Video Transcription

What should an athlete do if they have an advanced sports injury?

If the injury itself is really severe, or they’ve had the injury for a really long time, trust me, it can get really discouraging. I remember a girl who was a marathon runner, and unfortunately [because] of her injury she was letting herself get so depressed that it was almost as if life was over. I had to say to her, Mary, you know as well as I do, there are a lot of people that love you, you have great friends, you have a wonderful job, don’t let [this injury] define you. The first part of our care really related to that. Don’t let your athletic endeavors define you. Yeah, Dr Hauser has done five IronMans, I’ve done two Ultra Marathons. But people don’t know this, for the last several months I’ve done almost no exercise. I’ve done it by choice, I’m doing a lot of writing, and the office has been really busy. I’ve had other projects to do. I haven’t let not exercising define me. Having said that, as I said to Mary, we’re going to get you back to running. It may take, 3 to 6 months, but I want to tell you, first of all, you still can exercise hours a day. She had a back injury so she couldn’t run but she could do other things. Her and I talked about all the other exercises that she could do. Just because you can’t run, that’s why they have swimming, that’s why they have Pilates. There’s a million different kinds of exercises.

Sometimes, with athletes, the first thing they’ve got to do is don’t let an injury define you. You’re a wonderful person, I believe made in the image of God. You have a lot of people around you that love you. And two is, just because you can’t do a certain sport that you love, in other words, you can’t play racquet ball. Don’t let racquet ball define you or get you depressed. There are a lot of other exercises.

When you’re injured, it’s really the opportunity to do all the things that will make you a better athlete in the sport that you love. I’ll give you an example. Almost everybody can do balance work. When you play racquetball, balance is really important. When you run, balance is very important. Or, we all know that core strength is very important. When you can’t play racquetball because of your injury, why don’t you do exercises that will help you, in the end, be better at racquetball? Most athletes don’t do enough endurance training. There are lots of different ways to endurance training. You can do endurance training by getting an aqua jogger and running in a pool. Even if you can’t swim, you can still do the kickboard. I’m a strong advocate of swimming because I think swimming is the best athletic thing a person can do because it works all the muscles. You can work on your endurance with swimming. Or, for instance, if you can’t run, you might be able to do the elliptical. You might be in a racquetball sport where it involves sprinting, but why not work on your endurance? As you build your endurance, it’s going to make you better, like in the second game of a match, or toward the end of a match, you’re not going to get tired.

As it relates to your injury, Prolotherapy is the opposite of almost every other treatment. So, don’t be dissuaded because you haven’t had any success with other treatments. Prolotherapy stimulates the repair of basically tissues that often don’t repair by themselves. You know, like with muscle tissue, if you have a muscle injury, you put heat on it, you rest it, you excersise it, whatever you do, it typically gets better because it has such a good blood supply. Tendons have a crappy blood supply. Meniscus, only one fourth of the meniscus has a blood supply. The rest of it is by joint fluid. Labrum, terrible blood supply. These tissues look white. A tissue that looks white, whereas muscle tissue that looks red, so it has a good blood supply. Tendons are white, most of the meniscus is white, labrum is white. Ligaments are white. They have a terrible blood supply. The neat thing about Prolotherapy is the injections are done where the injury is. We’re either injecting substances that stimulate cells to replicate, or sometimes we actually inject the cells right there. We could take cells from your blood, that’s called Platelet Rich Plasma Prolotherapy, or I could take out bone marrow, that’s called bone Marrow Prolotherapy. A good website is to go to www.stemcellprolotherapy.com or www.bonemarrowprolotherapy.com to learn more about those techniques. You can also get stem cells from fat, but typically just normal Prolotherapy with dextrose or a fatty acid solution, or various hormones, the normal Prolotherapy, works great for whether it’s an acute sports injury or a chronic sports injury. Most injuries that don’t heal, it’s from joint instability. Any athlete who has a clicking sound, a clicking sound in your neck when you move it, a clicking sound in your back, clicking sound in your knee, the joints unstable. That’s why the other treatments haven’t worked. You have to cause a tightening and strengthening of the ligaments or meniscus.