Warnings When Applying Ice To The Skin
Along with the importanceof not applying ice to your skin for longer than is considered safe so as toprevent damage, there are some special precautions you should follow.
- Avoid using ice therapy if you have a heart condition unless your doctor gives you the go-ahead.
- If youve applied ice packs to your injury but it hasnt alleviated the pain and swelling within two days, make an appointment with your doctor.
- Dont use ice to treat stiffness, such as a stiff neck, as that can actually make it worse. This is because ice constricts the blood vessels, and thats the last thing you want to do if youre suffering from stiffness. You want to increase neck flexibility by boosting blood circulation, which is where heat treatments can prove beneficial.
When Ice Therapy Is Not The Answer
As with heat therapy, there are times when it can be tempting to slap a bag of ice on any sore or twitching muscle. But doing ice therapy for back spasm and a number of other problems can actually do more harm than good.
You should not ice for:
- General muscle pains
- Trigger points
- Reducing body fat
Also, this is pretty intuitive, but you should not apply ice if youre already shivering.
Another word to the wiseyou may think you have pulled or strained a muscle in the back or neck, but actual tissue damage is quite rare. The tissue of the back is really thick and it takes a lot of forcelike whiplash from a car accident or lifting something very heavyto actually tear muscles.
So when it comes to answering the questionwhats good for back pain, heat or cold?heat usually wins out.
And if you indeed have a back strain from lifting or something else, you should only apply ice for a few days and then switch to heating pads.
When Not To Use Ice
Cold is not suitable if:
- there is a risk of cramping, as cold can make this worse
- the person is already cold or the area is already numb
- there is an open wound or blistered skin
- the person has some kind of vascular disease or injury, or sympathetic dysfunction, in which a nerve disorder affects blood flow
- the person is hypersensitive to cold
Ice should not be used immediately before activity.
It should not be applied directly to the skin, as this can freeze and damage body tissues, possibly leading to frostbite.
Professional athletes may use ice massage, cold water immersion, and whole-body cryotherapy chambers to exercise-induced muscle damage that can lead to delayed onset muscle soreness . DOMS commonly emerges 24 to 48 hours after exercise.
A study published in The Cochrane Library in 2012 suggested that a cold bath after exercise may help prevent DOMS, compared with resting or doing nothing.
The participants spent between 5 and 24 minutes in water between 50 and 59 degrees Fahrenheit, or 10 to 15 degrees Celsius.
However, the researchers were not certain whether there may be negative side effects, or if another strategy might be more helpful.
Cryotherapy is primarily a pain-reliever. It will not repair tissues.
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Use Cold And Hot Therapy
In certain scenarios, using heat therapy and also cool treatment plan can assist soothe suffering and promote recovery. Is Heat Or Ice Best For Back Pain
For brand-new or severe strain like pain brought on by an autumn or various other strain that shouldnt last past six weeks. Cold treatments can be an excellent solution to reduce swelling, decrease swelling and numb discomfort.
For chronic soreness, distress thats expected to last or has lasted for even more than 6 weeks. Warm is usually the severe temperature level of choice for comforting agony as well as boosting the healing process.
Many patients benefit from both warm as well as cold treatments. For example, after exercise, immediate cool treatments can lower muscular tissue discomfort. After 24 hours, changing to warm therapy can help your muscle mass heal faster.
What Is Ice Useful For
Cold treatment can help in cases of:
- osteoarthritis
- strains
- tendinitis, or irritation in the tendons following activity
A cold mask or wrap around the forehead may help reduce the pain of a migraine.
For osteoarthritis, patients are advised to use an ice massage or apply a cold pad 10 minutes on and 10 minutes off.
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Be Proactive About Ice/heat Applications
In some instances, you may experience delayed muscle soreness if you overstretch your lower back muscles. This type of pain often develops gradually over a few days as tissue inflammation progresses. You can ward off inflammation by immediately applying ice after exercising or being active. After 24 hours, switch to heat applications to help overstimulated tissues heal.
Heat Or Ice For Back Pain / Cool It Down
Ice therapy is very useful for certain types of muscular injuries. Ice will work well for back muscle pain especially in the first 48 hours following a suspected injury. Ice will reduce swelling and provide minor pain relief by numbing local tissue. Ice also slows down neurological impulses in the area forcing nerves to transmit less pain messages to the brain.
Ice will trigger a reflex response to the lower temperature, causing the body to increase circulation. This brings oxygen and nutrients to the area and helps to remove pain-causing waste products from the muscles. This makes ice a good physical treatment option for oxygen deprivation back pain.
Ice may be applied with a cold gel pack or simply ice wrapped well in a towel. Never apply ice directly to the skin. Do not keep ice on the area for longer than 20 minutes at a time. Many doctors recommend 20 minutes on, followed by a half hour off for maximum relief.
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Adjust Your Daily Routine
When you are in discomfort, you need to make adjustments to the method you come close to day-to-day tasks. The trick to rebounding from severe back and also neck strain is preserving the regular curvature of the back. Sustaining the hollow of your back and also practicing fantastic posture will assist lower your recuperation time.
Treating Pain With Heat And Cold
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Overview
We treat everything from arthritis to pulled muscles to inflammation with ice packs or heating pads. Treating pain with hot and cold can be extremely effective for a number of different conditions and injuries, and easily affordable. The tricky part is knowing what situations calls for hot, and which calls for cold. Sometimes a single treatment will even include both.
As a general rule of thumb, use ice for acute injuries or pain, along with inflammation and swelling. Use heat for muscle pain or stiffness.
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How Does An Ice Pack Help
So what happens when you apply an ice pack to the back or knee? The cold temperatures restrict blood flow to your muscles, which helps to reduce bruising, swelling and pain.
Once you remove the ice pack, your muscles will warm and blood vessels expand, ushering in a flood of new blood, helping to clear debris left by injury and accelerating the healing process.
Cold therapy is a great option for fresh injuries like a pulled, sprained or strained back muscle or a new case of IT band syndrome.
When To Use Heat For Lower Back Pain
After the initial 24-72 hour of cold therapy, it is recommended to switch to heat therapy as the swelling and inflammation subside.
The heat will stimulate blood flow back to the area to help with healing, and of course, the ever important soothing effect of the heat.
Like ice therapy, there are many ways to apply heat therapy including:
- Electric heating pads
- A hot water bottle
- Or, you could microwave a bit of rice within a sock.
Be careful to avoid burning or overheating the skin. Either take a break from the heat or put something between your heat source and your skin to avoid burns.
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Start With Cold Therapy For Acute Back Pain
If you’ve had your back pain for four weeks or less, using cold therapy initially is likely your best bet. By bringing the temperature down, you can constrict blood vessels and simultaneously minimize swelling and information. You’ll be left with a numbing effect that hopefully offers relief.
Once you’ve noticed an improvement in your inflammation, transition to heat therapy. The heat can help with flexibility, muscle movement, and overall functioning. It will deliver nutrients to the injured tissues and allow you to feel better.
Contrast Therapy: Using Both Cold And Heat Therapy For Back Pain
Hot/cold immersion therapy alternates quickly between cold and heat therapy to jolt your bodys circulation. As you might imagine, rapidly shifting between hot and cold water can be very stimulating, but outside of that, the benefits of this method of dealing with an injured latissimus dorsi or any other injury is fairly unknown.
Some studies have shown contrast therapy can improve your bodys immune system, but others show minimal net benefit or near equal benefits as with doing cold and heat therapy separately.
Contrast therapy can be used for recovery purposes after a trying workout or to reduce swelling related to injuries. But it should not be used for fresh injuries when swelling, heat and redness are still present.
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Ice Or Heat For Back Pain
30-Second Blog Snapshot:
- Conservative therapies, such as hot or cold packs, exercising, and over-the-counter pain relievers may help mitigate pain in between interventional pain treatments.
- Patients hoping to relieve low back pain with a heat or ice pack may be confused about which one to use for their pain.
- At Southwest Spine and Pain Center, Utahs leading pain management group, physicians explain the difference between ice and heat packs for back pain.
Although ice and heat can be beneficial at relieving certain musculoskeletal pains, there are instances where one should be used over the other. A great rule of thumb to follow may be this: ice is for injuries heat is for muscle pain. Well elaborate:
Ice Is For Injuries
When you sustain any injury of any kind, your body responds by inflaming or swelling its tissues to prevent infectious agents and other debris from impeding recovery. Although this inflammatory process is completely normal, it can be incredibly painful depending on the cause or condition of your injury. Therefore, its important to apply ice to your injury not just to calm swelling, but to also reduce pain. Nevertheless, there are certain situations ice should be avoided and that is when your muscles are sore or stressed. Ice can cause severe trigger points and spasms to develop when its applied to sore muscles, which leads us to our next point: heat is for muscle pain.
Heat Is For Muscle Pain
When To Use Ice For Lower Back Pain
In most instances, you should use ice on your back for the first 24 to 72 hours following an injury. Cold therapy helps minimize swelling and inflammation. This, in turn, eases your pain. Cold therapy may also decrease tissue damage.
Whether you use an ice pack, a frozen towel or even a bag of frozen vegetables, place a cloth between your skin and the source of cold to prevent ice burn. Cold therapy should be applied for no more than 20 minutes at a time, but it can safely be applied up to 10 times in a 24-hour period.
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Does Ice And Heat Actually Work For Lower Back Pain
Ice is effective at reducing blood flow to a specific area.
This reduction in blood flow can reduce swelling and inflammation which causes pain, particularly around tendons and joints.
Ice also numbs nerve activity which can provide temporary pain relief.
Heat does the opposite. It improves circulation and blood flow to the affected area.
The increased blood flow to the injured area relaxes the muscles and helps promote healing to the damaged tissues.
The rising temperature can also provide pain relief in the lower back.
Several studies have shown that hot and cold therapy are effective for low back pain, can help with exercise induced muscle soreness, and can help with neck and back strain.
So What Is The Story With Necks
The information we gave explaining what happens to the back when it is iced holds true with necks as well. However, the argument against icing the neck is not as strong as it is with the back, the word never does not apply here.
Just like back pain, the majority of neck pain is not considered inflammatory or injurious in nature. This is the criterion for icing an injury. Just like backs, the neck is easily irritated with cold. Have you ever been hit in the back of the neck with a snow ball? The cold hurts worse than the snow ball impact!
The most common problem people face with their neck is the crick in the neck, which is enough to make you slightly hostile. This is usually brought on by chilly air hitting the neck at night, and not by the way you slept on your pillow.
Even if we break down all of the specifics, it is better to learn by experience. Take a small piece of ice from the freezer and place it on your neck for a few seconds. You will see quickly that your neck does not like it at all.
Unfortunately, no matter what you do, the neck is more fragile than the back. Because the brain knowns this, it pays more attention to the back than it does the neck, and protects it a lot more. Necks are susceptible to being injured a lot more easily, especially with a condition known as whiplash which is way more common than straining muscles in your lower back.
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When To Use Heat
Once the initial inflammation and swelling have subsided, switch to heat. Heat stimulates blood flow to the affected area and helps facilitate healing. It may also decrease stiffness and prevent pain signals from traveling to your brain.
When using heat, you can choose between dry heat or moist heat. Dry heat is generally easier to apply, but it may make your skin feel dehydrated. Moist heat penetrates your muscles better and may work better for easing your pain.
If you have open wounds, dermatitis or diabetes, avoid heat therapy altogether.
The Mind Game: The Effects Of Icing And Heating Are Dominated By Your Opinion
The emergency room experiment was surely dominated by placebo. The only medicine involved was reassurance: the patients expected relief, which is usually good for pain.5 The placebo effect is not as powerful as people think,6 but it was probably the only major factor affecting the outcome in this experiment.
And yet people do react quite differently to ice and heat! We often have strong preferences about this. The only real leverage hot and cold packs have is on our nervous system alarming or relaxing, soothing or irritating and that in turn is strongly determined by context and how we feel about it. A lot like back pain itself, actually.7
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What Is Heat Useful For
Heat is useful for relieving:
- osteoarthritis
- tendonitis, or chronic irritation and stiffness in the tendons
- warming up stiff muscles or tissue before activity
- relieving pain or spasms relating to neck or back injury, including the lower back
Applied to the neck, heat may reduce the spasms that lead to headaches.
In 2006, a team of researchers found that patients with lower back pain who exercised and use continuous low-level heat wrap therapy experienced less pain than those who did not use CLHT.
Previous studies had shown that, for some people, CLHT relieved pain more effectively than oral analgesics, acetaminophen, and ibuprofen.
However, the effectiveness of heat treatment may depend on the depth of the tissue affected by the pain or injury.
Some people use heat treatment, often in the form of a hot bath, to stave off DOMS.
There is some evidence that this might help, but heat that is applied for only 5 to 20 minutes may be less effective, as does not have the chance impact the deeper levels of tissue.
Some researchers have that moist chemical heat packs, which can be used for 2 hours, may be the best way to prevent DOMS through heat treatment.
Use Caution If Youre Pregnant
If youre pregnant and have back pain, its safe to use a heating pad. You should avoid prolonged exposure since overheating can be dangerous to a fetus. It can lead to neural tube defects or other complications.
This is more probable in a hot tub or sauna, but err on the side of caution. Use a heating pad on the lowest setting while pregnant, and only for about 10 to 15 minutes.
Since heating pads decrease pain signals and increase circulation, use the pad soon after developing painful flares or stiffness to speed the healing process.
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What’s Better: Ice Or Heat For Lower Back Pain
Lower back pain is a common condition. In fact, you are likely to experience it at some point in your life. While lower back pain can be a nuisance to your everyday life, conservative treatments are usually enough to treat it successfully. Two of these treatments are hot and cold therapy. Not only are both options incredibly convenient, they’re affordable as well.
If you’re living with lower back pain, you may be wondering which one is better. The answer is, “It depends on the timing of your back pain as well as its type.” Keep reading to learn more.
