Overuse injuries happen when soft tissues — like your muscles, ligaments, and tendons — are repeatedly stressed without sufficient recovery time. A few of the most common overuse injuries are tendinitis, bursitis, and even stress fractures.
These injuries can affect just about any joint, causing inflammation, pain, and limited mobility. Unfortunately, overuse injuries are notorious for slow healing because the blood supply to these areas is often limited. Reduced circulation means fewer growth factors and nutrients reach the damaged tissues, slowing your body’s natural repair process.
For some good news, you don’t have to keep nursing that overuse injury indefinitely. Daniel Moghadam, MD, and our team at Modern Aesthetica specialize in platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy to get you back to full strength faster. Here’s how it works.
PRP therapy is an innovative regenerative treatment that uses your body’s own healing properties to support tissue repair. The process begins with a small blood draw, which we put in a centrifuge to separate out the platelet-rich plasma from the rest of the blood components.
Platelets are cell fragments that play a key role in wound healing because they release growth factors that stimulate tissue regeneration. When concentrated PRP is injected directly into the site of your overuse injury, it promotes faster healing by enhancing your body’s ability to repair damaged tissues.
PRP therapy can help reduce pain and inflammation over time, accelerate tissue repair, and help you return to your regular activities sooner than with rest and physical therapy alone. And because PRP uses your own blood, there is minimal risk of allergic reactions or side effects.
When you get injured, your body naturally involves platelets and growth factors to stimulate tissue repair, but sometimes, the process can take weeks or even months. PRP therapy amplifies healing by delivering a higher concentration of platelets and growth factors to the injured area than what would normally be present.
This influx boosts collagen production and tissue regeneration and reduces inflammation, creating a faster and more efficient healing environment. It’s a highly customizable treatment, and we can use it to address injuries across your body, including your shoulders, elbows, hips, and knees.
PRP therapy is especially useful for soft tissue injuries and stubborn overuse injuries, which can be slow to heal because of poor blood flow. By injecting a concentrated dose of healing factors directly into the injured tissue, we can use PRP therapy to overcome this limitation and speed up the recovery process.
PRP therapy is minimally invasive, and we do each session in our Santa Monica, California, office. Treatment starts with a quick blood draw; then, we process the sample to separate the platelet-rich plasma.
Once it’s ready, we inject the PRP solution directly into the injured area. Depending on your needs, we may use imaging guidance to ensure precise placement. Injections take just a few minutes, and then you’re free to return to your normal activities.
We recommend avoiding strenuous activity for a few days to give the PRP time to work. You may experience mild soreness at the injection site for a day or two after the procedure, but this usually subsides quickly. Over the following weeks, you should notice a gradual improvement in pain, function, and mobility as the healing process continues.
Dealing with an overuse injury that isn’t healing as fast as you’d like? PRP therapy could provide the boost your body needs to fully recover. Contact our clinic at 424-391-3884 or request an appointment online to learn more about how PRP can support your healing and help you get back to your active lifestyle sooner.
