Dr. Darrow – Prolotherapy Patient

I love competition and was once one of the top gymnasts in the state of Illinois. Every sport I participated in, including golf and tennis, was performed with the precision of a gymnast.

I am still not fulfilled unless I drive a golf ball 300 yards or ace my opponent with a rocket-speed tennis serve. I also lifted a lot of weights, ocassionally until my arms turned black and blue.

By the time I was in my 20′s I had racked up my share of injuries. A fall during gymnastics landed me on my tail bone; a high-speed water skiing fall, among many other injuries, left me with back, neck and joint pain that persisted for years.

It wasn’t until I severely wrenched my right shoulder while lifting weights that I came to understand how medicine had failed pain sufferers and how Prolotherapy was a “miracle.”

After a year of failure with two cortisone injections and physical therapy to rehabilitate my shoulder, a “simple” arthroscopic surgery was performed. I was promised that I would be back to playing sports within three weeks.

After the surgery, in a story that is sadly too familiar, my shoulder became much worse. It blew up like a balloon filled with fluid. Enough so that when I walked, it sloshed.

It took a year after the surgery to return my shoulder to even the baseline pain I had experienced before the surgery. On top of this, chronic neck and back pain, and my right wrist, which had suffered years of abuse from the constant wear and tear of gymnastics, tennis and golf, was bothering me and I had a wicked case of tennis elbow. Pain was my constant companion.

Like many of my patients, I learned to live with pain. After all, I “knew” there would never be a cure.

Being in chronic pain, I did worry that I would be crippled as the pain extended to different areas of my body. Many of the injuries I suffered in my teens and twenties, which I thought were healed, revisited me, one by one.

Then a light turned on. During my fourth year of residency in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (PM&R) at UCLA, a PM&R doctor gave a lecture on Prolotherapy.

I immediately liked Andrew Kochan, M.D., because he was more down to earth than other doctors that had taught me. He was a bit radical in his approach, showing how traditional medicine failed those in pain. On this day, his lecture was about Prolotherapy, and he said it helped 80-90% of his patients.

What didn’t make sense was why none of us had heard about Prolotherapy.

I was invited to spend time in Andrew’s office watching his technique. All the while, it never occurred to me how this therapy would change my life.

Despite my aches and pains, I refused to stop playing sports. During one golf outing a misguided swing caused me enormous pain in my wrist. As I was swinging, I missed the ball and hit the ground with my club at about 100 miles per hour. My right wrist was forcefully hyper-extended causing me excruciating pain.

The lingering pain was so intense I could barely write. Treatment did not help and the pain would not go away. I had to give up all sports except running. Needless to say, I was miserable.

Dr. Kochan invited me to a medical convention for the American Association of Orthopedic Medicine. During a workshop on Prolotherapy I happened to complain to one of the lecturers that my wrist was probably worse than the one he was describing. He quickly told me that he could fix my wrist with Prolotherapy.

When he explained to me that he would inject my wrist with dextrose and lidocaine, and that this would heal my injury. I had to hide my skepticism.

“Inject me with sugar water? He had to be kidding!”

After about 24 hours, my wrist felt about 50 percent better. How could this happen after months of pain with no improvement? I then went on to inject the wrist myself over the course of the next several weeks.

It was after that when the miraculous occurred. My wrist was almost completely healed. I could hardly believe it myself, but it was true!

I had also cured my tennis elbow and long standing shoulder pain with my own injections. On several occasions, Dr. Kochan, and Dr. Bjorn Eck, an orthopedic surgeon, have injected every vertebrae from my neck to my sacrum. I, thankfully, was back to playing hours of tennis! My sports life was regained.

After my own healing, I started to perform Prolotherapy on any of my patients I could convince to try it.

After many years and thousands of patients, we now have one of the largest Prolotherapy clinics in the world.

Call our office 310-231-7000 or email us