When To Use Heat And Cold Therapy For Body Pain

I am use to heat treatment for my minor home accident. I never knew about cold treatment not until I saw it on television for the first time during a Nigerian football match. At first I was curious what the medic where up to. Later I discovered it was cold therapy for the injured player. Ever since then, I have always wonder which is better. However, I later figured out when each is proper for use.
The choice of treatment depends on the type and nature of injury. Using the wrong method can even make it worst of delay healing. Although both work on manipulating blood flow, the mechanism is different.

Heat Therapy

Heat therapy applied to the body increase blood flow to the area thereby increasing the amount of healing chemicals that gets there. This is achieved by increasing blood temperature. The result is a reduction in site stiffness.
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This therapy is suitable for long term pain otherwise called chronic pain. Chronic pain are without inflammation. Treating pain with inflammation using heat therapy will be counter productive. It will ease blood flow to the site carrying with it inflammatory chemicals. These chemicals will make the injury worst and increase inflammation.
Also, heat therapy on injury with cut will make the blood flow out more. This is a beneficial treatment if the injury is cause by an animal bit with suspected poison. However, everything attempt will be to stop the flow of blood.

Types Of Heat Therapy

There are several method to apply heat therapy. The most common one is soaking a towel or cloth in hot water and using it to massage the spot. This is one of the best because it keeps the site moist. Alternatively, using a towel or cloth that have been warm with an oven is good but without that moistness. Others are hot stone, hot water bottle and hot cream.

Heat and cold therapy

How To Use Heat Therapy

The first thing is to use the right temperature. Depending on several factors, the temperature should be enough to evoke the healing process but not too much to cause skin burn. To calculate how hot is right, the length of the heat therapy should be between 15-25 minutes. The towel can reduce the temperature in no distant time so the type of towel use should be put I to consideration.
It is more beneficial to add a little pressure to it.

Cold Therapy

Cold therapy applied to the body reduce blood flow to the area. This in turn prevent healing and inflammatory chemicals from getting there. At the end, the place will stop to swell when blood can't get there and the inflammatory chemicals could not cause more inflammation. This also prevent stiffness due to accumulation of blood at the site.
Injury with cut also benefit from cold therapy because it help to arrest blood flowing out. This is achieve by reducing temperature of the blood.
Another way cold therapy work is that it reduce muscle spasm. This help to numb pain.

Types Of Cold Therapy

There several methods of making cold packs. The most common is using ice pack machine. However, the others can be done at home using certain guidelines. A good example is mixing one cup of alcohol with two cups of water in a water bottle. The water bottle is put in a fridge. The end product can be use as an ice pack repeatedly.

How To Use Cold Therapy

Applying cold therapy directly to the skin is bad as it can cause frostbite. In some cases, adding oil of any kind to the site is recommended. For injury with cut, it is good to add a plastic bag to cover it. This will prevent the cut from getting wet.
There is no general rule how long it should be. A rule of thumb is to wait until the site gets numb. It is bad to wait for it to get to the point of frostbite. However, at 20 minutes is enough in certain conditions. The feeling is usually a sharp cold feel follow by a burning sensation that eventually goes numb.

When To Use Cold Therapy

The best injury to use cold therapy on is acute pain with inflammatory response. This include sprains. And this should be done within the first 72 hours. It is best to initiate it from the very moment it happened. This is because it is difficult to reduce inflammation after some days. It should be repeated every 4 hours.
As good as cold therapy is, it is contraindicated in diabetes patient, those with heart condition, elderly and children.

When To Use Both

There are times both can be use in same condition. After 48 hours, while the cold therapy can reduce inflammation, the heat therapy encourage circulation of blood to the site.
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Anti-inflammatory Menthol

Several creams have anti-inflammatory properties which can be applied on acute pain site. However, some of these creams come with heat effect. While the heat encourage the movement of inflammatory chemicals into the site, the anti-inflammatory properties help to prevent inflammatory response. From a recent research, such creams are better in treating certain types of injury than cold therapy. However, there was no evidence supporting it's use with acute pain as compared to the other methods. But by and large, it is obvious they are very good for chronic pain.
So when next you think of pressing that leg injury with hot water, consider what you read here.
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