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INTRODUCTION 0:11
In a healthy Denver podcast where we discuss all things revolving around health, fitness and wellness in the amazing state of Colorado so you can get behind the scenes information from industry insiders, special events and more. Coming up is our host physical therapist and strength coach Dr. Jamie buffet. And here we go.
JAMIE 0:35
Today we’re going to talk about the age-old question. Heat versus ice. I know many of you have had this question before, and this is a question we get almost every week in our clinic. It’s, you know, I’ve sprained my ankle. How should I use heater ice? And, you know, we get a lot of variations of that question as well. Back pain, shoulder pain, whatever. So this is something that most people don’t fully understand or don’t understand as well as they could. So I thought today we kind of go over these and just a short little episode on the best uses for both. So you know, there is a huge debate and a question we frequently get is this question of should I use heat or ice for my pain? Now there are positives and negatives to both. We’re going to discuss heat versus ice and talk about the options to help with pain and swelling. We’ll also discuss the proper amount of time to spend on both and how the two can be combined. So let’s start with ice. So most of us are going to grab an ice pack right after we experience an injury. We’ve heard this MAC growing up, he was hitting a ball hitting us when we’re playing baseball or running around spinning an ankle when we’re a kid and you know your mom or dad may go Brandeis back. So many of us know that ice is generally used right away to help with inflammation. It does this by slowing down the blood flow and improving inflammation, reducing swelling and pain. And sometimes our patients tell us and believe this to be the be all and end all of pain relief. However, what some don’t realize is that inflammation can be a good thing. It’s actually one of the four stages of healing. So more recently, medical practitioners have been debating the benefits of ice as our body goes through those phases of healing after injury. Inflammation is the second stage and an important one that allows our bodies to repair cells and to move the area of the wound. The question is, should we really be slowing down this process? It’s still up for debate. There is a really interesting book called iced I don’t remember the author but where a lot of this was questioned. And Kelly Surrett was I believe he gave the foreword and and you know it just really brings up an interesting idea that maybe icing isn’t the best thing for our joints. And so we tend to tell people that ice will decrease your pain. But use that to decrease the pain to try to move that inflamed area in a painful way that helps push out the inflammation. So the only time inflammation is a major problem is when it’s going on too long. If you’re still swelling two days later, and it’s not going down. That’s something to be concerned about. But if you haven’t seen any reductions in the swelling by you know two days, you probably need to see somebody about it quickly. So let’s move on to the next stage of healing that will occur after this stage of inflammation. We want that to start as fast as possible. So there are many forms of ice that can help including ice packs, cooling sprays, ice massage, ice baths, and they all tend to work pretty well. I find that ice works best at decreasing pain. Opposed, sorry, an ice massage works best in decreasing pain. Compared to a typical ice pack. That’s where you fill a Dixie cup full of water and let it freeze and then you rip off the bottom and kind of use it just kind of move it on the skin plate and circular motion and that cooling Yes, it’ll melt on you a little bit. That cooling kind of motion helps a little bit. So that’s kind of my quick and dirty on ice. Now let’s talk about heat. A lot of our patients tend to use heat because they feel like it makes the muscles feel better and looser. There are different types of heat, moist heat and dry heat. Most of us tend to use dry heat like a heating pad. What we see is or maybe you’ve wrapped kind of like a semi wet towel around that and then put it on your back. Both of these work well just doing what you prefer and what works the best for you. So this can help with things like the muscles are tight and achy. And you just want to relax those muscles to help you move a little bit better. Doesn’t help as much with sharp pain. Heat actually can make inflammation worse so those quick sprains right It just happened. You may not want to put inflammation around there. It works better after that inflammatory phase of healing has already happened. And it helps to improve the circulation and promote blood flow to calm down the muscle. He can help with lots of different types of where that chronic achy pain is, tends to be what it works better for.
JAMIE 4:56
So what we’ve noticed is ice helps a lot around joints, and heat can help more around muscles. This may work with most people, but it may not work with your body. You know this isn’t medical advice. These are only observations. arthritis may be one instance where it could potentially help the joints to feel looser and kind of get some blood flow and moving around a little bit as well. Alright, so let’s move on to how long you should leave heat or ice on so you only need to use heat therapy for around 1520 minutes. You can’t leave it on for longer but at a certain point you kind of just have diminishing returns you know more often also can help. So it’s important to be cautious and not allow heat or ice to be on YouTube long heat you can burn yourself ice you could actually have an ice burn as well and especially as the ice melts, and if there’s like a towel or something that can kind of freeze to your skin and that can cause some damage so you got to be careful there. So a lot of people will use ice baths but not typically for pain that’s typically more for sports recovery. And you know, typically that’s you’re not going to super long time in that either. Just because it’ll drop your body temperature so much that it may not be great for you. But I think ice baths that’s a topic for another podcast because there’s a lot of interesting information on that. There are some things you need to be careful of with ice and heat. I encourage you to look up several diseases and open wounds and impairments with sensation and things like that. So be careful with that. But both heat and ice work well and they can even be combined together. So if you will say you have a wrist that has been strained you can use what’s called This is my favorite as well is kind of like a submersion in hot contrast. So first put it in hot water, warm, not scalding. And then you put in cold water. You do that three times three or sorry. Three minutes hot, three minutes, three minutes. Three minutes go and work up to around 2020 minutes and this helps to flirt with dilation and constriction of the arteries where they’re opening and then closing and that can help to get increased increased circulation in the area and pump out some of the swelling and really can help with especially more those more acute issues. that has just happened. So you can use these things to help with pain, but just realize they’re probably not going to help the underlying cause. And that’s really important to realize, heat and ice are not fixes for anything. They are temporary pain reduction techniques to get you to the point where you can work on the things that are actually causing the pain. Alright, so let’s just give a quick summary. So heat is best for chronic pain and muscle soreness. Increased blood flow promotes relaxation, soothes tight muscles, reduces pain, and helps restore movement. You can use it for muscle aches, arthritis, chronic back pain, joint muscle stiffness and can be used before exercise to kind of get you moving. Ice is best for chronic pain or sorry acute pain and can be used for muscle soreness as well. Helps with relieving inflammation, eating swelling and redness reducing blood flow kind of numbs the pain a little bit and may reduce bruising. You can use this for sprains, strains after injuries, swelling and bruising and pulled muscles. So that’s a little recap of that heat versus ice controversy. Make sure you share this with anybody this argument with before and thanks for listening we really appreciate it consider giving us a review on your favorite podcast listening app, iTunes, Spotify, wherever you listen on. And if you’d like more information, or just a recap of everything I just talked about, we do have this on our blog. So if you go to blog or kinetic chain Denver backslash blog black X slash e VS is with us use one over the other is there or you could just contact us and we’ll sit down and send it to you as well. We also have an infographic that quickly recaps everything I just talked about. So hopefully you enjoyed this. Stay tuned. We appreciate you listening. Alright,
JAMIE 8:57
bye
