Can PRP Therapy Improve My Recovery After Surgery?

Your doctor says surgery is your best path forward for regaining pain-free function, but you’re not looking forward to the timeout that recovery requires. It used to be that you had to wait it out and go at your body’s healing pace, but with platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy, we can speed this process along.

As both a sports medicine and regenerative medicine specialist, Dr. Moisés Irizarry-Román understands the frustration that can come with surgery. You’ve likely been sidelined for quite some time by a musculoskeletal injury and you know that surgery is going to extend this forced timeout.

Fortunately, with PRP therapy at No Mercy Sports Medicine in Miami, Florida, we can reduce your recovery time after surgery, allowing you to get back to your life more quickly.

Your platelets and healing 

Your body is equipped with more than 1 trillion platelets, which are your frontline cells when it comes to tissue damage. When you experience tissue damage, your platelets jump into action to prevent your body from losing too much blood, a process that’s called hemostasis. 

Once these flat cells clot together to plug the breech, they initiate a wound healing cascade by releasing:

• Cytokines
• Growth factors
• Fibronectin
• Vitronectin
• Sphingosine 1-phosphate

These medical terms might not mean much to you, but to your body, they’re necessary tools for healing and repairing damaged tissues.

PRP therapy and wound healing

Even with advanced laparoscopic techniques that require very small incisions, some tissue damage is unavoidable during surgery. To help repair this damage and heal more quickly, we can unleash a concentrate of healing platelets into the area through PRP therapy.

The platelets in PRP come from your own blood — we simply isolate and concentrate them — which means your body readily accepts the additional resources. In effect, we’re redirecting and amplifying your own platelets to encourage faster wound healing after surgery.

Proven success

To give you an idea about how PRP therapy can help you heal more quickly after surgery, we want to highlight some interesting research.

In one study, 50 patients who underwent carpal tunnel surgery were split into two groups — half received PRP therapy post-surgically. At the six-week mark after surgery, only the group that received PRP regained pre-surgical levels of hand grip strength.

A report that reviewed several PRP studies regarding arthroscopic rotator cuff repairs showed that patients who received PRP therapy experienced less postoperative pain. And there’s evidence that the treatments promoted improved functional recovery.

When we add PRP therapy to your post-surgical plan, our goal is to reduce pain and speed up healing. If you want to learn more about the role that PRP therapy can play in your surgery recovery, please contact No Mercy Sports Medicine to set up an appointment.