Ice for pain relief

One of my favourite methods of pain relief is cryotherapy(using ice). In my clinic I use Biofreeze as a icing cream  because whilst having a lot of the benefits of ice it has the additional advantage that it doesn’t affect blood supply to the area.

For the home I usually recommend bags of frozen corn rather than frozen peas. Solely for the smell of thawing peas. I would strongly recommend putting a towel between the ice-bag and the skin as well.

Using ice for muscle strains and sprains usually works pretty well. For other kinds of problems such as a herniated disc they will either have minimal affects or possibly be detrimental. For this reason it is important to understand the cause of your pain and address the cause as well as addressing one of the symptoms.

Basic Advice

• Ice for no more than 20 minutes in one spot. You don’t want damage like frostnip or frostbite.
• Repeat this every 3 – 4 hours
• Ice in the first 48 hours. Its important not to use heat in the time immediately after an injury as this encourages undesirable swelling and other bad side effects
• After the first 48 hours a combination of Ice and Heat can work really well. 20 minutes of ice followed by 20 minutes of heat can create a healing environment where you are both bringing nutrient rich blood to the injury site to help with the healing process and flushing away the by-products of the healing processes.
• With heat, moist heat is better than dry heat.