Welcome to the four-part Sock Doc series “First Aid for Injuries,” designed to help you understand sports injury causes and how to prevent them, treat them naturally, and become a better athlete. I hope you’ll gain a lot of knowledge from these four articles that further emphasize the Sock Doc philosophy of natural injury treatment and prevention. There’s a reason why you’re injured, and it’s not because you forgot to ice, stretch, or take your NSAIDs with your Wheaties. You’ll learn why and when to ice; if you should use heat; why you should think twice about your anti-inflammatory medications; therapies for an acute or chronic injury; and a whole lot more. I hope you enjoy this unconventional and highly effective information—it will help you become a healthier, stronger, faster, efficient, and injury-free athlete.
When you’re injured (a recent, acute injury), there’s a natural inflammatory response that occurs in your tissues as blood and other fluids enter the area needing attention. Pain soon follows, letting your brain know that something is not right. This pain is a protective mechanism so you (hopefully) don’t cause any more unnecessary damage. The inflammatory response initiates repair of the injured area—whether it’s a bone, ligament, tendon, or any other body tissue. This is NORMAL and NECESSARY, so the question is not only if you should use ice, heat, or another type of therapy, but how much you should intervene with the normal workings of the body, especially to the extent of taking drugs like anti-inflammatory medications.
Once you’re injured, the questions arise like wildfire. Do you ice that injury or heat it? Or if you use both ice and heat, which one comes first? And how long and how often do you apply the therapy? Maybe you shouldn’t use ice or heat at any time. Do you wrap the injury and elevate it? Do you stay off the injured area or get in some active recovery? How about anti-inflammatory medications (NSAIDs)? Should you take them when you’re injured? Should you take an NSAID to speed up your recovery?
I’ll break this down and discuss how to properly use some different types of readily available therapies to treat an injury, both chronic and acute. But first, to understand which type of treatment you might want to employ, it’s important to understand what is going on inside your body when you’re injured, and of course, how you got injured.
“That Sports Injury Came Out of Nowhere”
Sport injuries don’t just come out of nowhere, with the obvious exceptions of trauma and accidents. You may have been in a motor vehicle accident, crashed your bike, got clipped during a soccer game, or slipped on a mossy rock while trail running. These types of injures can happen to anyone at any time while participating in certain sports or activities, though the extent of injury and the way it heals is highly dependent on the person’s health, which I will elaborate on in a moment.
Your body creates various muscle imbalances in response to some (or several) stressors to your musculoskeletal and nervous systems. These stressors affect your entire body but localize in a certain area (now known as your “injury”). An athlete’s body can only handle so much stress; it will ultimately break down. These stressors are due to training too hard or too often, inadequate rest or recovery, improper diet, improper footwear, past injuries creating compensatory patterns in your body, or too much emotional stress in your life. Eventually, the muscle imbalances reveal themselves as pain, inflammation, and an injury.
Additionally, most of these same stressors result in both antioxidant depletion and corticosteroid depletion—both major predisposing factors when it comes to an injury. (Corticosteroids are adrenal hormones—the same ones you need to balance blood sugar and electrolytes in your body.) The more stress you are under and the greater the free radical damage, the more likely you are to be injured, the more severe the injury will be, and the longer it will take to heal. This is discussed over and over on the Sock Doc site because it is the main reason why athletes get injured. It’s a huge concept to understand and one that conventional medicine, for the most part, still doesn’t quite grasp.
So, now that there’s an injury, what’s your body’s response?
Inside the Injured Body—The Inflammatory Response: Antioxidants, Fats, and Stress Hormones
Most people understand the process of inflammation at least at a basic level, which is why they think about ice and anti-inflammatory medications. Your body is trying to repair the injured tissues so you can recover as quickly as possible. Inflammation is too often thought of as this terrible thing, though it is very important and necessary for health and healing. It’s when inflammation gets out of control and your body doesn’t know when to shut it off that problems arise. Also, a body that doesn’t produce adequate inflammation may never fully heal.
The inflammatory response initiates repair, but its success is very closely related to how healthy you, the athlete, are. Though there are several factors involved in the inflammatory process, the two most important nutritional factors to consider are fatty acids and antioxidants. There are those antioxidants again.
A healthy fatty acid profile is a sure way to help your body recover from any injury in the most efficient and timely manner. This will be discussed more in Parts III and IV of the Sock Doc First Aid for Injuries series. Antioxidant depletion, which was one of the predisposing injury factors just discussed, is the other major aggravating factor when it comes to the inflammatory response. The more free radical damage you’re suffering from, the worse the inflammation and injury will be. Typically, the same factors that set someone up for the injury (those stressors mentioned above) are the same ones that will rob your body of antioxidants, making you more susceptible to an injury and dictating the severity of the injury. Sure, eating antioxidant-rich fruits, vegetables, and herbs will help with free radical damage, but it’s also important (perhaps more so) to recognize the factors that rob your body of antioxidants: poor sleep, excess stress, environmental stress (air, water, sun, temperature extremes), poor diet, etc.
“Damn, I’m Injured”
Well that sucks. So now what do you do? (This is the #1 Sock Doc question regarding a variety of injuries.) The first thing to do is realize why you got injured. No need to go through that again, right? Nope. If you understand the why, you can not only handle the injury correctly but also keep it and other injures from occurring again. If you really think you got injured because you didn’t stretch or you ran without your orthotics or your lucky rabbit’s foot fell out of your nutrition bag, then this is where you stop and read from the beginning—along with other stuff on the Sock Doc site—to better understand my “madness” before you move on.
There are two “go-to” therapies that the injured athlete uses—ice and anti-inflammatory medications (NSAIDs). I rarely use ice (or heat), and I never use NSAIDs when treating an injury of any type. There are reasons why I don’t use these therapies often or at all, which will be explained. First, should you use ice, heat, or RICE? And if so, when and how often? Second, should you use NSAIDs? Or perhaps more accurately, why would you not want to use NSAIDs?
I’m going to discuss the ice/heat quandary in Part II and NSAIDs in Part III and IV. Stay tuned, but until then, think about any excess stress in your life and whether you’re at risk of antioxidant depletion, corticosteroid depletion, or fatty acid/inflammatory problems. If you are at risk, begin by addressing those stress issues to reduce your chances of becoming injured and to heal and recover faster from an existing injury.
