Video Transcription

Hi, my name is Ross Hauser I’m Medical Director of Caring Medical in Oak Park IL. There’s been a lot of talk and research on PRP or Platelet Rich Plasma Prolotherapy. In this video you’re going to view how the blood is processed for PRP Prolotherapy and the natural procedure, how we utilize PRP Prolotherapy with Hackett-Hemwall Prolotherapy. I will do the voiceover and explain the actual procedure. If you have any questions please email me at drhauser@caringmedical.com.

How we prepare the Platelet Rich Plasma (PRP) injections

Here you are seeing the blood drawn for Platelet Rich Plasma. When someone has chronic pain, the idea of stimulating the body to repair the painful area, which is the basic premise of Prolotherapy, makes a lot of sense to just use as natural a process as you can. Well, Platelet Rich Plasma or PRP Prolotherapy is a method whereby we’re going to concentrate the persons own growth factors and inject those growth factors into the degenerated, injured areas to initiate the healing cascade.

Here you see the medical assistant putting the person’s blood in a special plasma chamber and this plasma chamber has a specific filter that will separate out the Platelet Rich portion of the blood. The whole centrifuging, or processing, of the blood takes anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes. Ultimately we’ll get out the Platelet Rich portion of the blood. The platelets are specialized blood cells that are basically storehouses for growth factors. These are the growth factors that are normally needed for the human body to initiate the healing of connective tissue such as ligaments or tendons. So in somebody who has a non-healing injury, such as a meniscal injury, labral injury, tendinosis, tendinopathy, non-healing ligament injury, then the injection of these growth factors into the area will initiate the healing cascade.

Here you’re going to see the medical assistant take off the platelet poor portion of the blood, which is the yellow portion, and what will be left is the red portion, which is the Platelet Rich portion of the blood. In this fraction of the blood you have growth factors, such as platelet derived growth factor, transforming growth factor, epidermal growth factor, fibroblastic growth factor, all these different growth factors, stimulate healing. They specifically stimulate cell replication, new blood vessel formation. The growth factors will promote the healing of connective tissues, such as ligaments or tendons, the formation of extracellular matrix, everything that’s needed to get the weakened, damaged, injured area strong.

So, here you see the medical assistant drawing up the Platelet Rich portion of the blood. The whole process is a way to take a portion of blood and then fractionate out or concentrate out the portion of the blood that has the healing factors, growth factors, from the blood and then inject those growth factors specifically where the person or the athlete has the damaged, injured tissue. The net result will be good, solid, healed tissue so the person gets pain free and gets back to all their activities.

Treating a Knee injury with Platelet Rich Plasma (PRP) Prolotherapy in conjunction with Hackett-Hemwall Prolotherapy.

This video shows an actual PRP, Platelet Rich Plasma Prolotherapy procedure. What you’ll notice on this video is that the patient also received Hemwall-Hackett Prolotherapy. Here I’m anesthetizing the inside of the knee with some anesthetic. This is needed because Platelet Rich Plasma does cause a lot of inflammation, so this will make it more comfortable for the patient. After this, I’ll inject the Platelet Rich potion of the patient’s blood that has growth factors that will initiate a healing cascade inside this person’s knee. We’ll often use this when folks have articular cartilage damage or a torn meniscus of the knee. You can see that the person is tolerating this procedure well. We did rub an anesthetic cream on the skin which makes the procedure less painful.

Now we’re going to do Hemwall-Hackett Prolotherapy on the knee, specifically here doing the MCL and the pes anserina tendons and the reason to do that is that it’s very seldom that a person’s pain is just due to some intra-articular pathology such as osteoarthritis, cartilage problems, or meniscus tears. Typically people also have tenderness or pain around the knee and if you don’t receive Hemwall-Hackett Prolotherapy around the knee and just get Platelet Rich  Plasma around the knee, generally the pain still remains after PRP. It’s really important to do all of these structures around the knee, such as here I’m doing the LCL. As you can see, the whole procedure takes a minute, two minutes, it shouldn’t take a lot of time, it shouldn’t be very painful. The process is very well tolerated and very effective for relieving chronic knee pain.