By Andrew P. Han
March 5, 2019
If you’ve ever needed to recover from an athletic injury, you’ve probably used ice to reduce soreness and swelling. For decades, doctors and athletic trainers have recommended RICE — rest, ice, compression and elevation — to reduce the pain and inflammation of sprained ankles. Inflammation has been viewed as the enemy of recovery.
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Icing, it turns out, is like flossing: an ingrained practice that seems practical but is not strongly supported by clinical evidence. The oldest justifications for icing, dating to the 1970s, have melted under scientific scrutiny, some cryotherapy researchers say, and most scientific studies on icing haven’t provided the solid results that would justify its popularity. This is true, they say, both for icing for daily recovery and for an injury.
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Even the doctor who coined RICE no longer promotes it. “It’s perfectly fine to ice if you want, but realize it’s delaying healing,” Gabe Mirkin said, “[Icing] is not going to change anything in the long term.”
Instead of icing to reduce inflammation, athletes might be better off letting it run its course. Better yet, get moving again, Mirkin said: “Don’t increase your pain, but you want to move as soon as you can.”
From personal experience, I know that walking on a sprained ankle too soon retards healing.
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The experts she cites in her book believe the justifications given for using ice — to reduce swelling and inflammation — aren’t just lacking in evidence but could be counterproductive. “There’s this idea out there that inflammation is terrible, and you want to reduce it,” Aschwanden said. “But the inflammatory process is how your body recovers from exercise, and rebuilds and recuperates.”
Immediately after tissue damage, cells send out a chemical distress signal that is answered by several types of white blood cells, which arrive on the scene and trigger inflammation as they go about their work attacking pathogens and cleaning up and repairing the damaged cells.
“If done for too long,” icing could have a negative effect on regeneration, said UCLA professor James Tidball, who researches the immune system’s role in muscle injury. In other words, by using ice to try to lessen inflammation, which is the immune system response to injury, you could also be reducing the activity of the cells that are promoting repair.
This isn’t to say cryotherapy has no physiological effect. Icing to numb something definitely works, and “icing is the safest pain medicine we have,” Mirkin said. Ice may also help people get a damaged area moving again. “If you have an injury, the muscles around it switch off,” limiting mobility, said Chris Bleakley, a professor of physical therapy at High Point University in North Carolina who has studied icing. “Ice helps to switch those muscles back on again.”
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