Inflammation Management Starter Pack
This has been coming up a lot lately and the initial treatment is something everyone should be able to do without going to a healthcare professional. When you’re dealing with inflammation you really only have one goal; let the body heal itself. This seemingly obvious statement is amazingly ignored by most patients as soon as an area of their body starts to hurt.
Your body has a natural healing response that triggers after injury which often will cause a normal amount of swelling, heat, redness, and reduction in function. Just imagine an exceptionally hard lifting workout. That delayed onset muscle soreness is exactly that. Damaged muscle tissue, loss of capacity to perform, heat, and some mild swelling. While a lot of these principles would apply to a lesser degree the inflammation response I'm referring to in this post is one following injury that results in an inability to complete the task and severely damaged or strained tissue. In this case you’ll want to hit these important steps to allow your body natural time to heal.
Remove the hammer - Give the body a chance to actually heal itself without you constantly re-aggravating the tissue. In athletics this may mean sitting out from sport for a bit. For most adults it can be modifying your work posture, hobby, or lifting regime to avoid anything that continues to exacerbate the inflammation response.
Ice - Hilariously, this has come under fire on instagram a lot with people suggesting ice is bad for you. I can’t stress enough how incomplete and inaccurate this statement is. Ice itself has not been shown to have nearly any effect on muscle temperature in the muscle. The main positive effect is a reduction in blood flow (helpful for an area with massive blood flow stimulus following an injury), immobilization of the painful area (because you have to while icing) and some systemic hormone release triggered to counteract the cold your body is being exposed to. All very positive. If you stick to icing 10-15 minutes at a time several times a day you have nothing to worry about.
Unloaded Movements - The implementation of this should be regulated by your therapist or athletic trainer who is seeing you for your acute injury. But for chronic injuries this is a must. This will bring non-inflammation causing blood flow to the area (because you aren’t loading it and because you’re moving it through a range that doesn’t hurt). Super helpful. Seemingly contradictory to ice but it’s quite helpful if done before icing or any other part of the day. No warm up required.
Sleep - A good argument could be made that this list should start and stop with sleep. There is nothing that currently exists which is more effective and naturally healthier than sleep for removing inflammation. There is massive literature out there on the benefits of sleep so I'd encourage you to dive into that if you aren’t willing to take my statement as fact.
Once you’ve done these you can start to introduce progressive load and functional activity. That will be the biggest variance between chronic conditions and acute conditions (and acute conditions with actual severe damage vs strains). Inflammation is normal and often healthy so don’t be afraid of the word or the concept. But understanding what it does and in which cases to manage it are key for any successful recovery!
The picture isn’t intended to be misleading. Coffee has some nice inflammatory properties. Nutrition will play a massive role in long term inflammation which exceeds the scope of this post.
