Regenerative Medicine approach to Hip pain- PRP treatment.

Treating hip pain can require nuance and thoroughness. If you’d like to learn more, send us a message.

So I had a really interesting hip case, hip pain patient this past week, that I think, has a lot of interesting things, that we can all learn from. And I think for patients to understand, how we handle musculoskeletal issues, when it comes to wear and tear arthritis. There are some subtleties that are important to understand.

So when it comes to wear and tear arthritis, it’s so important to understand, that it is very rarely just one structure that’s the problem, it’s a whole unit that’s problematic. Meaning when somebody comes in with hip pain, you can’t just think that, the hip joint that’s a problem. You have to ask, are there any soft tissue issues, ligaments, tendons? Is there any other adjacent joint, like the SI joint, or anything nerve related, from the lower back that could be related.

So in this particular case, and I actually made a TikTok video of this, and I put it up on all of our social sites, and I got a lot of interesting kind of feedback from that. It was a woman who has some chronic lower back issues, and has some more recent onset right hip pain. And upon examination, imaging, discussion, we sort of figured out that, her pain was maybe slightly coming from the hip joint, but more predominantly from the soft tissue structures, meaning tendons around the hip, and then also from the lower back and the SI joint.

So she had failed multiple other conservative processes, and treatments. So we ended up proceeding with platelet rich plasma, and were able to help her out because we ended up using a very high concentration of platelet rich plasma into the hip joint and the SI joint. We also ended up injecting a lower concentration of platelet rich plasma into the hip tendons and ligaments. And then lastly, also injecting platelet growth factors, into the epidural space, to treat some of the nerve related pain.

I’m very confident that’s going to give her a great result, in large part because we properly pinpointed, where her issue was. Which is that it’s not just coming from the hip joint, but from all those other structures. Number two, because we took a comprehensive approach, which means that instead of just treating, that one structure that might be involved, we treated the whole functional unit. Which meant treating not only the joint, adjacent joints, nerves, soft tissue. And because of that, she’ll likely do better longer term as well. And lastly, because using like really high level ultrasound and X ray guidance, able to make sure we’re really directly, and exactly hitting the right things, which will go a long way to getting her to feel better longer term as well.

The other aspect in her case, was she actually had a similar kind of pain, couple years ago for the left side, and did dramatically well when we had the same kind of approach to treatment. So I’m very confident she’ll actually do well there as well. But big takeaways are, if you do have some kind of joint issue, it’s never good enough to just say, hey my problem is just this one thing. You really have to think two, three orders deeper, to really get out what’s really driving things, to get a better result.