Olympians using PRP prolotherapy treatment are not cheaters
Elite athletes use PRP prolotherapy for injuries
Sorry about the lack of activity on the blog the last couple of days. With the 2010 Winter Olympics kicking off here this weekend, I’ve been running around to the different events and enjoying being right in the middle of it all.
You know athletes will use any means necessary to heal an injury and return to competition as fast as possible. They don’t care about the scientific data collected from randomized control trial studies on various treatments. Athletes care about results. So when a recent Dutch study concluded that platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy was no more effective than placebo for the treatment of Achilles tendon injuries, it isn’t likely to deter athletes from continuing to pursue PRP prolotherapy treatment, especially since there has been so much positive anecdotal feedback from high-perfomance athletes who have been treated with PRP.
One such athlete is Canadian men’s Olympic figure skating national champion, Patrick Chan. However, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is not completely convinced that PRP prolotherapy is not somehow performance-enhancing. The fact is that PRP prolotherapy involves drawing a patient’s blood, spinning it down in a special centrifuge to concentrate platelets and growth factors, and then re-injecting the platelets at the site of ligament or tendon injuries to stimulate tissue repair. It has nothing to do with blood doping which involves reinjecting one’s own red blood cells to increase oxygen-carrying capacity in the blood which can be very advantageous, especially for endurance events.
So, the benefits of PRP prolotherapy are being questioned yet it is also under scrutiny by WADA as being a potentially performing-enhancing procedure. Is it really that hard for people to believe that you can stimulate the body to heal itself without using drugs or steroids? SHEESH!!!
