1. Injecting New Life Into Painful Joints
Prolotherapy is an alternative therapy method used to fight chronic pain and inflammation in joints. It involves the injection of a sugar water solution into the joint to promote natural healing (the word "prolo" comes from proliferation, because this treatment promotes the proliferation, or growth, of new tissue). It specifically targets tendons and ligaments that have become weak due to injury or disease. Prolotherapy is an alternative to the usual treatment using anti-inflammatories, as some believe these may hinder rather than help the body's natural healing process.
2. Tricking the Body Into Healing Itself
The idea behind prolotherapy is to introduce an irritant (in this case, the sugar water solution) into the joint in order to "trick" the body by forcing it to speed up its natural healing functions. The injection will cause inflammation in the joint, which will cause the body to react by increasing blood flow to the area, which will in theory bring nutrients as well as growth hormones to the injured tendon or ligament, stimulating the healing process. New, stronger tissue will form as production of collagen, or connective tissue, is generated.
3. New Spins on a Very Old Idea
The idea of injecting a substance into the body to promote natural healing is not new, nor is the kind of prolotherapy used in treating joints (inflammatory prolotherapy) the only type. Hippocrates used a crude version of this idea 2,500 years ago. In the 1930s, Dr. George S. Hackett began using prolotherapy to treat the chronic pain of car accident victims. Injecting erythropoietin (a stimulator of red blood cell growth) into anemic patients is a type of prolotherapy and is widely performed in hospitals. Research is being done with growth factor injection prolotherapy to see if injecting a complex protein that stimulates growth of certain cells can be useful in treating arthritis.
4. For Everything From Arthritis to Whiplash
Prolotherapy is used on a variety of injuries and diseases, with varying degrees of success. Injuries and illness of the joints, such as arthritis, back pain, tennis elbow, carpel tunnel syndrome, TMJ (temporomandibular joint) pain, whiplash and spinal problems leading to headaches, scoliosis and sciatica have all been treated with this method. It has also been used to treat pain in diseases and degenerative conditions such as multiple sclerosis, polio, osteoporosis, muscular dystrophy and fibromyalgia.
5. Working Under a Shroud of Controversy
Studies concerning prolotherapy have produced mixed results about whether the method is an effective treatment. In some studies, improvement has been seen in both the level of pain as well as joint mobility. In one study, biopsies taken from the ligaments of the lower back in patients treated with prolotherapy showed an increase in ligament thickness of 60 percent, with less pain and better movement. However, other studies have not been as promising. Five studies done in 2007 showed that prolotherapy alone did little to help with lower back pain, and was only effective when combined with other, more conventional treatment methods.
