To make a long story short, human joints—like all joints in the body—have very poor blood supply. And where there’s poor blood flow, healing is limited or extremely slow. The body’s healing cells can only reach a damaged area if there’s a sufficient blood supply to carry them there.

Think of it this way: if a disaster struck a small town, and all the rescue personnel and equipment were nearby but the roads leading in were blocked, no help could get through. The town would remain in crisis—not for lack of resources, but because access was cut off.

Why is blood supply so poor in our joints? It's a trade-off made by nature. For joints to remain flexible, shock-absorbing, and mobile, they can’t be filled with fragile blood vessels that would be crushed with every movement. Instead, our joints are built to function beautifully without compromising on mobility—but at the cost of direct access to healing resources.

This trade-off works fine—until the cartilage in a joint gets damaged, such as in arthritis. When that happens, the body’s repair system can’t deliver help efficiently, not because the roads are blocked, but because the roads don’t exist.

Enter PRP: Platelet-Rich Plasma. Platelets are among the body’s most powerful healing cells. When you cut your skin, it’s the platelets that arrive first and start the healing process. They’re loaded with growth factors—special signaling proteins that tell other healing cells (like stem cells) what to do and where to go.

PRP therapy takes a concentrated dose of your own platelets—4 to 7 times the normal level—from a small blood draw. This platelet-rich solution is then injected directly into the joint space, bypassing the body’s lack of access and delivering healing factors right to the site of damage.

So what does PRP do for arthritis? It helps the body do what it already knows how to do—heal itself. By delivering concentrated platelets into an area starved of natural blood flow, PRP jumpstarts and supports the natural healing process, offering a non-surgical, regenerative option for managing joint pain and damage.