Hurt Yourself Skiing? How to Know When to See a Doctor?
Skiing is a fun, exciting sport. However, like any activity, injuries can and do occur. Trying to decide if you need to see a San Francisco sports medicine doctor? Read on to find out.
A doctor must carefully balance multiple objectives when treating athletes. Injuries take time and therapy to heal properly, but some players have trouble waiting that long. With PRP therapy, your physician can speed up healing and help prevent re-injury as you undergo rehabilitation.
As sports medicine doctors in San Francisco California, Dr. Jeffrey Halbrecht and Dr. Ephraim Dickinson at The Institute for Arthroscopy & Sports Medicine (IASM) use platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections to boost the healing process from soft tissue injuries or surgery.
Using a sophisticated centrifuge technique, we produce platelet-rich plasma from your own blood. This process separates your blood into its key components: white blood cells, red blood cells, platelets, and the plasma medium that carries it through your bloodstream.
While red and white blood cells carry oxygen and support your immune system, respectively, platelets are responsible for clotting and growth hormones. This is what makes them central to the healing process.
However, many sports injuries involving cartilage, tendons, or muscles take additional time to heal because of the lack of blood flow to those areas. PRP injections can target those areas and deliver platelets directly, accelerating healing for an accelerated recovery time.
We inject the prepared PRP into the site of your injury to encourage the production and attraction of growth factors, facilitating healing. This not only reduces downtime, but you’ll find it assists in other areas of your recovery. Additional benefits of PRP therapy include:
Dr. Halbrecht and Dr. Dickinson use this technique regularly; it’s one of the many tools of a sports medicine doctor in San Francisco. Patients can benefit from the multiple advantages of PRP and don’t have to worry about adverse side effects thanks to the biocompatible nature of the plasma.
We’ve found PRP to be exceptionally beneficial for patients who’ve suffered difficult-to-treat-and-rehabilitate knee injuries. As with any type of treatment, it’s important to have PRP injections administered by an experienced knee surgeon. San Francisco-based Dr. Halbrecht and Dr. Dickinson can help you with professional PRP therapy.
The entire PRP preparation and application process only takes around 30 minutes in our office. You’ll be in and out and back to your rehabilitation program swiftly. Want to know more? Contact the team at IASM by calling 415-233-7996, or book a visit online.
