When to Use Hot and When to Use Cold Treatments For Injuries
Perhaps one of the most important skills any medical practitioner can develop is understanding how to counteract the human body’s own misguided responses to injury, no matter how well-intentioned.
Similar to a well-intentioned dog that brings dead animals into the kitchen to proudly display their work, our bodies can do more harm than good in their attempts to help us. Sweaty palms before an exam do little to help your performance. Likewise, the human body’s natural reaction to certain types of injuries is swelling; does more damage than good in some circumstances.
In this regard, knowing when to apply heat to an injury and when to apply cold is important. It depends on the type of pain the patient suffers, the cause of the pain, and the length of time lapsed since the injury was sustained.
Biofreeze and other cooling topical analgesics are generally best when applied immediately after an injury, generally within two days. There are a number of reasons why this is true, but one of the largest involves swelling. In addition to numbing the pain, “vasoconstrictors” reduces the circulation of blood in a particular area as well reducing the sensation of pain.
A second instance in which it makes sense to apply cooling solutions is with “chronic” injuries that get repeatedly aggravated by specific, repetitive activities. For example, a tennis player stresses the same muscles in their racket-arm during every match they play. Should they sustain an especially bad injury in this area of their body, they may have no choice but to continue putting stress on it if they want to keep playing.
In such instances, cold treatments like Biofreeze work best when applied after a match’s end. Applying cold treatments before the beginning of a match not only hinder performance but it can actually prove quite dangerous due to the numbness it produces.
Heating solutions should be applied to old injuries only when swelling is not an issue. You may want to apply heat to stiff, sore, or aching joints before a jog. Remember: heat always increases blood flow in a specific area that in turn encourages muscle tissue to remain elastic. Heat can actually improve muscle performance during strenuous activity for this reason. It is seldom a good idea to apply heat directly after strenuous performance because it can bring unnecessary swelling to the area.
Another useful rule of thumb is that when applying heat to muscles, the applicators function better when wet; the inverse is true of cooling analgesics that can produce frostbite if applied when moist.

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