We are trying to get your body to make more collagen. You cannot simply ‘take’ collagen and have it show up where it needs to go.  It is ‘digested’ by the GI tract.  Nor can you ‘inject’ it and have it insert itself into the correct structures.  Your body has to identify a structure as ‘in need of healing’, and cells called ‘Fibroblasts’ (the only cells capable of making collagen molecules) must make these molecules in a way that they are ‘woven into’ the correct structure.  Fibroblasts are everywhere in your body.  I could not take a biopsy any place in your body and not find several.   But they do nothing unless they are ‘told’ to make collagen.  The ‘telling’ consists of a group of chemicals, collectively called ‘growth factors’, which trigger the healing cycle.  These are 40 plus chemicals which ‘run together’ and ‘act in concert’ to trigger healing.

These ‘growth factors’ live in essentially only two places in your body:  your platelets and your white blood cells.  If you have bleeding as a part of the injury, like a sprained ankle or an operation, the platelets are part of the clot, or thrombus, or scab that coats the surface of injured structures.  These then deliver growth factors directly into the injured structures.  If you do not have bleeding, the white blood cells control and modulate the degree of collagen replacement by measuring out these ‘growth factors’ whenever they sense that tissue damage has occurred.  Prolotherapy, using dextrose or one of the 40 plus chemicals which has been shown through the years to ‘trigger healing’, uses the ‘WBC response/growth factor release’ mechanism.  Platelet Rich Plasma utilizes both the WBC and the platelets as sources of these growth factors to trigger healing.