New York sports injuries - New NonSurgical Procedure Treating Sports Injuries Involves Using Your Own Blood: PRP Therapy

As the co-director of sports medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York Orthopedic Surgeon Dr. Jonathan Glashow has been at the forefront of American doctors offering platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy, a new nonsurgical technique that improves healing from injuries.

In New York sports injuries are common among the best athletes in the world. For those with common sports injuries like sprained ligaments or strained muscles, PRP therapy can deliver remarkably faster healing. It involves injecting injured areas with a concoction of growth factors extracted from the patients’ own blood. “The basic idea is that we’re taking the body’s natural healing elements, concentrating them, and we’re putting them at the site of injury,” says Glashow. “We feel like it supercharges the healing process.”

Dr. Glashow who is a sports injury doctor in New York City has named four sports-injury situations where PRP therapy proves especially effective: post-surgery, ligament sprains where surgery isn’t called for but healing is slow, muscle tears/tendinitis and mild to moderate arthritis. Studies have found that in all of these scenarios, PRP therapy can cut recovery time drastically and even help healing to greater degree in areas known for slow recovery.

Hamstring tears for example are common in baseball players. Where normal healing time from a hamstring tear could take months, injecting those muscles with PRP can return benched players much more quickly. And though the therapy is still considered experimental, there is very little risk involved, since the treatment incorporates the body’s own platelets.  “The thinking with PRP is that if we can find a way to help the body heal itself more quickly, we can help patients return to their lifestyles earlier,” says Glashow.

While much research has focused on the mechanical aspects of healing, this is a potential breakthrough on the biological side. Major laboratory and clinical trials are striving both to deepen doctors’ understanding of how it works and how to best administer it. “Right now there are several lab studies going on that are showing that with PRP therapy, the healing process is being sped up at the cellular level,” says Glashow. “That is the laboratory science of it – showing that this is not hokey and really does work.”

PRP is such a new therapy that there isn’t easy to find a doctor with expertise in it. Glashow advises patients to ask their orthopedic surgeon or sports-medicine specialist if they offer this therapy; if these specialists don’t, they can give you a referral.

New York sports injury doctor - Oblique Injuries Plaguing New York Yankees

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, during spring training New York Yankees team members saw 4 separate cases of oblique injuries. Joba Chamberlain, Sergio Mitre, Greg Golson and now Curtis Granderson, have all been felled by the same condition.

The obliques are a broad, flat band of muscle that connects to the pelvis and helps to rotate the hip. Chamberlain, Mitre and Golson are on the mend with their oblique problems, but Granderson's injury could keep him out for a while.

In New York sports injury doctors are no strangers to oblique injuries, but with so many plaguing the same team at once the Yankees are asking themselves whether the issue might be caused by something about their training regimen. The Yankees had a similar problem in 2007 when a rash of hamstring problems knocked out players like Hideki Matsui, Chien Ming Wang and Mike Mussina.

Team manager Joe Girardi admits spring training is very serious business, with rigorous and intense training exercises. He says "Every year there seems to be one thing, in one camp. And a lot of years, you don't necessarily even change what you did the year before, and it could have been something totally different from last year. It just happens."

New York Orthopedic Surgeon Dr. Jonathan Glashow is co-chair of sports medicine at Mt. Sinai hospital. He said that he and the trainers he works with are seeing more oblique injuries of late, as a focus on core strength— primarily the abdominals—makes the obliques weaker by comparison.

"There's been a rash of focus on core strengthening, the generic core. But it's not so simple. If you strengthen part of the core more than another part of the core, it creates an imbalance and leads to these oblique injuries," Glashow said. "I don't know if it's this training regimen that's brought this rash of them on, because I never remember hearing about all these oblique injuries."

Glashow, who is a specialist in shoulder and knee surgery in New York says baseball players entering spring training may have done something offseason, like intense core training, or have upper abdominal and back muscles that are more developed than their lower equivalents. In either situation, the obliques aren’t always ready for the rigorousness of spring training so suddenly.

"Seeing players, it seems like what's happening is that the exercises they're doing preseason may be creating a little more muscular imbalance, and then they really push it with their first exposure to this explosive rotation. Baseball's an all-or-nothing sport, and when you go all out, you stretch these muscles that aren't perhaps quite ready yet," Glashow said.

One theory from the team was that the heat of AZ could make the players dehydrated, but Dr. Glashow said that heat actually would help the muscles, not hinder them.

"To the contrary, when it's warmer out, they're a little more flexible,'' he said.”If it was colder, maybe that could be a cause.''

Often deferred to for his opinion and treatment of elite athletes, New York orthopedic surgery specialist Dr. Glashow acted as a medical media consultant for ESPN Sports and was a frequent guest on their morning sport commentary “Cold Pizza.” For more information on Dr. Glashow please visit: http://www.glashowmd.com/.