It seems the terms “chronic pain” and “pain management” are used today more than ever. In recent years, it seems our society is plagued by painful conditions, which years ago seemed to mend more readily than they do today. Speak with any person who is over 70 years of age and you’ll hear this sentiment echoed. Low back pain and Sciatica, for example, just got better with time back in those days. Today, however, these two conditions alone account for billions of healthcare dollars spent annually.

These lingering painful conditions in today’s society have given rise to the concept and practice of pain management, in attempts to treat or manage chronic pain.

Chronic pain is regularly misinterpreted as only severe pain. However, chronic pain is defined as any painful condition lasting and/or recurring for greater than a period of six months continuously, regardless of severity. There are many causes of chronic pain, the proper diagnosing of which often proves challenging. Chronic pain of the musculoskeletal system is often the result of an improperly healed traumatic injury, such as a whiplash injury or a partially torn tendon.

In the practice of pain management, chronic pain is all too often suppressed into relief temporarily by utilizing medications and interventions, which fail to address the underlying problem. This, unfortunately for the patient, leads to intermittent bouts of suppressed pain and continuations of the underlying cause of the pain.

At TotalCare Health & Wellness Medical Center, our approach to chronic painful conditions is different. We attempt to target the underlying cause of the pain and remedy it. Specifically, we aim to heal it. By utilizing an integrated approach of regenerative medicine we have been able to help hundreds of patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain improve their daily function.

Regenerative medicine is a specialty with the goal of repairing and rebuilding damaged tissue naturally through targeted interventions. These interventions are multi-faceted: surgical injection procedures, removal of toxic mediators, such as anti-inflammatory agents, biomechanical approaches, such as weight loss, nutritional supplements, and behavioral changes.

The surgical injection procedure used to stimulate natural healing is called Proliferation Injection Therapy, or “Prolotherapy”. These injections are placed into the targeted damaged tissue areas and promote a “proliferative” response by encouraging the body’s immune system to flood into the area and trigger the natural healing cascade. Prolotherapy, with its medicinal roots in Germany, has been practiced in the United States safely for over 70 years.

Prolotherapy can be effective in resolving many chronic pain syndromes such as whiplash injury, low-back pain, arthritis, fibromyalgia and carpal tunnel syndrome.