Evidence Ratings: Does It Actually Work?

Progressive loading is the best-evidenced tendinopathy treatment. Eccentric training and heavy slow resistance perform comparably in a head-to-head trial, so the protocol you actually stick with matters more than which one you pick.

Vitamin C is a well-established, non-negotiable cofactor for building collagen. Most people already meet these needs through a varied diet, and timed supplementation around exercise only adds a modest extra benefit.

Sports-medicine guidance has shifted from RICE to the PEACE & LOVE framework: protect briefly, then load early, and avoid routinely icing or medicating away inflammation.

Routinely blunting inflammation after training with ice baths or high-dose anti-inflammatories has been shown to reduce muscle and strength gains over time. Manage pain; do not reflexively suppress it.

Pain relief alone is not a reliable readiness test. Restored strength symmetry (around 90% of the uninjured side), demonstrated load tolerance, time, and psychological readiness all matter more.

Short-term NSAID use can help with pain, but higher doses and prolonged use may slow fracture healing, impair tendon-to-bone repair, and blunt muscle adaptation.

Collagen with vitamin C taken before loading raises collagen-synthesis markers and helped in one small Achilles tendinopathy trial, but the effects are modest, so treat it as a minor adjunct to loading, not a replacement for it.

BPC-157 consistently speeds tendon healing in rodent studies, but no published randomized human trials exist, so its effect in people remains unproven. It is not an approved medication and is banned in regulated sport.

BPC-157, TB-500, and GHK-Cu all show regenerative activity in laboratory and animal models (GHK-Cu also has cosmetic-grade human skin data), but none has well-powered human trials for musculoskeletal healing.