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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As others have said, elevation is more about helping blood leave the site because it rarely has trouble getting there, so our body is doing the right thing and we’re just helping it along.
There are lots of cases though, where our bodies really don’t do the right thing to make us better. We didn’t evolve with modern life and medicine in mind, so our bodies are operating under a different set of rules.
A common example is healing from cuts and scrapes, an open wound is a dangerous source of potential infection, so we need heal it as quickly as possible. Forming normal skin is a slow and difficult process though, so instead you scab over to protect the wound, then form scar tissue to properly seal it up. But throw wound dressing on there to keep it protected and your body will heal up with much less scaring. Our body doesn’t need to worry about sealing up as soon as possible, because we can do that; nor does it need to worry (as much) about infection, because we can generally treat that too.
So a lot of modern medicine seems counterintuitive, because we’re going against our bodies’ natural processes. Which we are, but only because our body doesn’t know we’ve changed the rules.
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