Chronic joint, nerve, or back pain often comes with a frustrating treatment cycle. You take daily oral medications that offer at least some relief, but the trade-off is felt in unwanted drowsiness, brain fog, and stomach upset. And once the medication wears off, you are back to square one.

Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections are a pain management alternative to prescription medications. But they come with their own potential frustration cycle. When injections are administered in a broad, unguided way, their full benefits are never realized. Patients are left right back where they started: in pain.

Fortunately, clinics like Lone Star Pain Medicine in Weatherford, Texas, don’t rely on unguided injections. Instead, they practice the gold standard of PRP therapy: targeted injections using medical imaging to ensure that PRP material is delivered exactly where it is most needed.

Hitting the Bullseye

If you have ever tried archery or shooting at a gun range, you are familiar with the bullseye on a target. The goal is to hit that mark directly in the center. The doctors at Lone Star think of PRP injections the same way. If they can hit the bullseye of pain, the injections will have maximum impact. Why is this necessary?

The human musculoskeletal and nervous systems are made up of intricate webs of overlapping tissue. Because of this biological architecture, pain caused by a tiny facet joint anomaly can feel like a lower back muscle strain to the average patient. How is a doctor to know exactly what is causing a patient’s pain and its origin?

Blind PRP injections can easily result in medication being delivered into healthy tissue rather than the actual nerve or joint causing the patient’s pain. Not only would this not relieve pain, but it could also potentially damage healthy tissue. So doctors rely on fluoroscopy or high-resolution ultrasound to guide their needles during PRP procedures.

Maximizing Relief, Minimizing Side Effects

Every medical treatment comes with potential side effects. When patients take pain medication, that medication travels through the bloodstream and affects the heart, liver, brain, and digestive tract. All of that is just to deal with a localized issue in the patient’s knee or back.

PRP injections are remarkably different in that they do not affect any other part of the body. An injection delivers the PRP material (or a combination of platelet-rich plasma and anesthetic) directly into the affected tissue. Here’s why it’s a better option:

• Lower Dosages – Doctors can recommend significantly lower doses for each injection because PRP bioavailability is higher.

• Fewer Side Effects – PRP injections have fewer side effects attached to them. Patients avoid the fatigue, higher blood pressure, and gastrointestinal distress that comes with medications. About the only notable side effect with PRP therapy is the same minimal injection site pain common to all injections.

• Immediate Feedback – When anesthetic is included in a PRP injection, it offers temporary pain relief. That relief is immediate feedback that tells the doctor he delivered the material exactly where it was needed.

The importance of immediate feedback can’t be understated. Once a doctor confirms his diagnosis and the targeted tissue, he can design future treatments to achieve even better results. He’s not guessing about pain origin or the material delivery.

Restoring Function and Quality of Life

Targeted PRP injections serve another purpose, at least to the doctors at Lone Star. One of their main goals in pain medicine is to restore function so that patients can enjoy a better quality of life. Because targeted injections tend to achieve better results, they are the gold standard for improvements in both quality of life and function.