The bodies natural response to an injury is to produce inflammation. I would assume thats the bodies response from milleniums of evolution so it serves a purpose in the healing of the injury? But the general consensus is once injured we do everything we can to reduce inflammation. I don’t understand and am obviously missing info / intepreting info wrong. ELI5
Or am I on the right track and this is why RICE isn’t recommended as much any more and heat is?
In: Biology
We treat fever and inflammation for comfort, not for efficacy, more often than not.
Medical advice is generally not to treat fever or inflammation unless they present a risk of further injury.
Inflammation is like war. You might win the war at the cost of high casualties (tissue damage, premature aging, planting the seeds for cancer, etc ). Or you might win the battle but lose the war (chronic inflammation, cytokine storms, anaphylaxis, etc)
I know this is a specific example but inflammation in professional Athletes can increase recovery time and decrease performance and some of that can be mitigated with ice baths / anti inflammatory medication/ wraps. However it does appear to be part of the healing process for other things like lifting weights and mitigation of that inflammatory response my “hinder your gains” so we want to reduce it when it’s an annoyance or too much and let our body do it’s thing when we know it’s taking care of itself in a good way.
There is actually a new approach on how to treat soft tissue injury that replaces RICE, that involves letting inflammation do the work. The idea is that inflammation is a natural healing process and trying to reduce it could impair healing.
New approach is called PEACE & LOVE:
Protect
Elevate
Avoid anti-inflammatory modalities (ice and meds)
Compress
Educate
after a few days:
Load
Optimism
Vascularisation
Exercise
Currently, our body tends to overreact and create large inflammatory responses over something small that is easily treatable, and can cause further damage. We now have medication that can treat said issues without the necessity of an inflammatory response, ie antibiotics, so oftentimes we’ll do an effective treatment for the specific issue along with an anti-inflammatory for comfort purposes
We do want inflammation. It does a bunch of stuff to help us out. But sometimes it does a little bit too much stuff, and it makes us feel bad. That’s why we try to control it with things like compression. We’re not going to stop it completely, but we might be able to stop some of the extra damage it might do to our own bodies in the process.
Sometimes our body does WAY too much, like in something called anaphylaxis. Our inflammatory system sees something and over-reacts. It kind of throws a tantrum and is very dramatic. Like seeing a toy it doesn’t like and then throwing all of its toys out and smashing them to pieces and setting the house on fire. Then we need to stop the inflammation/tantrum. Otherwise we might destroy the house.
Yeah yeah inflammation can be bad for you etc but we’re missing out the main reason we treat inflammation: it feels horrible. It’s painful.
Studies have shown that a significant percentage of depression is due to inflammation in the head. I don’t remember where I read that, it was 12-13 years ago.
When I cut way back on wheat and remove 100% of refined sugar from my diet, depression plummets.
The discrepancy is in the goal. Most injury recovery is based on allowing some return to work/play, which icing to reduce inflammation can allow. But better recovery happens when the inflammation is allowed to run its course, although that requires more time for just healing as opposed to returning to work with restrictions.
It’s like the flu. We all need to go to work to finance our miserable lives, so we buy stuff to dry up our drippy noses, tylenol for the headache, and cough syrup for the scratchy throat.
The prescription from nature is to drink fluids, get lots of sleep, and stay home for a few days. But that car payment ain’t gonna make itself…
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