Video Transcription

Arthroscopic surgery risks in young athletes

What is an athlete to do if they’ve been recommended to get surgery? Well, the first thing I would recommend is not to get surgery, and instead, to get an evaluation by a doctor who does Prolotherapy. Almost every phone call or email we get and almost every evaluation I do in the office for a young athlete, teenager, pre-teen, college athlete that we see, almost all of them are great Prolotherapy candidates. So, first of all, when you’ve been recommended surgery, don’t get surgery, get an evaluation from a Prolotherapy doctor. Labral tears, meniscus tears, ligament injuries, tendon tears, almost all sports injuries that young athletes get can be healed by Prolotherapy.

There are other reasons not to get surgery. The primary one is that you don’t want a surgery on your resume. If you are thinking about getting a college scholarship, or of playing professional sports, your value is going to go way down if you have had a surgery. So obviously you don’t want to have surgery on your resume. The second reason is Prolotherapy repairs the injury. Often surgery just removes the injury. If you have a labral tear or a meniscal tear, they just take out the labral tissue or the meniscal tissue. On the other hand, Prolotherapy stimulates the repair of those tissues. Once the tissue is repaired the athlete is fine. The third reason is that Prolotherapy doesn’t interfere with training. You can still train while you get Prolotherapy. The fourth is Prolotherapy gets the body part stronger. Once the body part is stronger, you don’t have a recurrence of injury. If you have surgery, you often have a recurrence of the injury, you have a recurrence of the pain, you have accelerated arthritis, you have that on your resume. Both short term and long term, surgery doesn’t make a lot of sense for most injuries.

If an athlete has a complete tear, like a complete ACL tear, then obviously you do need surgery. But, even in those situations I would encourage the athlete to get Prolotherapy after the surgery because if you had such a traumatic injury that you tore a ligament completely, or you broke a bone, you know that you also injured a lot of other tissues, ligaments, and tendons. Those things need to be strengthened with Prolotherapy.

Can Prolotherapy be done after arthroscopic surgery?

We’ll often get calls and emails from athletes that have had arthroscopy and they are wondering if after the arthroscopy, should they get Prolotherapy? The answer is definitively yes. If you’ve had arthroscopy for meniscus injury, labral injury, cartilage damage, it is most likely that the surgeon did what they could. However, unless the tissue is completely torn, a surgeon can’t repair it. If you have a ligament that is lax or loose, a joint that is unstable, or a tendon that is injured but not completely torn, you need Prolotherapy. We often see athletes after arthroscopy or surgery, they do phenomenal with Prolotherapy. As a matter of fact, I would even encourage you to get Prolotherapy if you’ve had arthroscopy.

Young athletes are shocked when they look at their arthroscopy report. They think that all the surgeon did was repair the tissue, but they are shocked to learn that the surgeon took out 20% of their meniscus, or they shaved off a whole bunch of cartilage that is not there anymore. Well, it’s not there anymore, and that means that you will get aggressive, progressive arthritis in the future. The best advice I could give you, besides doing a good exercise program, is to get Prolotherapy. Stimulate the cartilage cells to repair, stimulate the meniscus cells to repair, stimulate the ligament cells to repair. Then, not only do you not have short term problems, but you don’t have long term arthritis.