Originally Posted by inuic
LOL That would take a very long time there is a loads involved.. And its hard to be objective here I find.
Yeah. A long time. See if this helps:
A Case Study In Aggressive Quackery Marketing
Published by Val Jones under Clinical Trials,Dentistry,Health Fraud,Surgical Procedures
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Without any clear evidence of benefit beyond placebo, platelet-rich plasma (PRP) is now being marketed aggressively as a cure-all for sports injuries. And at about $300 per injection (the NYT reports $2000/treatment), there’s plenty of money to be made.
Like the fake “stem cell” clinics in Russia (where, according to Sanjay Gupta’s recent book, Chasing Life, a person’s fat cells are harvested, washed, and re-injected into their blood stream), PRP also involves injection of autologous body fluids. Essentially, a small amount of blood is drawn from the patient, centrifuged, and the plasma supernatant is then injected directly into tendons and/or joints. After a series of 3 injections (one/month), most sports injuries are “cured.” Of course, most injuries would heal themselves in three months anyway.
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As with the most successful forms of pseudoscience, there may be a grain of plausibility here. Knowing that human plasma does in fact contain growth factors that are implicated in wound healing – it’s not complete fantasy that injection of said factors may improve injuries in some way. So I decided to take a fresh look at Medline to see what sort of evidence there may be for the therapy. In my search I found:
1. One abstract discussing PRP’s use in degenerative knee arthritis. The study is not available for review in its entirety – but the abstract suggests that an improvement was noted at 6 months (in pain scores) with a significant worsening at month 12. No control group.
2. One small study that did not find a benefit to ACL healing in the presence of PRP.
3. Quite a number of studies related to the treatment of bone defects (mostly periodontal) with PRP. Most of those showed no improvement or a fleeting, temporary improvement with PRP.
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http://www.scie ncebasedmedicin … kery-marketing/
January 26, 2011, 12:01 am
Phys Ed: Does Platelet-Rich Plasma Therapy Really Work?
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS, Columnist
Tiger Woods, Chris Canty (a defensive tackle for the New York Giants) and the Phillies’ pitcher Cliff Lee have in the past year or so greatly boosted the popularity of a controversial therapy by employing it to combat a sore knee (Woods), hamstring (Canty) and abdomen (Lee). The treatment, platelet-rich plasma therapy, or P.R.P., involves centrifuging a person’s own blood until it contains a concentrated mix of plasma cells and growth factors and then injecting the resulting substance directly into the injured tissue. In theory, the distilled growth factors (a protein or substance that helps stimulate growth) should speed healing and improve the tissue’s health, which has happened in the lab. When scientists surgically created lesions in animal tendons and other tissues, P.R.P. therapy nudged the injured tissues to rapidly create new collagen and blood vessels.
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But now, rather belatedly, science is showing up to spoil the fun. Several new studies have examined whether P.R.P. is effective outside the lab, and as Leon Creaney, a sports-medicine consultant in London and the author of one of the papers, said, “the evidence has not been favorable” for P.R.P.
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Phys Ed: Do Blood Injections Help Sports Injuries? - The New York Times
Article Comments
Platelet-Rich Plasma Injections: Much Ado about Nothing?
March 27th, 2011 by Glenn Laffel, M.D., Ph.D. in Quackery Exposed, Research
Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy became a hot topic among professional and recreational athletes after some studies suggested it could hasten wound healing and several high-profile athletes reported using it as they rehabbed from various injuries. But recently, the news hasn’t been quite so good..
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….perhaps good old-fashioned physical therapy and RICE (rest, ice, compression, elevation) is the best way to go."