If you’ve suffered a muscle tear, you may be wondering what options are available to help you recover. Torn muscles can be debilitating, and our team at Phoenix Regenerative Medicine in Tempe, AZ, is here to help you find the right treatment for your needs.
How Can You Treat a Muscle Tear?
The Use of OrthoBiologics
OrthoBiologics has revolutionized orthopedic care. It used to be that surgery was the only option to correct many common orthopedic injuries, such as a muscle tear. Now that OrthoBiologics has entered the scene, there’s an alternative treatment that can help some patients avoid surgery and the downtime that comes with it.
When the body suffers an injury and becomes inflamed, this triggers a response from our tissue growth factors. This, in turn, stimulates cells to begin the healing process. OrthoBiologics joins the body’s natural fight, to make the healing process quicker and more effective.
What Is OrthoBiologics?
The term OrthoBiologics combines the word “ortho,” which means bones, and “biologics,” the body’s natural substances that help heal our damaged tissues.
As its name suggests, OrthoBiologics gives our body a boost in its healing abilities. It also helps with overcoming inflammatory conditions and restoring better functionality to the area. OrthoBiologics can be used in numerous ways and can come in multiple forms. It can be used for acute and chronic injuries alike.
You Can Use OrthoBiologics Together With Surgery
If your injury requires surgery, OrthoBiologics may still be able to help. Surgery can have an extensive recovery time attached to it. OrthoBiologics can help speed up your healing process so you can achieve a better level of comfort and functionality as quickly as possible.
We Specialize in Amniotic Allografts
An Amniotic Allograft is full of high-quality growth factors, essential nutrients and proteins, hyaluronic acid, and anti-inflammatory agents.
This powerful cocktail gives the body what it needs to heal and improve functionality faster than it can on its own. Since it’s a biologic treatment, it promotes safe and natural healing in the treated areas of your body. The amniotic tissue used in this treatment does not contain stem cells.
Aging and the Healing Process
As the body ages, it has an increasingly difficult time healing itself. Biologic therapeutics, such as an Amniotic Allograft treatment, not only help stimulate the healing process, but can also draw the body’s own healing properties to the area for an especially powerful healing response.
The Use of Image Guidance
Image guidance helps us to pinpoint exactly where to apply your treatment. This can be a helpful tool even when it comes to injections. It enables us to be extremely accurate and get the treatment exactly where it needs to go.
Amniotic Allograft injections will be carried out in a setting that allows us to be sterile and monitor your vital signs. After treatment, you can be on your way and get back to your regular routine.
What To Expect After Treatment
Since this treatment works with your body, your symptoms should gradually decrease after treatment. Most patients can notice a significant decrease in their pain and an improvement in their mobility within the eight-week mark.
The positive effects of treatment can last months or even a year, especially when it’s combined with viscosupplementation.
Viscosupplementation
If you’re struggling with a loss of mobility after an injury, you may also be battling the intense frustration that comes with that. Viscosupplementation can help you get back on track by offering pain relief and helping to restore proper movement.
This is another alternative to surgery. Its minimally invasive nature can offer you numerous benefits without having to go under the knife.
Hyaluronic Acid
This treatment consists of a gel injection that contains hyaluronic acid. The gel itself helps to lubricate affected joints, while the hyaluronic acid can improve flexibility, hydration, and elasticity.
This injection can be paired with some of our other treatments as we address muscle injuries. It is also excellent at treating joint and knee issues. It can help our patients to either avoid or delay a total knee replacement, and it can help slow down disease progression in the joint.
PRP Therapy
Another treatment we offer is PRP therapy, which harnesses the healing power of the platelet-rich plasma in your own blood. This PRP can relieve pain and expedite healing at the same time.
The Three Steps of Treatment
The first step of treatment will be to take a blood sample. This sample is usually taken from your arm, just like when you get a blood test. Usually, one or several small vials of blood are taken for treatment.
After the blood draw, we’ll use our centrifuge machine to spin the blood until it separates into different layers. When the plasma and platelets in your blood merge, it creates the PRP we use for treatment. We will then take the PRP and deliver it, and its potent healing abilities, to the injured area that needs it the most.
What Can PRP Treatment Help You With?
In addition to expediting the healing of a muscle tear, PRP can help with other conditions such as:
- Sprains affecting your ligaments
- Repetitive motion injuries
- Tendonitis
- A torn rotator cuff
- ACL injuries
- Tennis elbow
- Injuries affecting your soft tissues
Healing and Blood Flow
Less blood flow usually translates to a slower healing process. That’s bad news when it comes to ligament and tendon injuries in particular. PRP can offer these areas some much-needed support while strengthening your tissues at the same time.
How Long Does It Take?
This completely non-surgical treatment will be carried out by our team in an outpatient setting.
The whole PRP process takes about an hour. Most of this time is due to the fact that each PRP treatment comes from the patient’s body and is for the patient only. That means we have to allow time for the blood draw and use of the centrifuge. The injection itself usually takes 10 minutes or less.
Follow-Up Treatments
Depending on what your condition calls for, you may only need one initial treatment, or we may recommend a series of treatments to set a good comfort-level baseline for you.
After this baseline is set, patients with chronic issues or long-term injuries may want to have a follow-up treatment about every four to six months.
Considering Your Needs
It’s important to remember that treatment schedules can be flexible. You may be able to comfortably stretch out your time between treatments even longer than six months.
You can, of course, decide not to have regularly scheduled treatments at all, and just seek us out when you feel a return of your symptoms. We can take both your needs and your goals into consideration when we recommend a schedule that we believe will work best for you.
Physical Therapy
Physical therapy can help relieve pain, and improve mobility and functionality. It also plays a role in preventing an injury from causing physical disabilities. In cases where physical disabilities due to the injury are inevitable, physical therapy can still help limit the severity.
A physical therapist will work with you one-on-one. They’ll have a good understanding of the injury you’ve suffered, and the best way to help your body manage it. They can teach you exercises that promote healing, fitness, and mobility.
Is Physical Therapy a Good Fit for You?
Physical therapy is helpful for traumatic injuries, but it can also be very helpful for patients who have suffered a minor injury as well. In short, physical therapy can help almost anyone who is struggling with muscle or joint injuries and pain.
Occupational Therapy
Occupational therapy helps you to take what you’ve learned from physical therapy and apply it to your daily life.
Occupational therapists can give you tips and tricks on how you can better your comfort levels. Some common suggestions you may receive from an occupational therapist can include:
- Joint protection techniques
- Ways you can exercise safely
- The right braces or compression garments
- Different techniques on handling pain during activity and rest
Cortisone Injections
Cortisone injections are a steroid shot. This treatment can relieve inflammation in the tendons, joints, and bursa, and it can also reduce inflammation in your muscles.
With professional administration, this can be a great option for patients looking to reduce their pain and inflammation as they heal.
Machines That Can Expedite Healing
Our team utilizes several pain machines that can help you in your healing journey. We want to stress that these machines should only be used under the guidance and recommendation of a specialist. Our training enables us to use these machines safely in a way that will help, not hurt, the healing body.
The Chattanooga OptiFlex 3 Knee CPM
This machine is most commonly used after an ACL repair or knee replacement. It safely moves the knee joint, which can help prevent the development of scar tissue and stiffness around the area.
The Optiflex 3 Continuous Passive Machine (CPM) Device
This machine can improve and encourage a range of motion. This helps prevent stiffness and increase circulation. It also helps reduce swelling and chronic pain.
The ThermoTek VascuTherm
This machine can use thermal and contrast therapy, combined with compression. Thermal therapy can use heat or cold to provide relief to injured or recovering areas. Contrast therapy alternates between hot and cold and can reduce painful symptoms.
Thermo Electric Cooling
Compression and a variety of temperatures can help this device offer pain management and swelling reduction. This treatment is considered especially easy to use, and patient-friendly.
Things You Can Do at Home
When it comes to a muscle tear, professional help is your best bet of healing up well. We can make sure that any treatment we provide has the best shot possible of helping you. If you try to treat yourself at home, you could end up inadvertently making matters worse.
With that in mind, there are a few things you can do at home to improve your comfort levels as you supplement your treatment or wait to hear back about a consultation.
1. Temperature Therapy
If you’ve ever sprained your ankle as a kid, you probably had someone tell you to ice it. There’s wisdom behind this practice. Applying cold can reduce inflammation in an area and take down some of that swelling. Since inflammation can be painful, when inflammation goes down, the pain level usually goes down with it.
Applying heat, on the other hand, can help relax sore muscles and lubricate your joints. Remember to be safe while applying temperature therapy, the last thing you want to do is give yourself a cold or hot burn!
2. Diet Adjustments
Making some diet adjustments may help reduce inflammation. Refined sugar and carbohydrates may both contribute to inflammation, so by making a few dietary changes you may find some symptoms of inflammation improving as well.
3. Rest and Protect
One of the most important things you can do to protect an injured muscle is to rest it and not do anything that could make the injury worse.
Exercise is important, and movement can help the muscle heal properly, but if you aren’t careful you could make matters much worse. Before resuming exercise, we recommend a consultation so we can give you safe exercises to do as you heal.
We Have the Tools and Experience to Help You Heal
If you would like to learn more about how we can help you heal from your injury, contact our team at Phoenix Regenerative Medicine in Tempe, AZ, today for your consultation.
