It’s inevitable, over the course of a racing season, we go through a lot of gear. We break chains and flat tires. Our bar tape tears away. Even the highest quality carbon parts crack. Gears machined from solid titanium wear thin. Some of this occurs from the blunt force of a crash, but much of it is simply due to the tens of thousands of miles we ride our bikes over the course of a year.
Similarly, because of the immense, and entirely enjoyable, stress we put our bodies through racing bikes, they start to break down too. Sore throats linger. Knees and hips and backs start to ache regularly. The abrasions of a crash don’t disappear as quickly.
Sometimes, the pain doesn’t entirely go away. Most athletes, when asked about their injury history, can describe a body part they hurt and the exact amount of time it cost them (frequently to the day) from participating in the sport they love. Often, the injury lingers. It comes back when we push ourselves too hard, or spawns pain in another, even more frustrating way.
When we went looking for sponsors for Super Squadra last year, we approached businesses we felt would provide a valuable service to the cycling community. Thus, when ProloAustin agreed to come on as a primary sponsor, we were overjoyed—Dr. Fullerton and his excellent staff help athletes heal, completely.
Dr. Fullerton is one of the nation’s leading experts on regenerative medicine. Simply put, regenerative medicine focuses on using the bodies own healing capacity to treat injuries. Soft tissue injuries—which include muscle, ligament, and tendons, and are the most common amongst endurance athletes—are incredibly responsive to regenerative medicine, especially in cases where surgery or steroid shots prove ineffective.
So, what exactly is regenerative medicine? When you injure yourself, your body starts a healing process. Often, because we start to use the injured body part too soon, or because the injury was severe, we don’t heal properly. The body part continues to hurt. Dr. Fullerton, through the use of regenerative medicine, encourages the body to restart the healing process and continue it until the body part is fully functional.
Super Squadra sponsor Dr. Bradley Fullerton of ProloAustin.
This process starts with an evaluation at the ProloAustin office. Similar to any practitioner, Dr. Fullerton asks the patient about the circumstances and history of the injury. Then, he uses a unique device to aid in diagnosis. Dr. Fullerton’s skill and technique with the ultrasound machine is akin to x-ray vision. By pressing the machines wand against the injury, he can see individual muscle fibers, the attachment points of ligaments, and joint tendons. As he watches the body part move, he’s able to see small tears and abnormalities. We often wonder what it is underneath our skin that’s causing pain. Dr. Fullerton shows us.
Dr. Fullerton demonstrates how the ultrasound machine is used to diagnosis muscle, ligament, and tendon dammage.
After diagnosing the injury, Dr. Fullerton will present a couple treatment options. The most common is prolotherapy, or prolo, the namesake of his practice. Prolotherapy involves injecting the injured body part with a simple solution of sugar water and mild anesthetic. The injection spurs the injured area to produce growth factors that lead to healing. The treatment typically involves more than one injection and healing comes over time—typically a couple months. I know this, because I had prolotherapy on a frayed ligament in my knee three years ago. I didn’t necessarily notice how much better I felt. More accurately, I noticed that when I did things that used to hurt, like riding over three hours, it didn’t anymore.
The injections themselves do hurt, a bit. The area feels mildly bruised and achy afterward, but typically passes after a half day or so. Exercise helps. Don’t take IB Profen. With prolotherapy, inflammation is your friend.
The other treatment, which is newer and causes a bit more discomfort, but significantly reduces healing time, is platelet rich plasma treatment, or PRP. When he’s treating patients with PRP treatment, Dr. Fullerton draws a small amount of the patients own blood, spins it in a centrifuge to remove the red blood cells and plasma component, then re-injects it into the injured area.
It sounds pretty wild, I know, and Dr. Fullerton agrees, but the treatment has proven incredibly effective. “What would often take up to five prolotherapy shots to heal, can often be cured with a single PRP treatment,” Dr. Fullerton says. PRP treatments have become popular with pro athletes, who are often at the forefront of quick injury treatments, and have successfully used them to recover in time for important competitions.
“The primary candidates for regenerative medicine treatments are people with knee and back issues, people who have an injury that never fully healed, and people who’s injury healed to the point where it was functional, but caused an imbalance and subsequent injury in another part of their body,” says Dr. Fullerton.
The biggest misconception, Dr. Fullerton says, is that the treatment will hurt. While there is some mild discomfort (and I’m speaking from personal experience) it’s never anywhere near as painful as the actual injury.
If you have a chronic injury that keeps you from training and competing at the level you’d like, give Dr. Fullerton a call or visit the
ProloAustin website to learn more. We’re proud to have ProloAustin as a sponsor, and sincerely hope the cycling and endurance sports communities takes advantage of the services they offer.