Now that I am getting older, my joints are beginning to deteriorate.
I was told it was a loss of the cartilage that is in between the joints.
I didn’t care what caused the arthritis, but I did care about how to handle the pain. I didn’t want to have a knee replacement. I saw how scarred my mom’s knees were from all the knee replacements she had done. I wanted to put that off until I was too old to care about the scarring. I was barely in my sixties, and I still wanted to do marathons. My knee doctor told me they were doing platelet rich plasma, or what is called PRP in short. They took the blood from the PRP recipient and separated the plasma. The plasma had recently been used to help heal patients. It takes up to several weeks for the healing to occur, but when the platelet rich plasma is placed in the joint, it helps to heal the area and the body begins regenerating the cartilage. I had injections in my knee, but it wasn’t platelet rich plasma injections. The injections made it difficult to walk, and my leg swelled up like a balloon. I still wanted to try the PRP injections. I talked to my orthopedist and he said he could give them to me in the office. I had blood drawn and then they used centrifugal force to separate the platelets and plasma from the blood. They use my own PRP and the PRP injections are placed in my knee. It took a couple of weeks for it to start working, but it worked better than a knee replacement.
Regenerative injections