How Much Do You Know About Prolotherapy as a Pain Treatment?

12 Sep How Much Do You Know About Prolotherapy as a Pain Treatment?

One of our goals here at Lone Star Pain Medicine is to work with patients to find the most appropriate treatments for them. We resist one-size-fits-all treatments that often amount to little more than writing prescriptions. In fact, we are firm believers in looking at every possible treatment deemed appropriate for a patient’s condition. For example, we sometimes recommend prolotherapy for pain.

Prolotherapy is one of the most basic treatments we offer. It is by no means complicated in terms of its application. As with any pain treatment, prolotherapy is not guaranteed to work for everyone; some patients respond to it very well while others do not. If we were to recommend it to you, the decision of whether to try it would ultimately be yours to make.

Prolotherapy Is an Injection Therapy

One of the first things to know about prolotherapy is that it is an injection therapy. What does that mean? It means that the primary mechanism for its application is an injection. If you can tolerate immunizations and blood draws, you should have no problem with prolotherapy injections.

Perhaps a bigger question for you is the medicine itself. What does it consist of? Lone Star Pain Medicine utilizes a combination of anesthetic and a naturally derived dextrose. We inject the solution into a site chosen only after careful evaluation of the patient’s pain and its causes.

What Prolotherapy Does

Prolotherapy is considered a regenerative treatment of sorts in the sense that its goal is to encourage the body to heal itself. The solution we inject essentially tricks the body into believing a new injury has just taken place. The body should respond by sending cells and nutrients to the side of the injection in order to heal the damage. It is all part of the body’s natural healing response.

Over time, the body continues sending cells and nutrients to the site until it perceives healing is complete. We can leverage this natural response through multiple injections that keep the body working on healing. In this way, we are merely treating the symptom of pain. We are helping the patient’s body deal with the root cause of the pain.

Prolotherapy Is a Safe Procedure

You should also know that prolotherapy is a very safe procedure. There is always the risk of infection, a risk that is present with any type of injection. But that risk is minimal and can be easily managed. As for other side effects, these are limited to pain at the injection site that can last anywhere from a few hours to a few days.

You may have read that prolotherapy is not FDA approved. It is worth unpacking that. First of all, the fact that the treatment is not FDA approved does not mean it is a scam. FDA approval is not required for something to actually work.

Second, you should know that FDA approval isn’t required for this particular treatment. Current FDA rules allow doctors to apply prolotherapy without having to spend millions of dollars and decades of study in order to get the government’s nod. The FDA has already deemed prolotherapy safe.

It May Be an Option for You

Depending on the type of pain you are suffering and its root cause, prolotherapy might be right for you. Prolotherapy is mainly for soft tissue injuries and diseases. These are conditions involving muscle, tendons, cartilage, and the like. If you’re interested in learning more about prolotherapy, come see us at Lone Star Pain Medicine. We would be happy to help you figure out if prolotherapy is a good option for you.