Why do we elevate injuries to promote recovery? If this is the correct thing to do, why does the body send more blood to the injury?
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Our bodies haven’t really adapted to modern medicine when it comes to injuries.
Before medicine, if a human wanted to heal from an injury, they had to avoid using that limb/whatever for as long as it was still injured. The way the body evolved to make sure the brain did that was to make the injury hurt/less mobile/more annoying to use. Swelling does this.
Swelling does very little for us in the modern world though. We already know to stay off of injuries, and we have things like casts and braces and what not to help keep them immobile. So swelling is more of an annoyance to us than anything else.
So anyway, we do things that reduce swelling in the modern world. We take things like ibuprophin, we elevate our injury, we ice our injuries. All of these things do… essentially the same thing. Reduce swelling. Elevating basically just helps the blood drain from the injury so it’s harder for it to swell.
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