ACL injury treatment – the traditional medicine approach
Some of the worst words a competitive athlete could hear are, “You have an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tear.” And no wonder – most individuals are never able to return to their former level of athletic performance when using the traditional approach. Since most ACL tears occur as a result of a sports injury, traditional modern medical treatment involves the RICE protocol, a treatment regime that involves rest, ice, compression and elevation, all of which may temporarily relieve the pain of the injury, but which most definitely do not assist in the healing of the injured soft tissue…a ligament. In fact, RICE treatment actually slows healing because it decreases inflammation at a time when the injured area needs it most. In other words, RICE treatment does nothing to repair the injured and weakened ligaments and, thus, does not alleviate the chronic pain that people who have suffered an ACL injury experience, not to mention the fact that they may be prevented from continuing their sports for extended periods of time, or even permanently.
Cortisone injections are a bad treatment choice for an ACL tear
Another standard practice of traditional medicine is to inject steroids into the injured area or to prescribe anti-inflammatory medications. However, in the long run, these treatments do more damage than good. Cortisone shots and anti-inflammatory drugs have been shown to produce short-term pain benefit, but both result in long-term loss of function and even more chronic pain by actually inhibiting the healing process of soft tissues and accelerating cartilage degeneration. Plus, long-term use of these drugs can lead to other sources of chronic pain, allergies and leaky gut syndrome.
Physical therapy and surgery results may be limited for ACL tears
Physical therapy is another treatment approach with limited success since it can only assist with leg strength and knee motion, and not with healing the injured ligament. Often patients are put through expensive rounds of physical therapy, while their ligament injury only worsens. And finally, when all else fails, or when the ligament is completely torn, patients with an ACL injury are referred to a surgeon. Unfortunately, surgery can often make the problem worse, plus an “artificial” anterior cruciate ligament, whether using part of the patellar tendon, hamstrings or another material, is never as good as the real thing. Tendon grafts are often stiffer than the original ligament, and artificial graft particles have been found to cause proliferative arthritis when injected into knees.
Caring Medical's comprehensive Prolotherapy for a torn ACL injury
A better approach, in our opinion, in the case of an overstretched or partially torn ligament, is to use the MEAT protocol supplemented with Prolotherapy to stimulate ligament healing and regeneration. The MEAT protocol involves movement, exercise, analgesics, and treatment, such as Prolotherapy. And although a totally torn ligament usually requires surgery, Prolotherapy can play a key healing role here as well. First, Hackett-Hemwall Prolotherapy has been shown to regenerate tissue, and even before surgery is considered, the treatment should be given a chance to help the ligament heal itself. If this proves to be unsuccessful, or was not part of the patient’s treatment plan, Prolotherapy can still be a healing complement to surgery because the other ligaments around the knee, as well as the joint capsule itself, were at least stretched during the injury to the knee.
Chronic pain is most commonly due to tendon weakness, ligament weakness, as is the case with an ACL injury, or cartilage deterioration. The safest and most effective natural medicine treatment for repairing tendon, ligament and cartilage damage is Prolotherapy. In simple terms, Prolotherapy stimulates the body to repair painful areas. It does so by inducing a mild inflammatory reaction in the weakened ligaments and cartilage. Since the body heals by inflammation, Prolotherapy stimulates healing.
Prolotherapy offers the most curative results in treating chronic pain. In our experience at Caring Medical, it effectively eliminates pain because it attacks the source: the fibro-osseous junction, an area rich in sensory nerves. What’s more, the tissue strengthening and pain relief stimulated by Prolotherapy is permanent!
Prolotherapy research for knee pain at Caring Medical
Watch a Prolotherapy treatment video below
Think Prolotherapy may be for you? Call us!
To experience the Caring Medical difference for yourself, schedule a consultation via email or call us at 708-848-7789.
Caring Medical is a full time Prolotherapy doctor’s office. We have successfully treated all of the conditions we write about. This is why patients travel from across the country and internationally to be treated by our Prolotherapy physician Dr. Ross Hauser. The difference is in the care, technique, and experience you get with Dr. Hauser and team at Caring Medical
