According to a study done in 2006, approximately 7.5 million people visited a doctor because of shoulder pain, including upper arm sprains or strains and at least 100 million people living in the United States suffer from some sort of chronic musculoskeletal pain. This does not have to be! You can live an active and pain free life.

PRP therapy or platelet-rich plasma therapy can be used to treat conditions including but not limited to rotator cuff tendinitis, hamstrings, Achilles tendon injuries and tennis elbow. The process starts with having about 30 milliliters of blood drawn from the patient and then put in a centrifuge to separate the platelet-rich plasma. The platelets are then injected into the area where the injury is. The entire process takes about 20 minutes. PRP is thought to jump start a response from the body that makes it think that there is a fresh injury and thus begins the process of healing. Many times, surgery can be avoided by taking this route. Using PRP can be a great alternative to surgery and has proved very successful on numerous people, including athletes but it does not have to just be for athletes. Non-athletes still can experience some similar types of pain. More than half the population has the possibility of developing symptomatic knee by 85 years of age.

Stem cell therapy is another way to treat or prevent diseases, conditions and musculoskeletal pain by using the stem cells. A good example of stem cell therapy is a bone marrow transplant procedure. This is the most widely used stem cell treatment. However, there are studies and procedures beginning to take place that use the stem cells from umbilical cord blood. Stem cells play a very important part in the healing and regeneration of tissue. Although stem cell therapy can be a lot more involved than PRP it is still very effective.

There are too many people that live with musculoskeletal pain and think that there is nothing they can do about it. There are permanent fixes to these problems, you just have to talk to your doctor to find out which method works best for you. Many times the option is there to, for example, repair orthopedic injuries, but we are just looking for a quick fix like a surgery or something like that to get back on our feet as quick as possible. However, if you would allow a different, less invasive method first before jumping to surgery, there is a very good possibility that surgery will not even be necessary in the long run.