Dr. Weeks Comment: You won’t read much about this because it is ….. inexpensive!
Healing Injuries With Your Own Blood
By Tara Parker-Pope
Your Marathon
Coaching, tips and inspiration to get you race-ready.
In her latest Personal Best column, New York Times reporter Gina Kolata explores a new treatment that uses a person’s own blood to help heal injuries.
The technique has been used by Super Bowl athletes, major league pitchers and professional soccer players and, as an earlier Times article explains:
The method, which is strikingly straightforward and easy to perform, centers on injecting portions of a patient’s blood directly into the injured area, which catalyzes the body’s instincts to repair muscle, bone and other tissue. Most enticing, many doctors said, is that the technique appears to help regenerate ligament and tendon fibers, which could shorten rehabilitation time and possibly obviate surgery.
Gina explains that, given the lack of research on the treatment, she has remained skeptical. However, as she writes in her column, struggling with a serious sports injury of her own left her hopeful and open to the treatment for herself.
No matter how it goes, I will never know if the blood injection helped me. I have no way of knowing what would have happened if I had not had the injection and simply took two weeks off from running.
Read the full column, “Seeking Help for an Injury, At Any Price,” to learn more about her course of treatment.