Autologous Blood Therapy

Autologous blood therapy, also called autologous blood injection or autohemotherapy, comprises several kinds of treatment using a person own blood, belonging variously to traditional medicine, alternative medicine and some newer approaches still under investigation. The original, unscientific form was the immediate intramuscular or subcutaneous reinjection of freshly drawn blood, used in the early twentieth century when some physicians believed it had a logical mechanism of action, later abandoned as advancing science made clear it lacked one. Other forms involve changing the blood before reinjection, typically through oxygenation, ozonation, ultraviolet light exposure or centrifugation, including platelet-rich plasma and autologous conditioned serum; it is possible that ozonated or ultraviolet autohemotherapy has real effectiveness in some autoimmune diseases through an immunomodulatory mechanism not yet well understood, though this remains unproven.