4 Benefits of Walk-In Clinic Care
Walk-in clinics are common across the United States, with an estimated 11,000 clinics nationwide. There are particular benefits to choosing walk-in clinic care. Here, we highlight four.
How Exactly Does PRP Therapy Work?
Increasingly, both patients and the medical world are turning away from pharmaceutical and surgical solutions, particularly as first-line therapies. As well, there’s a desire to add natural solutions that work well in combination with existing treatments, helping your body to heal itself naturally.
Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy provides a powerful healing boost that applies to many conditions and injuries. Perhaps its most attractive feature is safety, since PRP is generated from your own blood.
At South Central Family Practice Clinic in Soldotna, Alaska, we’re PRP specialists. We turn to PRP to assist healing of soft tissue injuries as well as providing a boost for many cosmetic procedures. We even use it to treat hair loss!
It’s natural to wonder how exactly PRP works, given its remarkable versatility. Although much remains to be studied about the precise chemistry and mechanisms of PRP, today, we’ll look at both the practice and the theory of the process.
The power of platelets
If you’ve given platelets much thought, you likely know that they’re the blood component that causes clotting. When you have a bleeding cut or scrape, it’s platelets that stop the bleeding and begin the healing process.
It isn’t long before your injury vanishes, and this is in part due to other capabilities of platelets. In particular, hormones called growth factors arrive in these blood particles, helping to guide the healing process, including new tissue creation.
Harvesting platelets
Using platelets in PRP therapy is a simple process. Your treatment starts with a blood sample drawing, just as you’d have for a typical blood test.
We separate the components of your blood by centrifuging. The platelets form a layer between the light plasma and dense red blood cells. We extract these concentrated platelets, and your treatment is ready to start.
PRP injections
The prepared PRP serum is simply injected into the treatment area for your needs, carrying as many as 10 times the number of platelets as there’d be in the same amount of whole blood. It’s this concentration where the power of PRP lies.
Normally, natural healing can only progress at the rate at which the raw materials arrive at the site of a tissue problem. By injecting PRP directly into an injury location, we add a burst of growth factor hormones that increase the healing capabilities around the injection site.
The effects of PRP include reduced pain and inflammation, as well as helping your body convert stem cells into the differentiated cells necessary to restore tissue. Medical conditions that benefit from PRP therapy include:
- Osteoarthritis
- Joints suffering from the effects of other arthritis forms
- Tendon injuries
- Ligament and muscle injuries
- Slow-healing wounds
PRP has powerful cosmetic applications, too. We use PRP to treat:
- Some types of hair loss
- Skin laxity
- Collagen loss
- Sun damage to the skin
- Scar damage
New applications for PRP emerge regularly. It’s a safe treatment since it’s simply a relocation of your natural healing resources.
Find out more by contacting South Central Family Practice Clinic online or by phone. Book your appointment today.
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