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What is Prolozone Therapy? It is an advanced form of prolotherapy in the UK which has built a reputation for achieving results when all other treatments have failed. Published research indicates that it supports the recovery of and strengthens the following structures of the body: joints, cartilage, spinal discs, muscles, ligaments, tendons, nerves, meniscus, labrum, and bursa. We treat all areas of the body, including the head, neck, jaw, back, shoulders, knees, hips, arms, legs, elbows, wrists, fingers, ankles, feet, toes, pelvis, ribs, sacroiliac joints, sacrum, coccyx, acromioclavicular (AC) joint, and sternoclavicular (SC) joint.
Prolozone Therapy uses a concentrated form of oxygen. Standard Prolotherapy in the UK uses an irritant in the form of sugar (dextrose solution) to cause an inflammatory response. This inflammatory response helps to stimulate healing but has the following limitations: Standard dextrose prolotherapy can be extremely painful and sometimes requires gas and air during the procedure. The pain experienced during a Prolozone Therapy procedure is minimal.
It takes much longer to reach the repair phase with standard dextrose Prolotherapy, meaning that Prolozone Therapy achieves results in a faster time-frame.
Standard dextrose Prolotherapy requires many appointments, whereas Prolozone Therapy only requires a few, making it much less expensive for the patient.
Prolozone Therapy also has the ability to spread further around the treatment site, meaning it not only has a positive effect on the injury itself, but also the surrounding tissues and joints that may also have been under strain due to compensation.
Our patients have reported Prolozone Therapy has helped them to achieve results where standard dextrose Prolotherapy has either failed or only provided temporary relief.
PLEASE NOTE: We do also offer standard dextrose Prolotherapy for individuals who would prefer to have it for any reason.
Having performed over 10,000 procedures, Mr Eaton is one of the UK’s leading practitioners in the field of Prolotherapy and Prolozone Therapy, with patients travelling to see him from across the UK, Europe, and the Middle East.
He first trained in Prolozone Therapy and Prolotherapy in America with the American Academy of Ozonotherapy and continued on to complete further training with the Royal Society of Medicine, Charing Cross Hospital in London, Keele University’s Anatomy & Surgical Training Centre, and the medical department of Heidelberg University in Germany.
Mr Eaton developed his treatment and examination approach through the process of treating his own chronic pain and is committed to making sure his patients experience the same life-changing effects that his treatments had on him.
Over the years he has had the privilege of treating many elite-level athletes, including both Olympic and Commonwealth medallists.
Our clinical audits show that 95% of our patients experience results with our treatment.
Our success rate is higher than typically stated in studies, as we often combine the treatment with other advanced rehabilitation treatments within the same appointment as the injections to enhance the results.
For the 5% of patients who fail to experience results, we help point them in the direction of another practitioner or therapy that may be able to help.
The speed at which an individual starts to experience symptom relief depends on the type of condition or injury they have when they come in to see us.
Some patients experience relief after a few hours, some after a few days, and some not until a few weeks after their third appointment. 70% of our patients start to experience results after just one appointment.
Your practitioner will start by taking down a full medical case history. This will involve asking you detailed questions about your current symptoms and any previous conditions or incidents that may have had an influence.
Many individuals come to see us because they have failed to experience relief with other therapies. Sometimes, we find that the issue wasn’t necessarily with the other therapies themselves but with the practitioner performing that therapy, who may not have accurately assessed and examined the individual properly to start with and, therefore, not applied the therapy appropriately.
This is why we conduct a thorough examination using precision biomechanical technology to help identify issues and imbalances in the body that previous practitioners may not have identified. The information that our technology provides helps us to perform more targeted and effective treatment for our patients.
Unfortunately, the treatment isn’t offered on the NHS at this point in time.
Most patients can resume their daily activities straight away after the treatment. However, modifying any strenuous activity for a few days is advised.
It is normal to experience pain and discomfort around the procedure site for a few days as part of the repair process, but it shouldn’t stop you from continuing your daily activities.
It is common to experience temporary bruising at the treatment site. For the first 6-12 hours after the procedure, an ice pack may help for no longer than 10 minutes at a time. Thereafter, only heat is advised.
We advise you to avoid public hot tubs, swimming pools, and lakes for three days following each appointment to prevent the treatment site from being exposed to bacteria. You are allowed to shower or bathe during this time.
According to the International Scientific Committee of Ozone Therapy, Ozone does not cause side effects or allergic reactions and generally does not interact with other drugs.
When administered in tailored amounts by a qualified practitioner, the chances of experiencing adverse reactions are extremely small. For example, a German study on 384,775 patients evaluating the adverse side effects of over five million treatment appointments found that the rate of adverse side effects was only 0.0007 per application.
We always leave enough time during your first visit for treatment. If you are a complex case and multiple areas need treating, then please notify the receptionist upon booking, as you may require a double-slot appointment.
The treatment has been used in Europe since the 1950s. It is most commonly used in Germany, where over 7,000 practitioners offer it to help provide chronic musculoskeletal symptom relief.
Does prolotherapy actually work?
Multiple peer-reviewed research studies have proven the effects of dextrose prolotherapy injections and prolozone therapy.
How long does prolotherapy last?
Most individuals experience permanent results, although some structures, such as cartilage, require annual single-appointment top-up treatments.
What can go wrong with prolotherapy?
As it is a non-medicinal substance, side effects are low. The most common are bruising and temporary discomfort around the treatment site.
What is the average cost of prolotherapy?
Prolotherapy injections cost as little as £245. The price will depend on how many areas you are having treatment.
Is prolotherapy a permanent fix?
This depends on your complaint, age, medical history and how well the body can heal and repair itself.
What not to do after prolotherapy?
Resting the area and avoiding swimming pools for at least 3 days after treatment is advised. This is general advice for any type of injection therapy.
Who is a good candidate for prolotherapy?
Published research indicates that it supports the recovery of and strengthens the following structures of the body: joints, cartilage, spinal discs, muscles, ligaments, tendons, nerves, meniscus, labrum, and bursa. We treat all areas of the body, including the head, neck, jaw, back, shoulders, knees, hips, arms, legs, elbows, wrists, fingers, ankles, feet, toes, pelvis, sacroiliac joints, sacrum, and coccyx.
How painful is prolotherapy?
Depending on your pain threshold and complaint, dextrose Prolotherapy treatment can be very uncomfortable for some people as it involves the injection of an irritant solution. Prolozone Therapy, on the other hand, is much more tolerable.
Is prolotherapy a quackery?
No, an extensive number of comprehensive studies prove its effectiveness.
Who is not a candidate for prolotherapy injections?
Individuals with acute medical conditions such as infectious diseases.
What clinic locations do you have?
We have clinics in London, Manchester and Bedford.
This is a list of what is included in the guide:
What is prolotherapy? It makes sense to start off with a definition according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
“Prolotherapy is a non-surgical regenerative treatment. Short for “proliferation” therapy, Prolotherapy works by stimulating the body’s own natural healing process to assist the repair of injured musculoskeletal tissue.”
The use of prolotherapy involves-
Pain: Prolotherapy helps to assist the recovery of an injured structure and address the root cause of an individual’s pain, which then helps to prevent it from returning.
Repair: When an injury occurs, the body stimulates a natural process to attempt to repair the damaged tissue. Most soft tissue and connective tissue injuries will heal on their own this way. For those that don’t, outside help is needed. This is where prolotherapy helps natural healing response of the body.
Studies have indicated that Prolotherapy injection therapy helps to increase the number of healing compounds and growth factors in an injured area or joint, providing additional tools for the damaged tissue to repair.
Improves tissue strength: Both soft tissue and connective tissue structures in the body can suffer from weakness and laxity. This is often due to a lack of blood circulation, the most common being ligaments, tendons, discs, and meniscus. Research has indicated that Prolotherapy helps to strengthen the fibres within these structures which can help in pain reduction.
Improves stability: The main tissue structures involved in keeping a joint stable are ligaments and tendons. If they are weak, the laxity can cause a joint to move at angles that it wasn’t designed to. This can eventually lead to injury. Prolotherapy involves reinforcing the fibres of ligaments and tendons, ensuring that they can perform their job of stabilising a joint properly during movement. An example of a ligament is the iliolumbar ligament in the back. If this is weak, then it can lead to low back pain. An example of a tendon is the supraspinatus tendon, which is part of the rotator cuff complex.
Improve function and mobility: By repairing and strengthening the tissues within and around a joint using prolotherapy, function and mobility is therefore restored.
Reduces stiffness in muscles: The cause of muscle stiffness is often due to laxity in neighbouring ligaments as they have to work harder to compensate and stabilise a joint. Research has indicated that the prolotherapy helps to improve the strength of ligaments which then helps to take the workload of muscles and reduce stiffness as a result.
Tendon relaxation treated by prolotherapy involves the injection of a solution, often containing dextrose or other natural substances, directly into the affected tendon or ligament. This injection triggers a controlled inflammatory response, prompting the body to initiate the healing process. Over time, as the new collagen forms and matures, it effectively tightens and reinforces the relaxed tendon, improving its stability and function while alleviating associated discomfort.
Dextrose Prolotherapy – a sugar solution is used in the form of dextrose to act as an irritant. Its aim is to induce an inflammatory response in an attempt to stimulate the release of healing compounds.
Prolozone Therapy – uses an activated form of oxygen called Medical Ozone (O3) to stimulate the release of healing compounds, without having to induce an inflammatory response.
To first understand how prolotherapy works, it’s important to understand why many chronic musculoskeletal pain conditions struggle to heal on their own and why physical therapy or other injection protocols fail to provide pain relief.
One of the most common reasons is that the ligaments and tendons around an injured area are weak and aren’t able to provide a stable environment for the injury to heal properly. That injured area may be a joint, muscle, spinal disc, or even a ligament and tendon injury. Whether it’s low back pain, neck pain, Achilles tendinopathy or knee pain, if those structures neighbouring ligaments and tendons are weak, then that structure will struggle to heal properly.
As previously explained, the reason why ligaments and tendons can become weak is because they both have a poor blood supply. On top of that, as we age, general blood circulation becomes less efficient due to the thickening and stiffening of our blood vessels. This means that over time, ligaments and tendons don’t have the capacity to stay as strong as they once were, as they aren’t receiving the same level of oxygen and nutrients from their blood supply anymore.
Ligaments and tendons are made of collagen. Collagen is the most abundant protein in the body and is a core component of many different structures in the body.
Prolotherapy helps to stimulate the production of fibroblasts, which then brings about the deposition of new collagen fibres. When new collagen matures, it shrinks. This shrinking process helps tighten ligaments and tendons, resulting in increased strength and stability and reduced joint pain.
Treating these structures around the site of an injury using prolotherapy helps to create a stable environment for the injury to heal properly. It fixes the main issue that was preventing the injury from healing on its own or with physical therapy.
There are two types of areas in the body where prolotherapy can be performed: intra-articular or extra-articular.
An intra-articular injection is an injection performed into the middle of a joint. It is typically used to treat joint and muscle pain caused by internal structures, such as cartilage with knee osteoarthritis or a sprain of an internal weakened ligament. Examples of internal ligaments are the cruciate ligaments in the knee.
Meniscus injuries in the knee can also be treated with an intra-articular injection.
Extra-articular injections are performed into connective tissue structures outside of a joint, such as external ligaments, tendons, muscles, and bursa. An example of external ligaments is the capsular ligaments of the spine, which wrap around the outside of each spinal joint. Weakness in these ligaments can lead to neck discomfort and low back pain. An example of a tendon is the Achilles tendon. When it becomes inflamed, it is referred to as Achilles tendinopathy.
It is normal to experience a brief, sharp scratch as the needle first pierces the skin during prolotherapy. To reduce this sensation, many practitioners will use a cold spray to numb the prolotherapy injection site.
The sensation experienced during the procedure differs from patient to patient. Some experience no pain at all, and others can experience a bee-sting-type sensation that can last for up to a couple of minutes. That sting is then likely to turn into a dull ache, which subsides within five minutes. The sensation is different for different body areas. An individual with low back pain, for example, can experience a sensation of pressure as the prolotherapy injection is performed. In comparison, an individual with neck discomfort can experience more of a sting.
The usual pattern is, the more inflamed an injury is, the more discomfort an individual is likely to experience during the procedure. As mentioned previously, Dextrose prolotherapy is known to be considerably more painful than prolozone injections.
It is important to be aware that there are many ways that your practitioner can reduce the pain of the prolotherapy injections if needed. This will be discussed during your consultation.
The following information is advised after each appointment:
Your treatment provider will give you an aftercare sheet with this health information during your first appointment.
The cost of prolotherapy at our clinic is considerably lower than most other clinics. The main reason for this is that we feel the treatment should be accessible to as many people as possible.
Prolotherapy UK cost – Each appointment costs £285 and includes the following:
The consultation and examination fee is £95. Treatment for additional areas is charged at £70 per area.
Prolotherapy and proliferation therapy has a long history and dates back to ancient times, with the Egyptians using it to treat crippled animals. It was performed using a hot iron cautery.
The use of Prolotherapy and proliferation therapy in humans dates back to 400 BC when Hippocrates developed a way to repair a dislocated shoulder by using a hot poker as an irritant in the armpit.
Fast-forward to 1835. Dr. Alfred Velpeu was known as the father of Prolotherapy and started using iodine and saline injections to heal his patients. Later in that century, Dr. Rene Lerich started piloting the first research into the treatment of ligaments and painful areas.
From the 1940s onwards, practitioners such as Dr. Earl Gedney and Dr. George Hackett revolutionised the treatment into what it is today. Dr. Hackett was a trauma surgeon based in Ohio. He began studying the effects of dextrose solution as an irritant to help increase the thickness of ligaments in order to provide long term pain relief.
One of his students, Dr.Gustav Hemwall, then developed the library of scientific data further by making important discoveries that are still recognised today. He treated more than 10,000 patients worldwide and reported his clinical trials in a study on 8,000 of those patients.
In 1974, Dr. Hemwall presented a survey of 2,007 patients to the Prolotherapy Association. Long-term Pain relief was noted in a staggering 99% of those patients.
We offer the treatment at two different clinics in the UK. London and Bedford.
Unfortunately, the treatment isn’t that common elsewhere in the UK at the moment. One of the reasons may be due to there not being many prolotherapy training courses available in Europe.
There used to be Prolotherapy NHS orthopaedic doctors that performed the treatment in a primary care practice, but cuts to NHS funding over the years has meant that they don’t offer it in a primary care practice anymore. They mainly used it for the treatment of low back or sacroiliac pain. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that prolotherapy procedure in primary care practice will be on offer anytime soon on the NHS.
If you would like to go ahead and book an appointment or would like to ask us a question, then head over to our contact page for more information on how to do so.
Prolotherapy techniques should not be confused with platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections or stem cell therapy. Both PRP injections and stem cell therapy involve using components derived from your own blood. Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) and dextrose prolotherapy involve a very similar healing process and healing response when it comes to repairing connective tissue. They are both irritants that aim to decrease pain through stimulating growth factors. Prolozone Therapy has a much faster natural healing response. Platelet-rich plasma (PRP), endorsed by the mayo clinic, tends to be the most expensive out of the three treatments and hasn’t got much research proving its effectiveness for certain conditions such as low back pain. The Mayo Clinic has published a study for the treatment of TMJ pain which is a condition that can also be treated.
Hypermobility is a term used to describe joints that move beyond the range that they are supposed to. There are different severities on the hypermobility spectrum and it can be present in just a few joints or the whole body. It most commonly causes neck and lower back pain.
The most common hypermobility condition is called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS). It is a group of genetic connective tissue disorders that effect the strength of the structures that surround blood vessels, joints, and organs. Individuals suffering from this condition are at the severe end of the hypermobility spectrum.
A newsletter published by the famous mayo clinic talk about the effectiveness of Prolotherapy for strengthening the ligaments around the joints in order to improve stability and take pressure of the muscles, which often have to compensate.
Prolotherapy has been used in sports medicine for many decades to treat a variety of ligament and tendon conditions. It is known that Tiger Woods has used the treatment for low back pain. Below is a comprehensive list of reviews, studies and a randomized controlled trial from PubMed studies which help to dismiss the effects of the treatment as being placebo.