PROLOTHERAPY

Prolotherapy at Optimal Integrative Health

PROLOTHERAPY

Prolotherapy is a technique for treating acute and chronic pain around joints and ligaments. It involves injecting small amounts of a sugar solution into those areas. These injections stimulate the body to repair the painful area.

What Is Prolotherapy?

Prolotherapy is a technique for treating chronic pain around joints and ligaments. It involves injecting small amounts of a concentrated dextrose solution in the injured musculoskeletal tissue. This causes localized inflammation in the painful, damaged tissue in order to amplify the healing/repair cascade. As the inflammation resolves, healing occurs which can result in improved stability and decreased pain. These improvements can be maintained long-term after a series of injections.

What Is the Background of Prolotherapy?

After a musculoskeletal injury, there is often a strain or stretch of ligaments. Usually, healing occurs restoring ligaments to their normal strength. However, poor circulation and healing to the ligaments or tissue can produce joint structures that to not heal properly,lack stability and are prone to re-injury. We typically see these types of injuries treated with nonsteroidal medications or steroid injections; however, those types of treatments typically halt blood flow and repair mechanisms to the injured tissue, which actually delays or Common approaches to treatment, including nonsteroidal medications or steroid injections, can result in delayed or terminate proper healing mechanism.

Prolotherapy has been used to treat chronic musculoskeletal pain conditions for well over 50 years. It was developed and refined by several physicians in the Midwest. These doctors found that injecting an irritant into tendons and ligaments resulted in healing and long-term improvement. Research has shown changes in collagen —one of the building blocks for connective tissue — with prolotherapy injections and clinical studies have found benefit of the injections for specific chronic pain conditions.

What Are the Indications for Prolotherapy?

Optimal Integrative is involved in ongoing research into the benefits of prolotherapy for many types of musculoskeletal pain conditions including: