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Prolotherapy Cures Chronic Pain- Part 1 of 5

Scientific Living — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:04:28 +0000

The fact that we call it pain “management” is very unfortunate. In short, most chronic pain is not just manageable, but can actually be totally alleviated using natural means.

This will be a five-post series, in which the main treatment I will share with you is a technique known as prolotherapy. You are probably googling right now. Just so you know, if you read this Mayo Clinic article on prolotherapy, it is deeply flawed. I will critique it in a subsequent part of this series. Today, Mayo Clinic actually endorses prolotherapy. Also, former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop recommends prolotherapy to his patients. Nevertheless, prolotherapy is still not widely known. Strange, but true!

If you look at Wikipedia’s entry on chronic pain, it has a large section for Management. It states: “It is rare to completely achieve absolute and sustained relief of chronic pain.” This is a true statement, but that is only because people fail to find and remove the root cause of their chronic pain. The article goes on to list various ways to deal with the pain. Most of these are pharmaceutical drugs. These drugs may or might not be helpful, and can often be harmful in the long run. Masking symptoms will, by definition, never cure chronic pain. If you are suffering from chronic pain, are on pain killers, and feel sick of wrestling with your pain everyday, place prolotherapy in the back of your mind, should you decide to try something new.

Some Statistics on Pain:

Taken from American Academy of Pain Management

• 50 million Americans live with chronic pain caused by disease, disorder or accident.
• An additional 25 million people suffer acute pain resulting from surgery or accident.
• Approximately two thirds of these individuals in pain have been living with this pain for more than five years
• The most common types of pain include arthritis, lower back, bone/joint pain, muscle pain and fibromyalgia
• in 2000 it was reported that 36 million Americans missed work in the previous year due to pain and that 83 million indicated that pain affected their participation in various activities

And from another source:

• Chronic Pain Costs the American Public $100 Billion Annually

It is very clear that pain “management” is very expensive. The fact that one out of every six people in the USA lives with chronic pain is proof enough that the current state of pain management is not acceptable. If you are about to have a child, can you believe that there is a 17 percent chance that he or she will live with chronic pain, if limited to current popular medical treatments? For a condition that has been plaguing mankind since time immemorial, and has so much money invested in it, our advancement in treatment seems conveniently retarded.

Disclaimer: This article is not medical advice. This is opinion and is for informational purposes only. If seeking medical advice, consult a licensed physician.

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Prolotherapy Cures Chronic Pain- Part 2 of 5

Scientific Living — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:35:42 +0000

Understanding inflammation is important in understanding how prolotherapy works. Prolotherapy actually intentionally causes inflammation around tendons and ligaments.

Many have the idea that inflammation is a bad thing in every sense of the term. In fact, there is “good” inflammation, and there is “bad” inflammation.

Good Inflammation

Say you sprain something (like your ankle). You have probably had the experience of a joint becoming big and puffy and sore and red and stiff. This is due to the body’s inflammation process. When you sprain a joint, tendons and ligaments can get injured. Tendons are what connect muscle to bone, and ligaments are what connect bone to bone. Inflammation is the body’s way of getting lots of blood flow to the injured area. This allows plenty of nutrition to get to the damage, and repair it well. Without this inflammation process, we cannot heal. This is an example of “good” inflammation. The reason it is good is because the inflammation is productive. It will result in healing an injury, and then go away.

Bad Inflammation

Systemic Inflammation is the “bad” type of inflammation. “Systemic” means it is affecting the entire body. An ongoing process of inflammation throughout the body can be a sign of a serious health problem. No, a person won’t look like their entire body is swollen. Bad inflammation does not have to be visible. When there is systemic inflammation, the body is constantly trying to heal itself of some systemic problem. The experience of Natural Medicine is that systemic inflammation is often caused by food allergies or chronic infections.

We want to allow “good” or “productive” inflammation to do its thing. Stopping or reducing it would impede needed healing. On the other hand, it is the systemic inflammation that we want to eliminate.

Pain Killers

Let’s talk about our favorite pain medications, better known as: Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID’s). These include things like aspirin, ibuprofen, and naproxen sodium. These drugs relieve pain temporarily by reducing inflammation. Unfortunately, they do not discriminate between productive and systemic inflammation. If a person takes these drugs while recovering from an injury, he or she can actually prevent complete healing from occurring, by shutting down the body’s healing process (inflammation) before it finishes the job.

The R.I.C.E. Myth

Many people have heard of the time honored recipe for healing injuries, knows as R.I.C.E. (Rest, Ice, Compress, and Elevate). This is a complete myth with no good evidence to support it. Unfortunately, doing any of those four things will help an injury heal poorly. These all have the effect of reducing inflammation, and lowering blood supply (reducing circulation). An injury is better served by keeping the joint moving, and letting the inflammation do its job right.

Anti-inflammatory Diets

What about eating things that are supposed to reduce inflammation? Foods like fish oil that reduce systemic inflammation are popular. If you come across a supplement or medicine that claims to reduce inflammation, search for it on the internet and make sure it reduces the bad kind of inflammation. Also be aware, that there is theoretically a way to reduce “good” inflammation, while not interfering with healing. This can in theory be done, not by stopping the inflammation process, but by speeding it up, at getting it over with quicker. Some supplements like bromelain claim to help with this.

Disclaimer: This article is not medical advice. This is opinion and is for informational purposes only. If seeking medical advice, consult a licensed physician.

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Prolotherapy Cures Chronic Pain- Part 3 of 5

Scientific Living — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:05:53 +0000

Unfortunately, very few health care professionals are properly trained to diagnose the true causes of chronic pain. This results in many garbage can diagnoses. The true cause of the vast majority of chronic pain is tendon and ligament laxity.

Garbage Can Diagnoses

You may have heard of the term before. Basically, it means a doctor is labeling you with a name that describes your symptoms, but doesn’t explain the cause. If you or a loved one has been diagnosed with something defined by a set of signs and symptoms, but not a root cause, then I strongly encourage you to be skeptical. If all that is known are symptoms, then you are guaranteed never to fully recover.

The Right Type of Patient

Which patient stereotype more closely sounds like you? :

One type immediately believes what the doctor tells them, and can very often end up taking pain medications, going to support groups, suffering, or learning to deal with their symptoms (or worse yet, their “psychosomaticism”) for the rest of their lives.

Another type of patient would rather spend their whole lives looking, yet failing to find a solution, rather than NOT spending their whole lives failing to find a solution. As the saying goes:

“It is better to burn out, than to rust out.”

The wonderful truth is that many of these proactive types of patients do actually rid themselves of their ailments.

Trigger Points

Trigger points are very often involved in chronic pain. A trigger point is nothing but a very small muscle knot. Sometimes it can feel like a big lump under your skin, but it is almost always the size of a tiny pea. They are typically so small, that even after you manage to find one by feeling around with your hands, if you wanted to stick it with an acupuncture needle, you would probably miss many times before you successfully touched it.

Referred Pain

The reason we care about trigger points is that they cause pain. If you have chronic pain, feel deep inside the bands of muscle and try to locate a trigger point. You probably can. It will feel like a little nodule. If will often feel tender. The big tip-off that you have found a trigger point is that when you press down on it, you will experience pain somewhere else. This is called referred pain, and makes a very important point:

The place where you hurt is often not the place where the problem is!

Trigger Point Therapy

Removing trigger points will not necessarily make you pain free forever, as trigger points can reappear. Trigger points themselves have a root cause that must be removed.

Causes of Trigger Points

There are several speculations as to the cause of trigger points. These include things like neurological malfunctions and poor oxygenation. The most relevant cause is injury to tendons and ligaments. Tendons and ligaments can often not heal properly due to poor blood circulation in those areas. Muscles, on the other hand, get lots of blood circulation, and over time pretty much always heal completely.

When ligaments get injured, they become “lax”, which means loose. Ligament laxity results in unstable joints. If the ligaments are too loose, they aren’t doing their job of supporting the joint properly. In order to “pick up the slack”, trigger points may form. Trigger points gobble up some muscle into a knot, shrinking the length of the muscle, thereby compensating for the laxity.

Ligament Laxity

The amazing fact about ligament laxity is that it also causes referred pain. Regardless of whether or not trigger points form, the lax ligaments can cause referred pain by themselves. In the 1950’s Dr. George Hackett, the father of modern prolotherapy, diagrammed pain referral patterns caused by ligament laxity throughout the body. At the same time, Dr. Janet Travell, the Presidential physician, was diagramming pain referral patterns due to trigger points. Guess what! The patterns highly correlated!

And guess what treatment effectively removes ligament laxity? Yes, it’s prolotherapy. The experience of prolotherapists is that they can reliably predict what ligaments are causing pain, based on known referral patterns. Then, by treating those ligaments, the patient gets permanent alleviation of pain.

Statistics on Prolotherapy

Here are some statistics from Dr. Gustav Hemwall, an important advocate of prolotherapy in the 1900’s:

“In 1974, Dr. Hemwall presented his largest survey of 2,007 Prolotherapy patients to the Prolotherapy Association. The survey related the following:

1,871 patients completed treatment
6,000 treatments were administered
1,399 (75.5 percent) patients reported recovery and cure
413 (24.3 percent) reported general improvement
25 (0.2 percent) patients showed no improvements
170 patients were lost to follow up.

More than 99 percent of the patients who completed treatment with Prolotherapy found relief from their chronic pain. These results are similar to those published by Dr. Hackett, showing that Prolotherapy is completely curative in many cases (75 to 90 percent) and provides some pain relief in nearly all patients treated.”

These statistics amaze me! I hope they amaze you too. In fact, there are prolotherapists practicing today that are even more effective, due to more advances in the technique and other supporting therapies.

Pinched Nerves

Many people realize intuitively that their pain is referred, and attribute it to a pinched nerve. This is often a mistake. According to prolotherapists, pinched nerves are actually very rare when compared to ligament laxity. The way to tell the difference is that a pinched nerve pretty much always causes pain on a level of at least 8 out of 10 if you move the wrong way. According to prolotherapists, ligament and tendon pain tends to be more of a 5 out of 10. This is more of a continuous, dull, or vague ache.

Recap of Chronic Pain Causes

Ligament laxity is by far the number one cause of chronic pain. This is unfortunately a little known fact. Prolotherapy is an effective method of solving ligament laxity. The proof that prolotherapy is effective is clinical results. Official research, such as the double blind, placebo controlled study, is not abundant. However, research is growing, and I will share sources with you later in this series. There are also a number of systematic reasons why research in the area of prolotherapy will always be difficult. I will discuss this later in this series.

So what is the actual technique of prolotherapy?

Disclaimer: This article is not medical advice. This is opinion and is for informational purposes only. If seeking medical advice, consult a licensed physician.

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Prolotherapy Cures Chronic Pain- Part 4 of 5

Scientific Living — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:31:34 +0000

Prolotherapy can permanently remove ligament laxity, the most common cause of chronic pain. This results in amazing statistics on how effective prolotherapy can be.

The Origins of Prolotherapy

In 400 B.C. Hippocrates would treat pain in athletes by lancing their injured area with hot pins. Strangely enough, he reported success with this method. Today, our understanding of why this worked is that he re-injured an area, causing a new inflammation response, which healed the damage. This is shockingly similar to prolotherapy.

Here is more information about the modern history of prolotherapy.

A Prolotherapy Treatment

The goal of prolotherapy is to stimulate tissue repair by causing localized inflammation in tendons and ligaments. The way this is done is through injection of an “irritant solution.” An irritant solution is anything that will safely cause an inflammation response. What exactly goes in the solution that the patient is injected with may vary. A classical ingredient has been plain dextrose. Solutions can be customized to be “weak” or “strong”, depending on how much inflammation a physician is seeking to create.

A prolotherapy treatment can involve dozens of injections. It can even involve well over 100 injections in one sitting. This depends on how extensive the ligament damage is in the patient.

After the treatment, a patient will typically be sore at the injection sites for a few days. Gradually, the patient will notice improvement in pain. A course of prolotherapy is typically between three and six sessions. Each session can be spaced around four to six weeks apart. After each session, the patient’s pain will improve, and more often than not, will result in complete recovery.

The best way to learn about a treatment is probably watching a video! Here is a prolotherapy treatment to the shoulder:

For more videos, go to this website and search for “prolotherapy.” You can see plenty of treatment videos there.

Joint Degeneration and Meniscus Injuries

It should also be mentioned, that prolotherapy actually stimulates the body to repair joint degeneration and meniscus injuries, in addition to tendon and ligament injuries. This makes prolotherapy an even more powerful treatment, with the ability to help pain sufferers avoid costly, and less effective surgeries.

Not All Prolotherapists Are Equally Skilled

This is probably the number one reason why a person might not get satisfactory relief with prolotherapy. Take a look at the article I mentioned earlier from Mayo Clinic.

Aside from a few small things, the author says a prolotherapy session sometimes involves giving multiple injections. Whatever they were studying hardly deserves being called prolotherapy. A successful treatment will involve many injections. One injection is ludicrous.

This article is a perfect example of lack of education doctors have regarding prolotherapy. A skilled prolotherapist will know where to give injections, how many injections to give, how much solution to inject, and what specific type of solution to inject. To become an effective prolotherapist takes significant training.

Prolotherapy is probably the best treatment for chronic pain known to date. The number of skilled physicians is however limited, as the treatment still remains relatively unpopular.

So what is in the future of prolotherapy?

Disclaimer: This article is not medical advice. This is opinion and is for informational purposes only. If seeking medical advice, consult a licensed physician.

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Prolotherapy Cures Chronic Pain- Part 5 of 5

Scientific Living — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:51:29 +0000

Prolotherapy is in fact a tremendously effective treatment for chronic painful conditions. Working from that point of view, we must acknowledge that it has yet to become widely known.

Difficulties with Researching Prolotherapy

The gold standard in research is the double blind, placebo controlled study. This is simply impossible to do with prolotherapy. On one hand, it is a challenge to control for the skill of the physician. One might say that only one physician could be used in the study then? Well, what if you get a mediocre prolotherapist? Then you will get mediocre results.

Also, injecting a patient with a placebo is not possible. The effect of needling an injured area itself causes inflammation, and has a proliferation effect.

As is, modern medicine may never be totally satisfied with studies of prolotherapy.

Research Versus Clinical Experience

Which would you rather have:

1. A treatment that has been thoroughly researched and shown to improve chronic pain by a small amount?
2. A treatment that has not been thoroughly researched, but has anecdotal experience of tens of thousands of people being freed of their pain, and only and handful of people ever having negative complaints about the therapy?

The modern medical community hardly even listens to number two. Though there is a matter of personal opinion here, I personally think it is insane not to pick number two over number one.

Journal of Prolotherapy

There is however, a medical journal devoted to prolotherapy. It’s called The Journal of Prolotherapy.

Books

There are some books on prolotherapy, mostly written by Dr. Ross Hauser.

Finding a Prolotherapist

There is a listing of prolotherapists. A fulltime prolotherapist is the best bet when trying to find a skilled practitioner.

Summary

Prolotherapy is a proven treatment for chronic pain, that has the potential for 100 percent alleviation in the majority of cases. It is safe and nontoxic. Prolotherapy can very easily be cheaper than recurrent expenses of pain medication, which will not provide anywhere near the results that prolotherapy can. Prolotherapy is best done when performed by a skilled prolotherapist. Be on the lookout for uneducated prolotherapists. It is safest to find a doctor who does prolotherapy fulltime.

This series really only scratches the surface of chronic pain treatment with prolotherapy. There are so many other factors that are involved like diet, hormones, infection, supplements, nutrition, and other forms of prolotherapy such as prolozone, platelet rich plasma, and other growth factors.

Please read the disclaimer at the bottom of the page. This is not medical advice, and is for informational purposes only.

Disclaimer: This article is not medical advice. This is opinion and is for informational purposes only. If seeking medical advice, consult a licensed physician.

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