Sports injuries can temporarily derail the lives of professional athletes and weekend warriors. Common injuries such as sprains, strains, pulls, and tears can put a stop to a healthy, active lifestyle or prevent people from participating in everyday activities. But there’s a way to improve your physical function more quickly than was possible in the past, and isn’t that what everyone wants?
Dr. Patrick Connelly and the team at Paragon Integrated Medical in Lake Elsinore, California, routinely treat patients dealing with sports injuries and promptly get them back on the field. The practice uses alternative pain therapies to speed recovery times. Alternative pain therapy procedures take full advantage of the body’s natural healing processes to deliver results.
First, let’s dispel the notion that sports injuries only affect high-impact athletes. Sports injuries can refer to an injury incurred during a casual hike, a workplace accident, or a misstep on a sidewalk. How they occur doesn’t matter. It does matter that dealing with a sports injury can be debilitating, keeping you from fully participating in work, school, or recreational activities.
Let’s look at alternative pain therapies how it helps to heal.
What are Alternative Pain Therapies?
The National Institutes of Health define alternative pain therapies as “the process of creating living, functional tissues to repair or replace tissue or organ function.” What does that mean?
The aim of alternative pain therapies, a specialty of the Paragon integrated Medical team, is to restore damaged tissue that won’t heal independently or will take significantly longer to heal on its own than it would with intervention. Providers use living cells and tissue to stimulate and boost the body’s natural healing processes.
How it works
The team at Paragon Integrated Medical uses therapies that involve injecting or placing live cells into a patient. This treatment harnesses the body’s ability to heal itself and boosts the body’s natural growth factors to heal damaged tissue.
Dr. Connolly frequently uses platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy to treat common sports injuries. Plasma is a part of blood. It is made mostly of water and proteins; it provides a medium for red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets to circulate through the body. Platelets are blood cells that are responsible for a variety of necessary growth and healing functions.
By extracting a sample of your blood and isolating platelets, Dr. Connolly creates PRP, blood samples with a much higher concentration of platelets and valuable healing benefits than normal blood. A personalized treatment plan involving PRP injections can dramatically help heal affected areas such as ligaments, tendons, or cartilage tissue.
Speedy recovery
Combined with traditional non-surgical methods, including physical therapy, stretching, and bracing, alternative pain therapies often lead to faster recovery times.
To find out more about alternative pain therapies and how Dr. Connolly and the Paragon Integrated Medical team help patients restore peak physical function, call the office to schedule an appointment.