Joint pain may result from osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, or soft tissue injuries. Regardless of the reason for your pain, you experience a decline in function, increased stiffness, and decreased quality of life when you have pain in areas like your knees, shoulders, and hips.
Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections offer a revolutionary way to treat joint pain. At Interventional Spine and Pain Institute in Vero Beach, Florida, Dr. Michael Esposito uses this cutting-edge treatment to help your joints feel better and overcome limitations so you can live a fuller life.
Here’s how PRP injections help and how you can take advantage of this treatment.
The key to PRP is the platelets that exist in your blood along with red blood cells, white blood cells, and plasma. Platelets play an important role in wound healing — they help your blood clot when you have a cut, but they also contain powerful growth factors that encourage healing.
These growth factors signal your body to send other healing resources, like stem cells, to help rebuild and repair tissue. PRP injections introduce a concentrated amount of platelets at the site of your injury or tissue damage to tackle inflammation, restore tissue to health, and help you heal from the inside out.
Your joints are made up of bone and soft tissue, like tendons, ligaments, and muscles. When you think of joint pain, wear-and-tear arthritis (osteoarthritis) might come to mind. You experience pain when the smooth cartilage between bones at the joint starts to wear away and bone-on-bone contact occurs.
PRP injections can help your body rebuild cartilage to provide smoother movement at your joints. PRP therapy reduces pain because it aids in repairing the problem that’s causing your pain.
PRP treatments aren’t limited to osteoarthritis, though. The injections can help other painful conditions such as fibromyalgia, muscle strains and sprains, tendonitis, and ligament tears.
PRP comes from your own blood. We take a conventional blood draw from your arm and then process this sample in a centrifuge, a machine that spins the blood at extremely high speeds to separate the platelets and plasma from your blood cells.
The resulting compound — concentrated platelets suspended in plasma, which is the liquid portion of your blood — is what your doctor injects into your painful joints.
To make the injections as accurate as possible, we use ultrasound imaging to guide placement. Once injected, the PRP goes to work in helping you heal.
In the day or two immediately following PRP injections, you may experience heightened pain and stiffness. But over the course of several weeks, as the PRP does its job, you notice a gradual change in your level of pain. The healing properties of PRP help repair tissue and reduce inflammation.
The PRP injections may prompt enough repair in your joint to delay joint replacement surgery or make it so you won’t need it at all. If you do have surgery, PRP injections are useful because they accelerate the healing process, reduce pain, and get you back to normal function more quickly.
Are you looking for a new way to address your joint pain? Call Interventional Spine and Pain Institute today, or use the form on this website, to request a consultation with Dr. Esposito. We’re happy to explain more about how you can benefit from PRP injections.
