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Radio Show
Transcript
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
Tennis Elbow
Dr. Gene: My name is Dr. Gene and I
have the privilege of co-hosting the
Dr. Marc Darrow show with
Dr. Darrow.
Dr. Darrow is a board certified physiatrist, he specializes in physical
medicine and rehabilitation. He is the medical director of Joint
Rehabilitation and Sports Medicine Center in West Los Angeles.
Dr. Darrow's focus of his practice is on musculo-skeletal injury. He is
terrific in pain management. As an avid sports enthusiast, Dr. Darrow
discovered
Prolotherapy
after an injury on the golf course which caused him to suffer the kind
of chronic pain that afflicts millions of Americans. And a skeptical Dr.
Darrow became a believer in the therapeutic healing powers of
Prolotherapy and
Trigger Point injections, only
after one treatment, since then he has devoted his practice to
Prolotherapy, a little known natural therapy that is really
revolutionizing the way we treat chronic pain. As always Dr. Darrow it
is a pleasure talking to you this Saturday morning.
Dr. Darrow: Thank you Dr. Gene. It is always a pleasure to be
with you on Saturday mornings.
Dr. Gene: You know we have a
technique here that you and I have been speaking about for many weeks,
and it is a technique, to which you have coined a term, "taking
the surgery out of pain," if just those people, who have gone to
their general practitioners and had an MRI, and had the MRI read were
told that they have to have a surgery, were given this option, in so
many of those cases you have been so successful and preventing that
surgery from happening.
Dr. Darrow: Well we get that every
day, we have maybe 4 to 6 to 8 new patients a day and out of those there
is always at least one who has a surgical date set up and we find that
it is really not a surgical procedure which is necessary, we do
Prolotherapy and we heal the people.
Dr. Gene: Now I know through
advancements in medical procedures, worn out joints have been replaced,
ligaments
reconstructed. If one is looking for an non-evasive solutions to chronic
pain, let's say the results of stretched or torn connective tissue. This
procedure, Prolotherapy, really seems to be the answer for them.
Dr. Darrow: Well it really it does.
We have people who have bone on bone arthritis that had Prolotherapy
that ended up pain free. We know that there are nearly 300,000 total
knee replacements done every year. That seems crazy to me when most of
the time this doesn't have to be done. There is something like 400,000
low back surgeries done every year, most of it I don't think has to be
done. We get the people who already had it done, and occasionally people
who have other things done and mention that they also had back surgery
and did better, unfortunately I do not think that a lot of these
procedures did well for patients.
The problem is....is that Prolotherapy is
not very well known and even though we had some pretty important people
like C. Everett Koop, our previous surgeon general who was our greatest
proponent of Prolotherapy and was a Prolotherapist himself. The medical
population doesn't know about it. It is only the doctors who had
Prolotherapy done to them know how good it is, and I am one of those
doctors. It made a believer out of me very instantaneously and I
have been using it on most of my patients ever since.
WHAT IS PROLOTHERAPY?
My definition of Prolotherapy is the natural stimulation of the body
to produce more
collagen
or
cartilage.
And the way we do that is an
injection
technique with a very thin needle. In most places of the body we use an
anesthetic before hand, hence you do not even feel the needle. It
actually stimulates an immune response which creates some
inflammation
and brings fibroblasts to the area which create and build new collagen,
the body is made of about 90% of collagen, and in the knee there is
actually a study that says it grows cartilage by bringing chondroblasts
which are immune cells to the area. It can actually build up the
cartilage in the knee.
Dr. Gene: So basically speaking,
any type of weekend-warrior, any type of sports injury in general, for
arthritis, or over use syndrome (can benefit).
Dr. Darrow: Well anyone who has
pain that is in muscles, joints, tendons, ligaments, all that stuff is
made out of collagen. Many of these areas we injury around the joints
are just pure collagen, if you look at them, you would see that they are
the white tissues, they are white because they have no or little direct
blood supply, they don't heal up easily. In some people they heal up at
all because of this poor blood supply. People will have chronic sprains
of the ligaments and joints for years. We had people come in, in fact a
listener of this show had lower back for 45 years, he came in and after
one injection he was pain free.
Prolotherapy just makes sense, if you can
rejuvenate the body, by giving a little bit of inflammation to it, you
can heal it up.
Dr. Gene: The risk of using
Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, initially they may help, but they
really get in the way of the healing process.
Dr. Darrow: It really does, you
know the typically thing that most doctors prescribe when someone has an
injury or arthritis is an
NSAIDS
(Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs), but there are 100,000 people a
year who are hospitalized with GI bleed, there is also problems with
kidney failure, liver failure, and things of that nature. And on top of
that there are studies coming out now that show that chronic NSAIDs use
actually causes more joint destruction than not taking any at all.
CALLER: I had a question, I wanted
to know how the doctor felt about repetitive stress injury as the result
of computer use.
Dr. Darrow: That is a great
question, we have found an epidemic of people who are having repetitive
use syndromes of their fingers, wrists and
elbows,
shoulders, sometimes all of
that from computer use. We talk about the proper ergonomics about the
proper hand placement around different equipment, the proper distance of
the chair to the equipment, the type of chair, etc.
In the office, there are people who are on
the computer all day long, they do not have a chance. Doing anything
repetitively, they are going to get an overuse syndrome. I see people
come into the office sometimes with their arm tucked around their
abdomen. They are afraid to touch anything with it because they hurt so
bad.
One of the greatest things to watch is to
do some Prolotherapy into the area and seeing the tissue that has been
worn down, regrow,
The thing that is so unique about this is
people are always coming in and telling me, I am already inflamed, why
do you want to inflame me anymore and make it worse? And Prolotherapy
actually does this, it actually re-inflames the area, brings up more
inflammation in a very short period of time, usually 24 hours, which
will bring more blood supply to the area, and these fibroblasts and
chondroblasts that actually help regrow tissue. It is the chronic low
level inflammation that hurts and to get over it we have to increase the
inflammation a little bit. The body's natural healing response is
inflammation. Prolotherapy has helped so many people with computer
overuse syndromes, not just computer over use, we have musicians and
athletes who also get overuse syndrome.
Tennis Elbow for the most part is an
overuse syndrome, it occurs usually because the backhand is
not performed correctly. Which is to keep the elbow more in an extended
position, those beginners or players who do not have proper technique
down, will bend the elbow when they are ready to hit the ball and then
they will straighten it out. This causes quite a bit of overuse strain.
What we do is inject around the elbow and
we are actually thickening up the tendon that attaches to the bone.
There was a study done before and after Prolotherapy in the ligaments of
the low back which showed a 50% growth of the ligament itself and a
200-400% strength growth. So that is what we are doing, growing more
tissue, strengthening the area.
Dr. Gene: How would you compare
this to arthroscopic surgery?
Dr. Darrow: My way of thinking is
that it is a very invasive technique, even though it is much less
evasive than cutting the area open with a knife, but at the same time,
you are typically poking two or three holes the size of a pencil into
the tissue, and creating an awful lot of destruction by just entering
the area. And I was one of the poor unfortunate souls that had
arthroscopic surgery on my shoulder when I was in medical school because
my boss at the time did it. And my arm blew up like a balloon and it
took about a year for that shoulder to calm down enough to get back the
level of pain it was at before the surgery. I later learned about
Prolotherapy, injected myself in the shoulder and it healed right up.
Now for the pain the caller has the
"lateral epicondylitis" or tennis elbow, pain around the outside of the
elbow, typically Prolotherapy will take 4-5 sessions to clean that up.
Now if you use the computer a lot, and this action caused the pain in
the first place, it will cause it again if you are not careful. Find
equipment that is ergonomically suited for you. |
