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Platelet-Rich Plasma (PRP)
Working with your biology, not against it
Platelet-rich plasma takes your body’s own healing factors, concentrates them, and delivers them under ultrasound guidance to the exact site of injury.
Here’s how we approach PRP at OASIS, starting with the diagnosis that tells us whether it’s the right treatment for you in the first place.
What is PRP?
PRP stands for platelet-rich plasma. In simple terms, it concentrates your body’s own healing ability and delivers it directly to the site of injury.
Your blood naturally carries healing factors, platelets among them, that help you recover from everyday damage: cuts, bruises, abrasions, tendon tears, muscle tears. Most of the time that system works on its own, but two things can stop it: Sometimes the injury is more than your body’s healing capacity can resolve on its own, and sometimes the injured area has such poor blood supply that those healing factors never reliably reach the damage in the first place.
A PRP injection addresses both problems at once. We draw a small amount of your own blood, remove the parts we don’t need, and concentrate the healing factors into a small, potent volume of plasma. Then, under ultrasound guidance, we inject it precisely where the injury is. Inadequate healing potential and inadequate blood supply, addressed in the same step.
Practically speaking, PRP involves a needle. We draw your blood, process it, and inject it back into the injured area. If you’d like, you can watch it happen in real time on the ultrasound screen.
The three things PRP depends on
I find a restaurant analogy makes this clear. Think of a PRP injection as preparing and delivering a five-star meal. Three things decide whether it lands:
First, the ingredients. That’s your blood, and everything it carries: the healing factors you want, but also inflammation markers, blood sugar, and the rest of your health status. Source poor ingredients and no kitchen can save the dish.
Second, the chef and the recipe. That’s the preparation protocol at OASIS: how the blood is concentrated, how long it’s processed, the final volume and platelet dose.
Third, the right table. A Wagyu steak sent to the one table with a beef allergy is wasted, no matter how good it is. A five-star meal placed in the wrong spot does nothing. This is why ultrasound guidance is critical: the target might be a 2-millimeter pocket in a rotator cuff, the torn corner of a meniscus or labrum, or a partially disrupted ligament. You cannot reliably hit that by feel. You have to see it.
Excellent ingredients (you), an excellent recipe (us), and accurate delivery to the right place (ultrasound, also us). All three, every time.
What conditions is PRP used for?
One caveat up front: the evidence base for PRP is moving quickly, and this list will look different a year from now. Today, these are the areas where the evidence is strongest and where we see meaningful results.
PRP started in the veterinary world, helping animals recover from sport and activity injuries, racehorses among them. In humans, the applications keep expanding. You may have heard about PRP for hair loss or facial aesthetics; that’s outside what we do, and we’ll leave it to others to comment on.
What we focus on are orthopedic injuries that sit in a specific gap: too severe for the body to heal on its own, but not so severe that surgery is justified. These are often the patients who’ve been cycling through cortisone shots every few months because, until PRP, that was close to the only option.
The injuries that respond best share one trait: they’re partial, not complete. The split looks like this:
Where PRP can help
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Tendon tears
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Rotator cuff tears (partial thickness)
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Meniscus tears
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Arthritis in small joints of the fingers, and large joints such as the hips and knees
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Tennis elbow
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Tendinopathies and tendinitis
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Ligament tears and ligament laxity
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Nerve inflammation
Where PRP is unlikely to help
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A full-thickness ACL tear
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A full-thickness rotator cuff tear
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A full-thickness MCL tear
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Bone-on-bone, end-stage arthritis
These are cases where the tissue is completely disrupted and reconstruction, not a healing signal, is what restores function.
Notice the pattern: full-thickness, or end-stage. Picture a rubber band. Cut partway across, and it can be reinforced. But cut all the way through, and no glue restores it; that takes reconstruction, which is what surgery does. Partial tears and injuries that stop short of complete failure are where PRP shines.
How do we decide who's a candidate?
Every treatment decision begins with an accurate diagnosis. Until we have one, there is no way to know whether PRP is the right tool for your injury, and no responsible way to recommend it.
The first step is confirming that your symptoms come from a diagnosis reasonably expected to respond to PRP, such as a partial-thickness rotator cuff tear or early knee arthritis. That diagnosis is established in our office, through a full medical interview, a physical exam, and in-office musculoskeletal ultrasound. Ultrasound has resolution comparable to MRI for soft tissue, with one advantage MRI can’t match: we can image the tissue while you move. A partial tear that looks intact at rest can show up clearly under load. That is the kind of finding that changes the diagnosis and the plan.
From there, candidacy comes down to the ingredients you bring: your body and your overall health. The science is clear that platelet dose and quality matter for whether PRP works, and that depends on you. Your blood carries the full weight of your health: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The good are the healing factors. The bad includes things like inflammation markers and excess blood sugar. Uncontrolled diabetes, very high cholesterol, or regular use of common anti-platelet medications such as aspirin, ibuprofen, and naproxen can all degrade the quality of what we have to work with. At worst, we’d be concentrating and delivering disease markers to the injury instead of healing factors, which is the opposite of what we want.
That’s why candidacy requires a comprehensive medical interview and a real understanding of your conditions and medications before we go further.
The good news: many of these things are treatable and optimizable. If your body isn’t ready to produce good PRP today, that doesn’t mean it can’t be ready after a month or two or three of optimization under our care. Nutrition, vitamin deficiencies, hormonal changes, smoking; the list of things that affect healing is long, and sorting through it together with you is what distinguishes us from every other office offering PRP. We help you take full ownership of your health and optimize you for the best possible outcome.
Not everyone is a candidate. That’s the entire point of the consultation: to find out how close you are, and what it will take to get you the result you deserve
How does PRP compare to the alternatives?
PRP vs. cortisone
This is the comparison that matters most, because cortisone is what most patients have already been offered. Cortisone is a steroid, a powerful anti-inflammatory. Injected into an injury, it turns off inflammation, and with it the redness, swelling, and pain. On its face, that makes sense: quiet the inflammation, quiet the symptoms.
The problem is that inflammation is the body’s healing process. You don’t heal without it. An inflamed tendon or joint is your body recognizing damage and trying to repair it. Many chronic injuries are stuck in a loop: the body keeps flagging the damage but can’t heal its way out, so the pain, swelling, and warmth never resolve. Cortisone is good at switching that off and making pain go away.
PRP sits on the opposite philosophy. Instead of suppressing inflammation, it nudges and supercharges the body’s healing response, giving it the push it needs to get over the hill and finish the job.
Picture a partial tear as a pothole in the road. Every drive over it bangs up your car. Cortisone is closing your eyes and covering your ears each time you hit it, so you feel it less while the damage keeps happening. PRP is sending a construction crew, cones, trucks, and asphalt to patch it. It draws attention to the pothole and may even flare symptoms briefly, but once the patch cures, the pothole is gone, and everyone goes home.
PRP vs. surgery
This one is more of an apples and oranges comparison. Nothing replaces surgery when a tissue is fully, mechanically disrupted. If a bridge cable is completely cut, the only fix is rebuilding the cable; that’s surgery. If the cable is frayed but partially intact, reinforcement can restore its function without replacing it; that’s PRP. For the right injury, surgery is absolutely the right answer. For partial tears that haven’t reached failure, PRP is worth evaluating first, and it avoids the recovery timeline, the risks of general anesthesia, and post-surgical scar tissue.
The honest framing: PRP is not a substitute for surgery in patients who need surgery. It’s a real option for patients who don’t.
At a glance:
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What does treatment look like?
PRP is not a set-it-and-forget-it shot. It is an involved process built on careful preparation, precise execution, and real follow-up. Here is the full arc at a glance, with the detail below.
Step 1: Consultation
Confirm the diagnosis and review your full health history. Required first step, one hour, $500.
Step 2: Optimization (if needed)
Address any conditions that lower PRP quality before we inject. Ranges from a couple of weeks to a few months.
Step 3: Injection day
About one hour. Blood is drawn and processed, then injected into the damaged tissue under live ultrasound guidance.
Step 4: Recovery & rehab
Normal daily activity in two to three days; heavier loading restricted for six weeks or more. Concierge one-on-one rehab runs three to six months.
Step 5: Follow-up
Repeat exams, ultrasound scans to verify healing, and telehealth through to final evaluation. All included in the plan.
It starts with the consultation, which is mandatory. Two things have to happen there: we confirm an accurate diagnosis, and we take a full inventory of the health conditions that could affect your body’s ability to produce good PRP. If something needs optimizing, whether supplementation, prescription medication, or lifestyle changes, we handle that first. Only when you’re optimized do we schedule the injection.
Injection day runs about an hour. In the two weeks beforehand, you may need to stop certain anti-inflammatory medications or supplements that hurt platelet quality or quantity. You’ll arrive rested and well-hydrated. A team member draws between 60 and 120 mL of your blood, a quarter to a half of what a standard blood donation takes. While it processes, which takes about 15 to 20 minutes, we position you in the procedure room and scan with ultrasound to find the safest injection approach to reach the damaged tissue. We numb the area with local anesthetic, then sterilize and prep the site while it takes effect.
To be straightforward about the pain: this is not a painless injection. The local anesthetic mitigates it, but expect some discomfort. It does not rise to the level of needing general anesthesia. Once the PRP is ready and the numbing has set in, we inject the damaged areas under live ultrasound guidance, with you watching on the screen if you choose. Then you’re bandaged up and free to go.
Most patients drive themselves home. For shoulder injections, or if you have needle anxiety, plan to bring a driver. We can offer an oral medication that dissolves under the tongue to ease anxiety and pain, but it impairs driving, so a driver is required if you use it. Depending on the area treated, there may be activity restrictions: no high-impact activity, no overhead lifting, and so on.
Recovery and rehabilitation
In the days and weeks after the injection, your body restarts its healing response in stages, and each stage needs the right input to finish well. That input is controlled load. Tendons, ligaments, and bone all respond to the forces placed on them, and loading the healing tissue in a deliberate, progressive way tells it what demands it needs to meet. That’s what turns a PRP injection into a durable repair instead of a temporary one.
This is why rehabilitation is built into most treatment plans. Most of our PRP plans include three to six months of concierge, one-on-one rehab with our partner clinic next door, based on your specific needs. Across that same window, the plan also covers all the follow-up you need: repeat physical exams, repeat ultrasound scans, and telehealth check-ins, whatever it takes to confirm you haven't had a complication and that you're healing as expected. Everything from injection to final evaluation is included.
One thing to be clear about: PRP rewards commitment. It delivers its best only when you're invested in the full process, so if you're after a quick fix to get through the next couple of months, cortisone may still have a place for you. Because we use high-dose, high-concentration PRP and optimize you beforehand, we typically anticipate a single injection with results that last for years.
What are the risks?
As a newer treatment, PRP carries both known and still-unknown risks. We’ll address both honestly.
The known risks are the ones that come with any injection: bleeding, infection, or hitting something we shouldn’t. We reduce them by understanding your health status going in, stopping medications you shouldn’t be on, optimizing your immune status and anything affecting your ability to fight infection, and doing everything under sterile technique. That lowers the risk; it doesn’t make it zero.
On hitting the wrong structure, this is where ultrasound guidance has a real advantage over the blind or landmark-based technique done elsewhere. We see the needle live, to the millimeter, and so do you, on the screen. No other approach gives you that precision in placing the needle exactly where it should go and away from what it shouldn’t.
As for the unknowns: PRP comes from your own body, so the theoretical risk of rejecting it is low. But the field is still being studied, and there may be things we can’t yet foresee. That’s exactly why the choice to do PRP versus something else is always part of the consultation; it depends on your risk tolerance and your goals.
Worth keeping in perspective: the risks of the standard alternative are well documented. Cortisone is known to weaken tendons, worsen diabetes, and cause effects ranging from skin pigment changes to fat atrophy to adrenal suppression. This isn’t meant to villainize cortisone. It’s to point out that you, and the people around you, already accept real risk from standard treatments. To our best knowledge, PRP does not carry those particular risks. The right choice is an individual decision, made with you.
How much does it cost?
Treatment plans for PRP depend on your diagnosis, whether you need optimization first, and how involved your rehabilitation needs to be.
All of our PRP plans are all-inclusive. You won’t be nickel-and-dimed for follow-up visits, phone calls, or text messages. We’re with you from beginning to end, and the plan reflects that.
The consultation is a separate, fixed step: one hour with Dr. Kiok for $500. That’s where we determine whether a PRP plan is right for you in the first place. If PRP ends up being an option you wish to pursue, the $500 consultation fee is applied towards the PRP treatment plan.
Is it covered by insurance?
No, PRP is not covered by insurance.
It’s worth understanding why we’re comfortable with that. When you ask whether something is covered, what you’re really asking is whether you’d like to give an insurance company the chance to deny the treatment you and your physician arrived at after a full hour of evaluation. We don’t take insurance because we don’t believe a coverage desk should shape your care. Treatment plans are created in person, with you and Dr. Kiok, and carried out on a timeline that fits your goals; no delays, no denials. The same can’t be said for any insurance company. No exceptions.
How can I find out if PRP is right for me?
The foundation of a successful outcome is an accurate diagnosis, and that comes from the consultation. It includes:
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A comprehensive, one-hour medical interview
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A full physical examination
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An in-office musculoskeletal ultrasound of the affected area
For PRP specifically, we’ll also identify and optimize any underlying health conditions that need to be addressed for the treatment to work.
PRP isn’t right for every injury or every patient. If you’re not sure whether you’d be a candidate, that’s exactly what the consultation is built to figure out. You’ll leave knowing what’s actually wrong and what will treat it, whether that’s PRP, another regenerative option, surgery, or something else entirely.