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When your joints and ligaments start to deteriorate, whether from aging or repetitive use injuries from sport or working conditions, the results can be pain, swelling, and loss of flexibility and mobility. Short of joint replacement, it can be difficult to fix these issues. However, a leading-edge therapy is now available for joint regeneration.
At Invigorate Asheville located in Asheville, North Carolina, regenerative medicine specialist Dr. Linda Dula focuses on using powerful growth factors present in your own body to spur regeneration of joint tissue, eliminating the need for surgical intervention in many cases. This treatment is known as prolotherapy.
Prolotherapy is a holistic therapy concept that has been around, in some form, for thousands of years, but only recently has it been fully tested and accepted by the medical community. The basics of prolotherapy involve injection of a mild irritant into the joint at the site of an injury or pain.
The irritant causes an immediate response from your body, as it sees the irritant as causing micro injuries that must be healed. Intense internal focus is directed at the site of the injection, and the natural healing process goes into overdrive. Your own natural healing factors come in and jump start the healing process targeted to the specific area.
At Invigorate Asheville, we also can go beyond the practice of traditional prolotherapy and enhance the injection solution with platelet-rich plasma derived from a sample of your own blood, which releases growth factors to attract more healing factors to the injection site through cell signaling. We may also harvest adult stem cells from your own tissue to enhance this effect.
The goal of prolotherapy is to help repair damaged ligaments in the joint by driving an enhanced healing process exactly where it’s needed most, whether that’s your hips, knees, shoulders, or other joints.
Prolotherapy has many benefits, with most patients who respond to the treatment reporting a 50% or greater reduction in pain and other symptoms like swelling.
Overall, prolotherapy is thought to produce the following beneficial results:
We treat a number of common conditions using prolotherapy, including:
Probably the biggest reason our patients choose prolotherapy is to avoid surgery. Though not all patients will get the relief they desire from this treatment, and serious injuries may require arthroscopic or open joint surgery in the future, prolotherapy does provide relief to a large number of patients suffering from joint pain.
To learn more about prolotherapy and find out if you are a good candidate for this procedure, contact our office by calling 828-237-1511, or request a consultation with Dr. Dula online today.
