It’s not until something is wrong that you realize just how important certain joints are in your body, which is often the case with shoulders. As the 2 million Americans who seek medical help for rotator cuff tears each year can tell you, life is limited when your shoulder is in pain.
When it comes to pain in major joints like your shoulders, our experienced and skilled team here at Pain Medicine Consultants understands that relief is your top priority, as is healing quickly and strongly. The good news is that platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy checks all of those boxes.
The best way to understand why regenerative medicine practices like PRP therapy are so effective in handling certain joint issues is to take a closer look at what we’re up against.
Your shoulders are inherently unstable ball-and-socket joints thanks to shallow sockets. But it’s this instability that provides your arms with such wide ranges of motion — from reaching high in the air to twisting around and scratching your back
The group of tissues that keeps the ball (the top of your humerus) in the socket is your rotator cuff, which is formed by four muscles that come together to form a tendon. This tendon covers the end of the humerus and attaches it to your shoulder blade, allowing you to lift and rotate your arm.
When you damage this tissue, either in an acute injury or due to repetitive stress, you can develop a tear. Rotator cuff tears can be partial or complete and, in both cases, greatly affect how you use your arm. Not to mention, rotator cuff tears can lead to considerable pain.
Our goal with rotator cuff tears is to find nonsurgical solutions that help with the pain and restore function, and PRP therapy accomplishes both.
With PRP therapy, we harness your body’s amazing wound-healing resources, concentrating them, and then redirecting them into areas that could use a little boost.
First, we draw a sample of your own blood, and then, using a centrifuge, we separate out your platelets. These cell fragments are your body’s first responders when there’s tissue damage, and they’re responsible for initiating the wound-healing cascade, which includes four stages:
When we inject the PRP into your damaged rotator cuff, the platelets release growth factors that are involved in each of these phases. For example, cytokines control the inflammation and fibroblasts synthesize collagen and create fibrin scaffolding.
Ultimately, with PRP, we’re able to speed up the stages of healing and reduce the pain by better controlling inflammation.
So through a series of PRP injections in your shoulder, we deliver a huge boost in resources that allow the tendon to heal quickly and strongly.
While we’ve had our own successes here with PRP therapy, we want to draw your attention to a study that included 71 shoulders with full thickness rotator cuff tears.
Researchers found that there were no adverse reactions to the PRP injections in any of the participants and that they saw positive results in 77.9% of patients at six months, 71.6% at one year, and 68.8 % of patients at two years.
As you can conclude, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by trying PRP therapy for your rotator cuff tear.
To learn more, please contact one of our offices in Pleasanton, Pleasant Hill, or Corte Madera, California, to schedule a consultation.
