Prolotherapy was born from the work of several forward-thinking physicians, beginning in the 1930’s. The earliest report of its use was around 1936 when Earl Gedney, DO, a general surgeon at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, caught his thumb in closing operating room doors, which badly stretched that joint. After suffering several months of thumb pain and instability, colleagues told him nothing else could be done. He was advised to just “live with it” and to change professions since that injury prevented him from working effectively as a surgeon. However, Gedney was not of the mind-set to agree with this, so he started thinking outside the box and researching other options.

He remembered attending a lecture about using irritating solutions to treat abdominal hernias (A hernia is a muscle tear resulting in an opening or defect). In the 1930s, the risks associated with surgery were high, and so a nonsurgical approach to hernia repair was quite popular. Gedney knew about a group of physicians, called “herniologists”, who had been using a nonsurgical technique for years. The idea behind the herniologists’ treatment was that injections of irritating substances at the hernia muscular opening stimulated repair and the formation of thicker, denser tissue that closed this defect. These irritating solutions were said to cause “sclerosing” (thickening or hardening), and the technique was called “hernia sclerotherapy.” The first organization devoted to hernia repair using this method was formed in 1923, and by the early 1930s, such procedures were widely accepted as very effective in the treatment of hernias.