a series of injections, which we space out to keep your healing on track.
If you’d like to explore whether PRP injections can help with your musculoskeletal damage, call one of our offices — in Los Angeles, including Glendale, Wilshire, and East LA, Santa Fe Springs, Pico Rivera, Encino, Newhall, Montebello, or Tarzana, California — or schedule an appointment for a consultation online.