Dr. Pearl believes in exhausting conservative treatment options for heel pain which include strapping, stretching and strengthening exercises, and foot support. He offers three different solutions for foot support: custom orthotics, a variety of over-the-counter sport and dress insoles, and supportive compressive sleeves.
If these techniques are exhausted, Dr. Pearl offers other advanced treatment methods to cure chronic heel pain. There are two accelerated healing technologies he uses most often. The first is EPAT or shockwave which uses low frequency pulsed sound waves to increase vascular flow to jump start repair. The second is amnion growth factor injections to provide safe healing factors when our own body is not capable of repairing an injury. He uses the most advanced technology such as digital X-Ray and ultrasound to correctly diagnose other heel pain problems including bone bruising and bursitis. He also uses ultrasound to track the progress of the condition which offers a comprehensive overview of the healing process.
The cure for some chronic sports injuries can be elusive, with the most challenging aspect being the return to sports without chronic pain or a permanent injury. Research in the rapidly expanding field of regenerative sports medicine has found promising uses for amnion tissue in the form of amnion injections to heal sport’s injuries. Some patients are turning to amniotic membrane injections to regenerate healthy tissue around an injury, rather than letting it heal into problematic scar tissue.
Because the literature supporting another regenerative treatment, platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections, remains controversial, it is especially timely to consider amnion injection as an option. Recently published randomized and case studies reported improvement in new healthy cell growth with amnion injection.
Unlike PRP, amnion does not require the patient’s own blood. And though they both theoretically deliver a “regenerative punch” to the injured tissues by concentrating growth factors calling into action the body’s own adult stem cells to repair the damage, platelet-derived growth factors are less effective because adult stem cells are already significantly differentiated and unable to regrow into the useful, less-differentiated progenitor cell lines. (Progenitor cells are early descendants of embryonic stem cells, and are, in turn, more limited in what they may become than embryonic stem cells.)