Is PRP Right for Me?

The circulatory system, a crucial system for transporting oxygen, nutrients, and other materials through your blood, is driven by your heart and is essential for life. The blood that flows through its veins, arteries, vessels, and capillaries is composed of four essential components: plasma, red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets.

Blood platelets are the cells that cause your blood to clot when you get a cut or scrape, and using their properties to help the body heal has become a popular treatment option called platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy. This treatment has many uses, and to find out if it’s right for you, let's examine how it's done and what problems it can help you recover from.

Dr. Joseph Daniels, along with the Southwest Orthopedic Associates team, offers PRP therapy and many other treatments to help people in Fort Worth, Texas, with their joints and muscles affected by injury and other medical conditions.

How PRP therapy works

Platelets make up the smallest part of your blood, but they have the responsibility of hemostasis, which entails the adhesion, activation, and aggregation necessary in clotting over wounds when you get injured. This element is essential in PRP therapy, as once we’ve drawn your blood, we run it through a device called a centrifuge, which concentrates platelets to help your body heal.

Conditions it’s used to treat

The growth factors in this part of your blood, intensified through PRP therapy, are used to help with:

• Osteoarthritis: research shows promise in PRP therapy by reducing inflammation

• Joint injuries: it helps to heal chronic damage to the muscles, ligaments, and tendons in joints

• Skin conditions: also called a vampire facial, it helps with scars, wrinkles, and sun damage

• Hair loss: stimulates healing and growth in hair follicles

• Surgery recovery: used to speed up healing in surgical wounds, especially in jaw or plastic surgeries

Once the blood is drawn and platelets are concentrated, an ultrasound is sometimes used to target the appropriate treatment areas more effectively. And remember, this is done all by using properties of your own blood to heal the body.

What to expect from treatment

First, we draw your blood to prepare the PRP dose and run it through a centrifuge to obtain the proper platelet concentration. When the process is finished, the mixture is placed in a syringe and then injected multiple times into the targeted area (we use ultrasound-guided imaging). From that point, the platelets do their work on a cellular level.

We use a topical numbing solution to reduce discomfort during the process. This outpatient treatment takes between half an hour and an hour, and while the risks of side effects are low due to using your own blood, infection, injection site pain, tissue damage, and nerve injuries can happen.

PRP therapy can help you heal from injuries or surgery, and to find out if it’s the treatment you need, make an appointment with Dr. Daniels and Southwest Orthopedic Associates today.