There' s a tricky balance when you’re an athlete. You love pushing yourself and seeing where your body can take you. You’re also placing your body at a greater risk for injury, which can push you straight to the bench or couch to nurse an injury.
Since feet and ankles are in the line of fire when it comes to active pursuits, our team here at Aesthetic Podiatry & Sports Medicine Center, led by Dr. Mariola Rivera and Dr. Lisa Shah, offers cutting-edge regenerative therapies that can speed up healing.
Topping this list are platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections, which are ideal for many foot and ankle issues.
When you’re injured, your body jumps into action with a four-stage healing process, including:
The first responders to arrive on the scene and initiate this cascade are your platelets, which are flat cells that are found in your blood.
When the platelets arrive, they first stop the bleeding, and with that job done, they release powerful growth factors that call on healing resources to repair the damage. These resources include stem cells to rebuild tissue and cytokines to regulate inflammation.
With PRP therapy, we draw some of your own blood, separate out the platelets in a centrifuge to create a concentrate, and then we inject this concentrate of platelets into your damaged tissues.
In effect, we’re using your body’s own powerful regenerative and healing system and redirecting and amplifying it to boost healing.
At our practice, we’ve had great success using PRP therapy to help our more active patients recover from common sports injuries, including:
This list isn’t complete, but if you’re an athlete with a foot or ankle problem, the odds are good that PRP therapy might be able to play a role in helping you to heal faster and stronger.
We described how PRP can boost healing, but we want to dive a little deeper into this. Not only can we boost and amplify healing, but with PRP therapy, we can reduce pain and inflammation, which can make your injury journey a little easier.
While we can provide you with success stories here at our practice, there have been many studies that back up our findings.
For example, one study on the use of PRP for chronic plantar fasciitis concluded that, “A single dosage of PRP injections demonstrate clinically and statistically substantial improvements in functional outcome scores.”
Researchers also found that PRP therapy not only improved function, but reduced pain and improved fascia thickness.
So, if you value your active lifestyle and you’ve been sidelined by a foot or ankle injury, it’s a good idea to sit down with us to see whether PRP therapy can help you get to the other side more quickly.
To set that up, please contact us online or by phone at one of our offices in Purchase or White Plains, New York, to schedule an appointment.
