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Prolotherapy depends on
your ability to heal.
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Your body has two healing systems. You have a daily ‘maintenance’ system, and a much larger ‘acute injury’ system. Both of these systems are triggered by, and only triggered by, a group of chemicals that live in your white blood cells and platelets. It is important to understand how this system works, and how we can help it work better, for three reasons. First, a healing system problem may be the root cause of your connective tissue pain. If so, this problem needs to be identified and corrected. Secondly, we want Prolotherapy to work as quickly as possible to remedy your problem. Thirdly, we want your connective tissue to STAY in good condition - pain free.
Are YOU Keeping Yourself from Healing?
Let’s look at some simple ways that you can impair the effectiveness of your own healing system. You want as many of these factors as possible to be working in your favor, particularly during Prolotherapy treatment.
THINGS NOT TO DO:
- Ice
- NSAID medication (Advil, Aleve, Mobic, Celebrex, etc.)
- Corticosteroid medication (cortisone, Medrol, etc.)
- Insomnia (lowers HGH levels)
- Fail to get your hormone testing done if recommended
- Smoke
- Fail to identify and deal with food allergies
- Poor nutrition - heavy on the sugar, light on the nutrients
- Stop taking hormone replacement, particularly Testosterone
- Fail to exercise
How to Maximize Healing
Most of our patients are highly motivated. Many already take good supplements, pay attention to their nutrition, and lead overall very healthy lifestyles. They often ask advice on how to improve their connective tissue healing. Here are some tips:
- Balanced diet. Optimal dietary intake varies with each individual. Dr. Ross and Marion Hauser have an excellent book available on their website for individual dietary typing. There are many other valuable resources on the net and in print. Occasionally a visit to a Nutritionist is very helpful. We may recommend this.
- Supplements. There are many facets to the healing system, and many chemicals are involved. We have a handout that highlights the major, consensus chemicals that may be taken as supplements. Occasionally a visit to a physician who treats using a ‘natural medicine’ strategy is helpful, and this may be recommended.
- Exercise. 30 minutes per day of modest exercise (resulting in light sweating) will optimize the function of the maintenance healing system. We do not exercise-restrict during treatment in the vast majority of cases.
- Weight training. If you are in consistent training and we are treating a damaged structure, you should drop to about 40% of your usual weight and go up on the reps when using this structure. As the pain resolves at one weight during treatment, slowly increase, keeping below the pain threshold. Once you are at full resistance, pain free, you will be released from treatment.
- Sleep. Human Growth Hormone is released during stage III and IV (deep) sleep. If you are getting less than three hours of uninterrupted sleep at night, consideration should be given to consulting a sleep specialist
- Heat. Applying 30 minutes or more per day of any kind of heat is very helpful. This is particularly important in the few days following treatment, but is an excellent idea throughout.
- Hormones. If your testosterone is low, or is in the low-normal range, healing may be significantly impaired. People often come to see me because failure of their maintenance healing--caused by low testosterone--leads to connective tissue pain. If hormone testing is recommended, do it. If treatment is recommended, stay on it.
- Immune system stressors. Anything that draws a lot of attention from your immune system will likely impair your healing system. This may be transient (e.g. the flu), or persistent (e.g. an unrecognized food allergy). Occasionally we will recommend evaluation by other medical professionals to rule out significant allergies, unrecognized infections, or less-common hormone abnormalities. Anything that you do to support your immune system function may be a good idea in terms of healing. We generally do not treat while you have an active viral or bacterial infection.
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