Coming up on my second anniversary of living with golfer’s elbow and now tennis elbow pain, I was more moody, desperate and negative than ever. I was ready to escalate matters. I spoke to yet another physician – a very famous doctor in the Bay Area that has treated every well known, superstar athlete you can name. He laid out 2 immediate options I could try – both costing several hundred dollars out of pocket. I already had spent thousands, cost didn’t matter and I couldn’t bear the thought of giving up activity or simply lifting my kids or carrying groceries for the rest of my life.
He first mentioned trying a cortisone shot. But from his voice, I could tell he wasn’t too optimistic about it. That was good because I had gotten one in my back for lower back pain years ago that did zilch. So we opted for option number two, which after much reading and research, I was very very very excited about. And so was the physician. Plasma rich platelet injection to instantly heal elbow pain, I couldn’t wait!
Plasma rich platelet injection or PRP may sound gruesome (as it turned out it is kinda gruesome), it and other variations of it have been tried by the some of the world’s top athletes with supposedly amazing results. And the science behind it seemed very sound as it is based on your own stem cell regeneration. On top of that, it felt too good to be true in that the cure (yes, an actual medical cure) would happen almost instantly. And because it is a medical procedure widely done all over the country and the world, it felt like a real hope for my golfer’s elbow and tennis elbow pain.
The procedure itself is very straightforward. It’s relatively quick and low risk. The idea is to inject the injury site with your own platelets from your own blood that attacks whatever foreign element and scarring and swelling and injury is irritating that part of the body. In my case, platelets or stem cells from my own body would work in and around my elbow to regenerate healthy cells and tissue so that what once was healthy is made healthy again. And because it’s stem cell regeneration, it happens instantly.
In addition to hearing about PRP from an orthopedic physician, I casually asked a friend who had gotten the procedure done after almost giving up on a strained hamstring that wouldn’t heal. He told me that at the injection site, he was instantly pain free and needed to go back in to inject a small corner of the lower hamstring where he still felt some pain. It sounded amazing – whatever they do to harvest my platelets and then put back into my pain site, go for it. I literally could not wait until my procedure date.
There are a few different variations of this procedure – some in the US and others only in other countries - and a simple Google search will give you an idea how big this practice is and all of those variations. Some do multiple injections in the span of just a few days, while in the US, physicians believe that if it’s going to work, a single PRP injection is all that is needed.
So I arrived for my appointment and here’s what went down. They first draw blood – not all that much but my nurse had a terrible time with the draw and so these multiple sticks in my arms turned out to be the worst part of it all. I am not on an operating table or anything that feels like an invasive procedure. The doctor comes in and says he will numb the area of injection – it feels like a giant novocaine shot. The shot stings for a second as it’s literally being driven into my elbow. But the novocaine sets in immediately and I go numb. I have to honestly admit, when my elbow went number, I felt joyous at the pain-free feeling, which I had not experienced in months.
The doctor takes the vial of blood and goes into another room where there is a centrifuge. He’s talking to me the whole time and telling me what is happening. He spins the blood for a few minutes, which separates the platelets from the rest of the blood. This rich serum with the magical power to regenerate body parts then is sucked into a syringe. Armed with what I know will finally end my misery with golfer’s elbow and tennis elbow, I watch him stick the needle here and there around the source of my elbow pain injecting tiny amounts of my own platelet. In less than 10 minutes, he’s done and most of that time was spent waiting for the centrifuge.
He bandages me up and tells me that while it should be working literally at that moment, just to be sure stay off of the elbow and restrict all activity for a couple of days. Novocaine was flowing through my right arm still and so it was pain free and I wondered if I would ever feel golfer’s elbow or tennis elbow pain again when it wore off.
As it turned out, I didn’t feel much pain – perhaps it was my imagination and I certainly was babying it but hours later when I knew the novocaine was out of my system, I couldn’t believe that PRP may have worked and instantly. For the next two days, I lived as if I had one arm. There were hints of pain but I couldn’t know for sure – that’s how much I was babying it. I decided to go beyond the few days the doctor said and continued to live an inconvenient life of a one armed person. In the end, I knew that either the elbow was fixed for good or it wasn’t and I needed to find out.
I started moving the arm, lifting light objects, opening doors and jars and sure enough, the elbow pain slowly started to surface. I couldn’t believe it and wanted to be denial. But it was clear, if I froze my right arm, the elbow pain would subside as one would expect. As soon as I resumed any activity, the golfer’s elbow and tennis elbow would flare up again. I was thoroughly dejected - $700 and my hopes and dreams later, PRP had not worked for my elbow pain.
Much clinical research has been done since my experiment with PRP with evidence of high success rate on elbow tendonitis. So don't dismiss this option and discuss it with your physician.
But if you are willing to spend hundreds of dollars and do an invasive procedure, perhaps try the non-invasive method that melted away my pain in less than two weeks. Or if you're eager to try something more medical, I also reveal a less invasive and recent technology that is based on the same principle of stem cell regeneration as PRP! Whatever you're interested in, click here to jump to the all-natural, 11 minutes a day method that allowed me to go from chronic pain to pain-free in less than 2 weeks.
If you're just having fun (at my expense!) and want to read about the even more extreme (and dangerous as it turned out)idea I pursued, have a look here.