Joint pain is nothing short of misery. If you’ve tried anti-inflammatory medications, modified your workouts, and maybe even completed weeks of physical therapy, and you still struggle with an ache that creeps back in, it’s time to explore other treatment options.
At Pain Medicine Group in Sarasota or Oviedo, Florida, our team of interventional pain management specialists may recommend platelet-rich plasma (PRP) to help with your joint pain.
Instead of relying on medication to reduce pain, PRP uses a concentrated serum made from your own blood that’s rich in healing proteins and growth factors. The aim is to help jump-start your body’s natural healing processes, which can be the key to lasting joint pain relief.
PRP begins with something you already have: your own blood. Platelets in your blood help with clotting, but they also contain growth factors and signaling proteins. Signaling proteins trigger your body’s tissue repair and healing processes.
To collect these platelets, our team draws a small amount of blood and places it into a centrifuge. The centrifuge spins rapidly to separate its components. This lets us prepare plasma with a higher concentration of platelets than normally found in circulating blood.
Once we prepare your PRP solution, we inject it directly into your joint.
PRP therapy can help alleviate joint pain because:
Oral pain relievers can reduce pain symptoms, but they circulate throughout your body. These pain medications can also be hard on your digestive system.
PRP is different. We deliver the injection directly to the area we’re treating. This means the platelets go where you need them most.
A local anesthetic can temporarily block pain signals. A corticosteroid injection can reduce inflammation and provide relief for some people.
While pain relief is absolutely a necessity in pain management, PRP aims to support the biological processes involved in tissue repair rather than simply numbing the joint.
That doesn’t mean it can regrow every damaged structure or reverse advanced arthritis, but research suggests PRP may improve pain and function in certain joint conditions, particularly knee osteoarthritis.
PRP isn’t typically an instant fix. Because the treatment relies on biological processes rather than simply blocking pain, you may not walk out of the office feeling dramatically different. Some people experience temporary soreness around the injection site before improvement begins.
When PRP is effective, changes generally develop over the following weeks and may continue over several months. In fact, one injection may deliver 3.5 billion platelets to your joint, and studies show that the best relief comes when the treatment series reaches 10 billion platelets.
That gradual response is one of the biggest differences between PRP and treatments designed primarily to provide short-term symptom relief.
PRP has been studied for a variety of orthopedic and musculoskeletal conditions. Depending on your diagnosis and individual circumstances, our team may recommend PRP therapy for problems involving your:
Your evaluation may include a physical examination, review of your symptoms and medical history, and appropriate imaging or diagnostic testing. From there, we can determine whether PRP makes sense or whether another treatment is more likely to help.
Possibly, but PRP isn’t a guaranteed replacement for joint surgery. Sometimes, especially in the case of severe or traumatic injury, surgery is the best option.
For someone with mild to moderate joint degeneration or certain soft-tissue injuries, however, PRP can be one part of a conservative treatment strategy aimed at improving pain and function without immediately moving to surgery.
According to a study published in International Orthopaedics, 85.7% of the people who had PRP for knee pain didn’t undergo knee arthroplasty in the five years after their injection.
For the right person, PRP may provide longer-lasting improvement in both joint pain relief and improved joint function. But understand that no single treatment works for every painful joint. Your results can depend on the condition being treated, how advanced it is, and how your body responds to therapy.
PRP can work alongside other parts of a comprehensive treatment plan, including physical therapy, joint-friendly exercise, weight management, medications, or other interventional pain treatments.
The best way to find out if PRP therapy is right for you is to contact Pain Medicine Group to schedule an evaluation.
