A UK medical group representing physiotherapists has come out with a stern warning against single-day PRP therapy training courses. They say a single day of training is insufficient for understanding what the therapy is, how it works, whether it is efficacious, and how to administer it. However, looking at the official warning on the group’s website raises questions of its own. The warning certainly deserves scrutiny.
The Chartered Society of Physiotherapy (CSP) is a UK organization that represents physiotherapists and student physiotherapists waiting their official government registration. According to the group, physiotherapists need a minimum of 150 hours of additional training before they think about offering PRP therapy.
The 150 hours is not arbitrary. It comes from a paper published two years ago by the organization. The original paper was intended to establish standards for physiotherapists looking to branch out into other therapies they were not originally trained in.
Insufficient Injection Therapy Training
For the record, the CSP does not have an issue with PRP alone. They believe a single-day training course is insufficient for any type of injection therapy. It would seem that their cautious approach would also apply to steroid injections, prolotherapy, etc. Perhaps some caution is necessary. But 150 hours of additional training seems like overkill.
Based on training for 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, it would take almost a month for a physiotherapist to complete the necessary training to offer injection therapies. That is overkill. Injection therapies are not rocket science. They are minimally invasive; they have been proven safe for years.
More About PRP Therapy
PRP therapy has been around a long, long time. It is not a brand new therapy that just popped out of the oven six months ago. At least that’s the case here in the U.S. Maybe it’s considered new medicine in the UK. But even if were true, researchers on the other side of the Atlantic could look at what we are doing here.
For the record, PRP stands for ‘platelet-rich plasma’. It is blood plasma with a concentrated level of platelets. Where does this substance come from? The patient being treated. This makes the PRP autologous biological material which, according to the FDA, is both safe and appropriate as long as the material remains minimally manipulated.
Lone Star Pain Medicine out of Weatherford, TX explains that a typical PRP procedure is pretty straightforward. It begins with the doctor taking a standard blood draw. The blood is then placed into a specialized centrifuge where it is spun to isolate the plasma and platelets. The resulting PRP is then injected into the site of injury or disease, usually with imaging technology to help guide needle placement.
Platelets and Growth Factors
PRP injections contain a large concentration of platelets and growth factors. Both are important building blocks in the healing process. Platelets tell the body that healing is necessary while growth factors contribute to the production of new tissue. In essence, it is believed that PRP injections effectively jump-start the human body’s response to injury.
The CSP has its reasons for warning against single-day PRP therapy training courses. But there doesn’t seem to be any logical reason to require a month-long training course for a procedure that is so simple. There isn’t that much to it, really.
Doctors and physiotherapists alike undergo sufficient medical training to understand musculoskeletal structures, soft tissue, and how platelets and growth factors affect injuries to them. It is not like PRP therapy impacts body parts they have never heard of before. Training is really about administering the therapy and nothing more.
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