If you are an athlete and you have gotten injured, you want to be able to get back and into your game as soon as possible. However, you also want to make sure that you are as healthy as possible and that your injury is all healed up. If you try to play while still injured, you can end up with lasting and career-ending damage. There are a lot of things that you can do to heal any kind of injury, including things like surgery and physical therapy. Your doctor might also suggest something called platelet-rich plasma therapy. 

Platelets

Your blood is made up of a whole lot of parts. There are red blood cells, white blood cells, plasma, and platelets. The platelets are little bits of the stuff that makes up the cells in your bone marrow. Your bone marrow is the factory for many of the aspects of your blood. The platelets aren't very big, but they do have a big job. They are in your blood so that they can help with clotting. When they reach a break in a blood vessel, they all start to clump up. As that clump gets big enough, it turns from a clump into a clot. The platelets also carry growth factor proteins which are used in healing any injuries. PRP takes advantage of those growth factors and can help heal your injury faster. 

Platelet-Rich Plasma Therapy

The way that this therapy works is that the doctor is first going to draw an amount of your blood. Once they have that blood, they are going to start processing it to get the plasma and the platelets. They do this by sending it through a centrifuge. The speedy spinning of the centrifuge causes the red blood cells to separate out from the rest of the blood. Those red blood cells are then siphoned away from the other parts of the blood. Once that happens, the resulting product is injected into the injured area. Each injection can happen in one appointment because it isn't a long process to make the PRP, but it may take a few injections to get the full effect of the treatment. 

If you are an athlete and you have been injured, you want to make sure that you can get back into training and back playing as soon as possible. You also want to make sure that your heal up completely and quickly. PRP therapy can help you.