Ever notice people react quite strongly to their love of heat or ice?
Icing for pain, you love it, but you’ve been told to use heat, but you hate it. I’m here to tell you, stop feeling guilty! Icing for pain is just fine! You don’t want to “do the wrong thing” and feel like you are breaking the rules when you sneak that ice pack out and use it to calm your flare-up. I’m here to tell you, stop feeling guilty! Icing for pain is just fine! No need to feel guilty about it!
Heat or Ice for Pain? Which is correct?
I get a lot of questions about which is “right” to use, heat or ice?” I think that’s kinda like asking which coffee is the “right” one, iced or hot. Kinda up to the person drinking it… isn’t it?!
There are a lot of rules and talk around which is better – heat or ice – for pain and when do you use what. It’s mind-boggling really. Let’s simplify, shall we? When pain has been hanging on for 3 months or more it’s more about finding ways to calm the pain than anything else. When we look at research about the use of ice or heat for pain, there is good news. Everybody wins.
Research tells us both heat and ice “show mild improvement in pain severity.”
WOO HOOO! I love these kinds of results! The best part about this research is it means YOU get to choose! Use whatever feels better to you.
You get to choose! Do you life ice for your pain? Use it! When you have a preference for something, your nervous system usually shares that preference. So, since we are trying to calm the nervous system down, you get to use the thing that feels soothing and relaxing to you. Picking the thing you hate, the thing that makes you feel tense and irritable probably isn’t the best way to help decrease the threat to the nervous system and improve your pain.
Pain can be like a fussy baby
I mean… if the baby were crying does screaming at him or her help calm the baby down? How about putting that bundle of love in your arms and running frantically up and down the stairs? Yeah…. I don’t think I would try that! However, a nice rock in the rocking chair, and a little shhhhhhhing, those things tend to help calm my babies. Choose the things that calm you to help decrease your pain. You matter just as much as the fussing baby!
I like things that give me choices. In the spirit of choices, this post here is for you heat lovers. For you ice lovers out there, here is a video on how to make two types of ice packs so you can ice for pain, I even let my daughter help me.
Ice Pack Recipes 1
1 part Rubbing Alcohol
3 parts water
Put in Ziplock Bag. I recommend double bagging.
Ice Pack Recipe 2
Dish Soap
Put in a ziplock bag
Ice Pack Recipe 3
Frozen veggies – these work great, just don’t eat them after you have used them.
Grab your ice pack and place it wherever it hurts. Just remember too much of a good thing isn’t usually all that good.
Hints and Tips for icing for pain:
- To avoid frost burn/ bite please place a thin layer of fabric between you and the ice pack.
- Icing goes through stages – cold, burning, aching, numb (CBAN) this process takes between 10-20 minutes.
- Remove the ice once you feel numb – mileage may vary
- Once you have hit 20 minutes please remove the ice. I understand your pain may not all be gone at that point, but leaving it on will encourage other metabolic changes that may not be very helpful and your pain.
- Let the tissues rewarm before icing again – about an hour
Enjoy the video and let me know which Ice pack you like best in the comments below.
Sources:
French, S D, et al. “Superficial Heat or Cold for Low Back Pain.” Cochrane Database Syst Rev., U.S. National Library of Medicine, 25 Jan. 2006, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16437495.
Garra, G, et al. “Heat or Cold Packs for Neck and Back Strain: a Randomized Controlled Trial of Efficacy.” Acad Emerg Med, U.S. National Library of Medicine, May 2010, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20536800.
Malanga, G A, et al. “Mechanisms and Efficacy of Heat and Cold Therapies for Musculoskeletal Injury.” Postgrad Med, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Jan. 2015, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25526231.
