I distinctly remember learning about prolotherapy for the first time about a decade ago. It turns out that one of my former doctors from NY had moved down to Florida, about an hour from where I lived, to begin a sports medicine clinic that offered, among other things, prolotherapy. I just assumed that prolotherapy was relatively new. I was wrong.
It turns out that what we consider modern prolotherapy dates to the 1930s. But predecessors, based on the same basic principle, go back millennia. Learning that little factoid gave me new respect for my former doctor and his insistence that prolotherapy was a legitimate alternative to a handful of more traditional therapies.
The Basics of Prolotherapy
Before getting into the history, a brief introduction to prolotherapy is in order. My friends at the Lone Star Pain Medicine clinic in Texas explain it well enough. They say that prolotherapy is a treatment designed to encourage inflammation, inasmuch as inflammation is a natural physical response that acts as a precursor to healing.
Inflammation tells the immune system that something is wrong. The immune system responds with growth factors, blood, nutrients, and other essential materials to start fixing what is broken. So prolotherapy is really a way to jumpstart the body’s natural healing processes.
Lone Star doctors say that prolotherapy is utilized mainly for soft tissue injuries and diseases at the current time. Could it have other applications? Possibly. But before anyone goes down that road, more stringent research is needed.
The History of Prolotherapy
With the basics out of the way, let’s get to the history of prolotherapy. The earliest forms of the treatment actually date back to ancient Egypt and the practice of hot iron cautery to treat injured animals. The first recorded human prolotherapy treatment is credited to Hippocrates (circa 400 BC) who is recorded as using a hot poker to repair a dislocated shoulder by applying it to the axilla.
French surgeon Alfred Velpeau is sometimes referred to as the ‘father of modern prolotherapy’ due to at least one instance of him treating a hernia by injecting an iodine solution. By the late 19th century, a number of prominent doctors were relying on injection therapies to treat a variety of soft tissue injuries.
Through the early 1920s, most prolotherapy injections in the U.S. were related to hernia treatments. The first formal organization for practitioners was formed in 1926. They referred to themselves as the American Society of Herniologists.
By the mid-1930s, prolotherapy was known as sclerotherapy due to the fact that some of the materials being injected caused scarring. But it was in 1937 that prolotherapy finally started getting its due. Thanks to Dr. Earl Gedney and an injury he sustained when he caught one of his thumbs in a door, the first article promoting prolotherapy was published and a recognized medical journal.
Gedney had self-treated with prolotherapy in order to prevent the thumb injury from ending his career as a surgeon. Not only had he successfully treated himself, but he had also treated one patient with knee pain and another with lower back pain. The rest is history.
The Debate Continues
Despite the combination of history and literature, the debate over prolotherapy effectiveness continues. According to Lone Star doctors, there is no shortage of patients who swear by it. Yet those who do not buy its legitimacy say there is no scientific mechanism behind it. Therefore, any relief from prolotherapy must be due to the placebo effect.
What do you think? Have you ever tried prolotherapy? If so, did it work?
