Sports Injury Recovery in the Nashville Area: What Regenerative Clinics Offer

Regenerative clinics offer athletes PRP injections, bone marrow concentrate and sometimes A2M. In the sports trials cited here, one PRP injection did no better than a sham needle for Achilles tendinopathy, and the hamstring trials are small and conflicting. Exercise-based rehab comes first, and Tennessee law lets you start it with a physical therapist before you see a doctor, on conditions.

What do regenerative clinics offer athletes?

Related pages: overview of PRP and the conditions it has been tested for; guide to who might be a candidate for stem cell injections; account of what A2M has and has not been shown to do.

The question for an athlete is the same as for anyone else: what happened when the treatment was compared with a placebo?

What the sports injury trials show

Sources for the table: Kearney, JAMA 2021; Am J Sports Med, 2014; Sports Orthop Traumatol, 2023; Cochrane, 2014.

The hamstring trial that favored PRP compared an injection with no injection, and patients knew which they had. That design can make a treatment look better than it is. When a clinic cites a result, the first thing to check is what the comparison group received.

Tennis elbow, knee arthritis and other tendon problems are not repeated here. The PRP overview linked above sets out each of them with its trials, including the ones in which PRP was compared with cortisone rather than a placebo.

Where does rehabilitation fit?

First. For Achilles tendinitis, OrthoInfo says “Physical therapy is very helpful” and that surgery “should be considered only if the pain does not improve after 6 months of nonsurgical treatment” (OrthoInfo). A clinic that offers an injection in place of a proper loading program, rather than alongside it, is skipping the step with the better evidence. If rehab did not work, it is worth finding out whether it was the right program, done long enough, before you pay for an injection.

Who can you see in Tennessee, and how do you check them?

A physical therapist, without a referral first. Tennessee law lets a physical therapist evaluate and treat you without a doctor’s referral, on conditions. Your physician must be notified by the therapist. If “no progress has been made” in your condition within 30 days, the therapist must stop and refer you to another qualified practitioner, and treatment cannot continue “beyond ninety (90) days without consulting with the patient’s appropriate healthcare practitioner.” The 30- and 90-day limits do not apply to a condition a physician has already diagnosed as chronic, neuromuscular or developmental (Tenn. Code § 63-13-303; Board of Physical Therapy policy, 2023). What the law allows and what your insurance pays for are separate questions, so ask your plan whether it wants a referral before the first visit.

The 30-day rule is also a useful yardstick for you. If a month of supervised rehab has changed nothing, the step the law points to is a fresh look at the diagnosis by another practitioner, not an injection bought on your own.

An athletic trainer, working with a physician. Athletic trainers in Tennessee are licensed by the state Board of Athletic Trainers and work “upon the advice, consent, and oral or written prescriptions of a physician” (Tennessee Board of Athletic Trainers). If a school or club trainer is managing your injury, ask which physician they are working with, and make sure that physician sees any plan that includes an injection.

Checking a license. The state says “You may verify the license of any health care practitioner or facility in Tennessee” through its license verification search (Board of Physical Therapy). That covers the physical therapist and athletic trainer as well as the physician. For the physician who would do the injection, board certification and who does each step matter too; those checks are set out in our guide to verifying a specialist in Tennessee. Then use a checklist for judging a clinic before you pay, and watch for the warning signs of a clinic selling past its evidence, such as promised return dates or “avoid surgery” claims.

What about throwing, ligament and cartilage injuries?

Clinics may offer injections for partial ligament tears, including the elbow ligament in throwers, and for cartilage damage. The evidence that would support the offer is a trial with a placebo or sham group, in your injury. If the answer is a case series, an athlete’s story, or “we’ve had good results,” the treatment is still experimental for that injury. A clinical trial with named investigators, ethics oversight and a registration you can check is the safer way to take part in an experiment.

How long before you can play again?

None of the sources on this page sets a return date after any of these injections. Ask for a written plan that moves you forward by criteria (pain, strength, function) rather than by the calendar, and share it with your physical therapist, athletic trainer or coach so that everyone follows the same plan. The recovery basics, including which medicines to avoid and the warning signs of infection, are on the page about the first weeks after an injection. Do not stop a prescribed blood thinner or aspirin without the doctor who prescribed it.

What if rehab has not worked?

An athlete who has done a well-run rehab program for months and is still in pain has a real problem, and a 2025 review of 27 trials found PRP better than cortisone in the mid term for several tendon conditions (BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, 2025). It uses your own blood. The limit is that the comparison was with cortisone, not a placebo. In the Achilles, the placebo-controlled trial found no benefit; the hamstring trials are small and conflicting; and the older review of soft tissue injuries found no difference in function.

Should an athlete pay for a regenerative injection?

Not as a replacement for rehab, and not on a promise of a faster return. If you have done the rehab and still want to try, choose PRP over more expensive options only with a clear way to judge whether it helped, a written return plan, and the understanding that the placebo-controlled trials so far do not favor it.

This page is general information, not medical or legal advice.