Icing Down an Injury May Be Harmful

Quote:

Originally Posted by Abu3baid

I will mention that big time sports to this day use ice for the injured, and I will defer to them as they pay the big money to the trainer an doctors to take care of their athletes..

What I would like to see is some sort of case studies detailing out the differences in healing and other hints between ice use and lack of use!

Interesting article though!

Yet there were a lot of people who believed that eating fat makes you fat, yet it is more complicated than that. Basically, just because something is a standard doesn't make it correct.

I can understand the premise behind it. I know in another similar situation, were athletes take cold/ice baths to promote blood flow to the extremities to help speed up recovery. Yet that is a near full body immersion into a cold environment. They are talking like 10-15 minutes in an ice bath, sometimes it might just be cold water with no ice, they are talking about temperatures around 50-70 degrees. Not sitting ice on a localized area, which would be up to 30 degrees colder than a ice bath.

I think long term icing could be detrimental. Having freezing temperatures exposed to a isolated location could promote the constricting of blood vessels. Bellow is some information on frostbite.

Hmmm. So we let the body's natural reaction to insult go unchecked because otherwise we'll do some damage? Perhaps, therefore, people should leave well alone when someone has a galloping, systemic infection? Let their rising body temperature, literally, cook their brain and the body's defenses will obviously deal with the bug causing it? That must be the problem in West Africa just now - people are interfering with the body's natural reaction to an insult.

Seriously, there's enough evidence that icing is beneficial to plenty of injuries and all injuries involve an inflammatory reaction and, therefore, swelling of some magnitude. Sounds like a job for common sense - don't leave ice on for too long at any one time; after all, eukaryotic cells generally haven't evolved to function at ~0°C.

I have spent quite a bit of time in my colleges training room for various injuries and can say that icing an injury makes a big difference in recovery time even just to improve muscle recovery times (that is why pitches ice their arms after they pitch and to keep the pain down).  I'm not sure where the writer of that blog got their info but swelling of an injury can actually do more harm than good to the healing process.  The general purpose of the swelling of an injury such as a sprained ankle is to reduce movement in the injured area and that, along with the pain associated with it keeps you off it and prevents you from making the injury worse.  If the swelling gets too severe or continues for too long then the fluids in the swollen area will actually restrict the blood flow and can destroy the blood vessels in the area causing the recovery time to lengthen.  That is why most medical professionals will tell you to ice the injury to reduce that swelling and then use heat to increase the proper blood flow to the area which will heal the injury.

just because something is a "natural" reaction of the body does not mean it is still relevant or can be bettered by modern medicine.  The human body adapted over thousands of years to survive living in caves and getting chased down by predators where there probably wouldn't be ice to help an injury and continuing to move on a minor injury could cause that small sprain to permanently cripple you which would mean almost certain death

This makes sense, and also happens to fit with some traditional, non-Western medical practices, such as in Chinese medicine, where usually soft-tissue injuries are treated with herbs or manipulations to increase blood flow.

Years ago I got tendonitis playing guitar.  The doctor just advised icing after playing.    It actually didn't do me any good and I had deterioration to the point I just stopped playing altogether for several years.

Swelling isn't really about immobilizing lymbs, it has to do with increased lymphatic activity taking away metabolic wastes from tissues that are healing.  The pain is mostly a side effect from that.   It's not some kind of magical signal to not use the limb (indeed, the natural response in animals is often to scratch or bite injuries).

Now days on strains I use Tiger Balm or Blue Emu Oil and a heating pad immediately.     I would only use ice on things like bruises, not strains.  For better pain relief I'll use something that dulls the sensation of pain, like kava or CBD (cannabidiol, a derivative of cannabis).