Palm Beach Sports Medicine is on the leading edge of science in offering PRP therapy to their patients in the Palm Beach area.

PRP is a nonsurgical, minimally invasive method of delivering a patient’s own growth factors to energize the body’s healing mechanism and stimulate new, healthy cell growth in bones and soft tissue.

In a PRP treatment, the patient provides a sample of blood that is separated into its components in a centrifuge, a machine that spins the blood at a very high speed. One of the components is a plasma rich in platelets that are at the core of the body’s healing process. The now enriched and highly concentrated plasma is injected back into the injured area.

Because the patient is his/her own donor, there is no risk of infection or rejection.

PRP treatment has proven itself to be an effective treatment, and even made headlines, by bringing relief to such celebrity athletes as Tiger Woods, Yankee baseball pitcher Pedro Feliciano, and the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers’ stars Hines Ward and Troy Polamalu.

The healing of bone and soft tissue is affected by many factors ranging from, but not limited to, the degree of injury, the blood supply, the location of the wound, the type of tissue injured, the presence of infection, motion at the injury site, and overall patient health. Adding concentrated platelets helps creating a better environment for more rapid healing.

The most promising use of PRP is in the repair of tendonitis. Injuries like tennis elbow and Achilles tendonitis can sometimes be treated successfully with injections of PRP rather than with surgery, reducing the risk of infection and eliminating the development of additional scar tissue.

At Palm Beach Sports Medicine, we are already seeing success with PRP injections used for tendonitis, meniscal repairs, and even with wound healing following total joint replacement surgeries.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/sports/17blood.html

Borrione P, Gianfrancesco AD, Pereira MT, Pigozzi F (2010). “Platelet-rich plasma in muscle healing”. Am J Phys Med Rehabil 89 (10): 854–61.

Mishra A, Pavelko T (2006). “Treatment of chronic elbow tendinosis with buffered platelet-rich plasma”. The American Journal of Sports Medicine 34 (11): 1774–8.

Mishra A, Woodall J, Vieira A (2009). “Treatment of tendon and muscle using platelet-rich plasma”. Clinics in Sports Medicine 28 (1): 113–25.

Foster TE, Puskas BL, Mandelbaum BR, Gerhardt MB, Rodeo SA (2009). “Platelet-rich plasma: from basic science to clinical applications”. Am J Sports Med 37 (11): 2259–72