Quotes on Prolotherapy
"Injury to a joint not only causes pain but abnormal mechanical performance of a joint...When ligaments are torn or stretched, the mechanics of the joint are altered. This leads to direct and referred pain. Injections of irritants such as dextrose cause a localized inflammatory response that stimulates deposition of collagen that strengthens ligaments. This, in a sense, tightens the rubber band holding the motion segment (joint) together, improves joint performance, and directly or indirectly decreases pain. Prolotherapy is the only methodology I have ever utilized with both limited risk yet potential for significant benefit. This technique has been reserved for refractory patients that manage to find a proficient provider, but is most effective on subacute injuries. As a practitioner of prolotherapy, I encourage athletes and chronic pain patients with chronic soft tissue injuries to consider prolotherapy. Prolotherapy is a secret that needs to be discovered."
Lloyd Saberski, M.D.
Former Medical Director,
Yale University School of Medicine
Center for Pain Management
New Haven, Connecticut
"I was at one time almost incapacitated because of pain and eventually incapacitated because of paralysis of my right arm. I had been diagnosed at the University of Pennsylvania as having intractable pain, a situation I could not accept. Prolotherapy has been responsible, completely and totally, for restoring me to active and surgical hearth and it has been my experience over and over again that I have been able to do the same for other people so diagnosed. Although I am a pediatric surgeon and have little need to use prolotherapy in my own patients in the pediatric group, I have for many years now been practicing prolotherapy on the parents of my patients and on my friends who were getting what I thought was poor medical and surgical therapy in reference to pain, paraesthesias, etc. Prolotherapy is not a panacea, but it is a rare patient that I select for such treatment that has not been extraordinarily grateful for the relief of pain and the return to productive life."
C. Everate Koop, M.D.
Former Surgeon General of the US Public Health Service
Professor of Pediatric Surgery,
University of Pennsylvania
(excerpted from a letter to G. A. Hemwall, MD, 6/5/78)