Should you use ice for injuries? In school we were taught, that we must use ice when we have acute injuries, because of blood flow, swelling and in order to reduce inflammation. It sounds logical, because everyone knows it’s true.
You do the R.I.C.E protocol: r is for rest, i is for ice, c is for compression and e – elevation.
Even if you’ve been working in the healthcare profession for a long time, you can’t be totally sure that using ice for acute injuries improves your recovery or gets you back to your normal state. Ice helps to decrease pain and reduce inflammation because it creates a vasoconstriction effect. It only pushes blood out of an area that is inflamed.
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Is inflammation always bad?
The question is whether we want to reduce the inflammation. If inflammation is pathological, it has a negative effect and we need to get rid of it.
In an acute state, inflammation is a fundamental part of healing when we have an increase in immune cells, macrophages to help clean up the area, an increase in oxygen, blood that carries nutrients and hormones, like insulin growth.
So you have this incredibly complex and coordinated effect of your body trying to heal an area.
Why not use cold therapy for acute injuries?
Then people start doing things that stop the healing process, and applying ice actually inhibits recovery; it slows down the repair process and delays normal function.
Applying cold therapy does decrease pain, but at the expense of inhibiting recovery.
When people take medications like NSAIDs, those actually slow the repair as well, because they get rid of inflammation. So the key to repair is not to reduce inflammation prematurely. For example, if you have a fever, your body is trying to heat up to kill off the virus. Or if you start sneezing, your body is trying to eliminate something that’s in your nasal passages.
Other things to avoid for acute injuries
In school, we were taught that you should definitely use this R.I.C.E protocol on all acute injuries. And when something is chronic, you use heat.
Using heat on an acute injury is not probable, because that’s going to actually add more swelling, inflammation, and pain.
It actually slows your recovery, because your lymphatic system doesn’t have a pump and it requires motion to push things out of it.
So the more you rest, the less recovery you’re going to get.
What to do for acute injuries?
In the lymphatic system, we have a lot of waste going on after an acute injury. So the question is, what do you do for acute injuries? You put motion into that joint as much as you can. If it’s fractured, you don’t want to put motion into the area. But if it’s strained or sprained, you want to apply a passive range of motion or sometimes an active range of motion depending on the severity.
More motion will activate more lymph and more circulation, and it will speed up your recovery.
The next thing is infrared therapy, which is just putting light into a certain body area. The recovery of an injury can dramatically decrease pain as well.
Another thing is about Vitamin D. It is a natural thing that can greatly support your immune system. If you have any inflammation or pain, it would be better to have a higher dosage of Vitamin D. 40 000 IUs probably every day for a whole week can quickly shorten the recovery time.
Manual therapy-opposite side is also a very interesting counter-intuitive technique. Basically, if you injured your right ankle, for example, you would use manual therapy on your left ankle. You always work on the opposite side. It sounds kind of weird, but if you try it, you will find that it will work.
All the nerves on the right side of the body are connected to the left side of the body through the spinal column. When you work on the left side of the body, it affects the right side of the body because they’re on the same circuit.
These neurological circuits are embedded in your muscles to allow things to be coordinated. So you can walk and can perform certain motions.
So even on the right side of your body, where you have the bicep, it contracts the opposite muscle, which needs to be inhibited. If there was an acute injury on this side, you would manually work on the opposite side.
Manual therapy could be anything from trigger point therapy to massage or any type of stimulation. If you injure yourself, you need to try this out to see for yourself. Even if you were using a hammer right and hit your thumb on the left side and started to massage the right thumb, you would notice a dramatic decrease in pain.
Anytime you hurt on one side of the body stimulate, the exact opposite mirror image side.
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