At Vitality Medical Centers, our goal is to establish a treatment plan to fix your overall problem so you don’t have to continue taking so many pain medications. You can finally stop going to pain management and start your path to recovery.
Prolotherapy is a treatment option for patients in our office suffering with chronic knee pain that has failed traditional forms of treatment including physical therapy, chiropractic, massage, or even other types of injections.
Our board certified medical physician, Dr. John E. Stavrakos, MD, has received countless hours of post-graduate training in regenerative injection treatments to include prolotherapy. Dr. Stavrakos has been performing these prolotherapy knee pain treatments for several years now and has seen great results in most of his patients.
The first step to determining if prolotherapy is right for your knee pain, is to contact our office to schedule an appointment with Dr. Stavrakos. He will sit down and really listen to your situation. Then after a detailed evaluation he will devise a treatment plan that is customized specifically for you. This may include prolotherapy for your knee pain or may consist of one of the many other treatment options our office has available for your knee pain.
We look forward to meeting you very soon.
Our office accepts most major insurances including Medicare, Tricare, BCBS, and UHC. Your evaluation and any diagnostic imaging that may be needed will be covered. Our billing department will do a benefit verification for you, but typically most insurance companies do not cover the prolotherapy for knee pain. The cost for the prolotherapy treatments for the knee pain typically starts at $200 per session with most patients needing 3-6 sessions. Each prolotherapy session is done 4 weeks apart.
*We do offer a variety of payment plans to make the prolotherapy knee pain treatment affordable.
What is Prolotherapy?
Prolotherapy is short for proliferation therapy, a nonsurgical way to treat lower back pain, tendinitis, osteoarthritis and some sports injuries. These injections are made up of natural substances as well as anesthetics to reduce the discomfort of the procedure. Injection formulas contain naturally occurring substances such dextrose (a 10-chain sugar derived from corn), saline, Sarapin (an extract from the pitcher plant), as well as numbing agents like Ropivacaine. The prolotherapy injection causes localized inflammation to essentially “trick” the body to jump-start and optimize the natural healing process to repair and rebuild damaged tissue such as ligaments, tendons, joints, and muscles. With the prolotherapy injection’s initiation, the body creates new, stronger tissue over damaged areas. Structures such as ligaments (that connect bones) and tendons (that attach muscles to bones) as well as joint cartilage are often a major source of pain and disability because of their poor healing ability in adults; Prolotherapy works by directing growth factors in the blood via the localized inflammation to damaged connective tissue to effect more efficient repair than would occur if left alone.
What is the Prolotherapy procedure?
Prolotherapy injection procedures are similar to other injections commonly seen in medicine . Before the Prolotherapy solution is administered, injections of an anesthetic under the skin with a small, thin needle will be given to decrease the discomfort of the procedure. Once the numbing agent is working, a small needle is injected into the tissues that require treatment (in many cases, at the attachment sites of ligaments and tendons to bone). Depending on the area of the body and severity of the damaged area a series of injections may be needed, typically about 3 to 4 weeks apart. The number of sessions needed can be as few as one or two or as many as six to eight. After the procedure, patients are typically prescribed certain pain medications to help with the post injection discomfort, and are recommended to use the MEAT (Movement, Exercise, Analgesia, and Treatment) protocol, as the healing process continues.
Why choose Prolotherapy?
We offer this procedure to patients who wish to avoid surgeries and to decrease or get off of pain medications, and aid in helping reduce the disability associated with painful musculoskeletal problems. Some of the conditions that may be treated include (but are not limited to): tennis elbow, plantar fasciitis, joint osteoarthritis, chronic neck or back pain, pelvic pain, meniscal tears and many other musculoskeletal ailments. Most doctors practicing Prolotherapy concur that 80 % to 90% of patients report positive results and less discomfort overall. Modern Prolotherapy has been in existence for over 75 years and has treated everyday people, professional athletes, even a former Surgeon General of the United States, who afterwards recommended it to his colleagues. The end result is a healthier patient on fewer medications, which translates to lower risk of side effects and physician related complications, the ability to avoid more painful, riskier invasive procedures, and ultimately a better quality of life!
