Prolotherapy and PRP Injection Therapy | Scottsdale & Phoenix

Regenerative therapies, including prolotherapy and platelet-rich plasma (PRP) can often eliminate joint pain.

Every joint in the body has ligaments, tendons, and cartilage that can be injured. We specialize in managing pain and restoring musculoskeletal function. Regenerative medicine can benefit anyone with joint pain, helping your body rebuild healthy structural tissue and restore full pain-free function.

Regenerative treatments are less invasive, less costly, deliver quicker results, and require minimal recovery time. Elite athletes and active people take advantage of these non-surgical regenerative treatments to get back in action faster and stronger, and to prevent small injuries from becoming more serious.

• Prolotherapy is highly effective for joint pain management. To stabilize the joint capsule, rebuild collagen, strengthen and repair ligaments and relieve pain, injured tissues are infused with a nutrient solution of glucose, vitamin B12, and lidocaine; glucosamine may be added to increase stimulation. Generally, 3-6 treatments provide full resolution; the number of initial treatments and annual tune-up treatments that our prolotherapy doctors recommend varies depending on the individual and the severity of the damage.
• Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy concentrates your platelets and their related healing factors so they can be injected directly into ligaments and joint tissues to heal moderate to severe joint degeneration, cartilage tears, and arthritis damage. PRP therapy treatments provide stronger healing stimulation than prolotherapy. When pain is combined with joint inflammation, we often start with 1-2 prolotherapy treatments, followed by 2-3 PRP treatments.

Healthy ligaments are key to pain-free joint movement, yet ligaments are often missing from orthopedic evaluations. Our physical exams identify injured ligaments, which are often the targets for effective treatment.

The number and sequence of treatments that will deliver the most effective solution to help relieve pain and restore function. Our exams explore for indirect factors too, like stress, environment, and diet that may aggravate a physical injury. Our treatments apply a progression beginning with the simplest, prolotherapy. Where we want a stronger effect, we use your own blood cells to make platelet-rich plasma (PRP).

Pain management and regenerative therapies such as these concentrate your body’s own healing compounds to stimulate natural healing processes, accelerating repair of damaged joint tissue, rebuilding healthy tissue and restoring full function. To treat more serious conditions, our PRP and prolotherapy doctors may suggest nutrient infusions and detoxification at our Scottsdale clinic serving the greater Phoenix area.

“Went to doctors here several years ago for knee issues. Had several treatments for strengthening the knees. I am very satisfied with the results. I would recommend their treatment instead of surgery.” — Sam R.

“The best sports mainstream doctors and surgeons couldn’t help me. They told me that the torn tendons in both of my big toes wouldn’t heal, and I would not get rid of the pain. Vicoden did nothing for the pain. I was going to have to quit dance and still be in pain just in normal day-to-day activities. Prolotherapy at NPG was my last option, that I thankfully heard about from an occupational therapist friend. It’s been almost a year, I am almost totally pain-free, and I am dancing and competing on my toes in dance. I take no pain medications at all. My entire quality of life is back!” — Colette M. 

We work on people’s diets, evaluate their endocrine system, their digestion, their allergies. I focus on the physical structure, treating neck pain, back pain, and especially extremity pains like shoulders, knees, and hips.

When we have traumatic events, anything from an auto accident to an old sports injury, we are left with remnants of trauma. These can be ligament strains, they can be cartilage tears. They can be the development of a chronic degenerative disease like arthritis that develops from these acute injuries into chronic problems.

Naturopathic medicine has been a very effective way to treat these injuries. We start by decreasing inflammation by cleaning up people’s diets and use botanical medicines to treat pain and inflammation. And we directly treat the cause of strained ligaments, injured joint capsules and torn cartilage.

Naturopathic physical medicine incorporates two unique components. In addition to manipulation and physiotherapy and acupuncture, the first component uses treatments called prolotherapy and platelet therapy. Prolotherapy is the injection of nutrients into ligaments to strengthen them, and the injection of nutrients into joint capsules to enhance the metabolism of cartilage. Injecting nutrients into the ligaments of the back to strengthen them means people don’t need to be addicted to adjustments. Tightening ligaments and strengthening joint capsules will decrease hyper-mobility; we do that because an excessively mobile knee or shoulder or hip joint will degenerate the cartilage faster. So if you tighten up the joint capsule, you have a more stable joint to do muscle rehab and reestablish the structural integrity of the joint.

The second component of naturopathic physical medicine is platelet therapy, known as platelet-rich plasma or PRP. Platelet-rich plasma is created when we draw someone’s blood, we centrifuge it, and we take off the concentrated platelet component of the blood (eliminating red blood cells and some of the plasma). Injected into torn ligaments, strained joint capsules or torn cartilage, platelets can stimulate regeneration of these structures. They do it by directly stimulating the DNA, the genetic engineering of these joints, to stimulate the regenerative capacity of these structural tissues. So for many chronic arthritic knees, even sometimes bone-on-bone hips, or chronic back pain from whiplash injuries, we’re able to use your own platelets (the word ‘autologous’ means they are your platelets). When your platelets are in contact with your damaged tissues, they will genetically stimulate the healing of rotator cuff tears, cartilage tears, and chronic pain. Used in conjunction with nutrition, rehabilitative exercises, botanical medicine, and enhancing your metabolism through the rest of the naturopathic modalities, tissues – and the body they’re part of – will be restored for the long term.