How Prolotherapy Promotes Healing From Within

Any time your body incurs damage — whether through an accident or a disease like arthritis — it jumps into action to heal itself, regenerating and repairing tissues on a cellular level. 

While effective, your body works at its own pace and allocates resources judiciously, which means you may not rebound as quickly as you’d like. Thanks to innovative treatments like prolotherapy, we can amplify the call to promote more natural healing from within.

At Health First, Dr. Jonathan W. Singer and our team offer a wide range of services that work with your body to garner more sustainable results. Through integrative approaches to healing, we tap the power of the human body to heal and repair itself, which is certainly true of prolotherapy.

Here’s a look at prolotherapy and how it promotes healing from within.

The goal of prolotherapy

Prolotherapy isn’t a new approach to healing, as it dates back millennia, but it’s re-emerging in Western medicine as an effective regenerative medicine option. Through modern prolotherapy, we inject an irritant in and around your damaged tissues to elicit a healing response.

The solutions we use in the prolotherapy injections are harmless — typically dextrose or saline — and your body registers them as irritants. When we introduce the irritant, your body responds by sending in the resources necessary to aid in the healing and repair of affected tissues.

One of the primary responders are your platelets, which release growth factors that call upon further resources, such as stem cells. In other words, our goal is to create the ultimate healing environment without the need for resorting to more invasive and potentially dangerous measures like surgery.

When prolotherapy is most effective

Since prolotherapy is a minimally invasive option for healing, we use it to address a wide range of issues, including:

• Tendonitis
• Bursitis
• Worn-down joints
• Arthritis
• Ligament tears
• Damaged intervertebral discs
• Slow-healing wounds

Many of the issues we list here are degenerative and are most often addressed by managing the symptoms. Through prolotherapy, our goal is to get to the root of the problem using a regenerative approach that leads to more sustainable results.

The prolotherapy process

When you come in for prolotherapy injections, we use fluoroscopy to guide the injections into your damaged tissues. Before we administer the injections, we apply a topical anesthetic for your comfort. 

After we administer the prolotherapy, you’re free to get on with your day, though you’ll likely experience some swelling and soreness at the injection sites. Any swelling is a good sign as it’s your body’s way of protecting the area while it goes to work to repair the tissues.

After a few days, the swelling should subside as the damaged tissue continues to regenerate itself with healthier cells.

If you’d like to explore how prolotherapy can help you regain pain-free movement, contact one of our two locations in Greenwood Village, Colorado, or Cheyenne, Wyoming, by phone or online to set up an appointment.