There are many ways to care for an injury, but not all of them will heal you. It is important to know how to properly care for an injury so that you can recover quickly and return to your favorite activities. This blog post will go over the five steps for proper injury healing.
Five Steps For Proper Injury Healing
Following are Five steps to Heal Injury:
Seek Professional Help
If your injury is very serious, and you cannot handle the pain for a long period, then seeking professional help might be necessary to ensure that everything heals up properly. The truth is, when you have a serious injury and will be in the hospital for an extended period, it can get very expensive.
As the injury attorneys at Thomas Law Offices noted, this is where a lawyer comes into play to help protect your rights and receive proper compensation from insurance companies that are at fault.
Injuries such as these shouldn’t go without having someone fighting on their behalf. In some cases, surgery may be required to get rid of a damaged area of your body or repair broken bones / torn ligaments.
Rest
Rest is the most important part of caring for an injury. When you injure yourself, it means that there is some tissue damage and inflammation present in your body.
If you just keep on going about your normal routine after getting injured, then this will cause more stress to be put onto your skin and tissues because they are already weakened from the initial injury.
This is why resting the injured area for a certain amount of time will allow your body to recover and heal quickly so that you can return to normal activities again without pain or discomfort.
Resting does not mean staying in bed all day, it simply means taking some downtime from any strenuous exercise or physical activity related to the injured area.
This could mean taking a week off, or it could simply be staying out of the gym for just one day while you ice your knee to reduce any swelling that may have occurred after getting injured right before leg day at the gym.
Ice
Ice is very important to use after getting an injury because it can reduce any swelling or inflammation that may be present in your body.
You should take some time every day to apply ice onto the injured area for 20-30 minutes at a time, so you can get back into action faster without having too much pain and discomfort.
If possible, try to apply ice as soon as possible after you injure yourself and continue to use it until the pain and inflammation start to go down.
If your injury is on a joint, then using an ice pack may not be very helpful because those areas are too large for the cold compress to cover enough surface area, so there won’t be enough cold therapy to reduce the inflammation and swelling.
For these types of injuries, you should try using a bag of frozen vegetables or ice cubes wrapped up in a towel instead so that it can apply more pressure onto your skin and tissues while providing the same amount of pain relief as an ice pack would do on its own.
Compression
Using compression to help with the healing process is a good idea because it helps increase blood flow to an injured area while reducing any swelling that may have occurred.
If you are using ice for your injury, then using some compression afterward can work well together to get rid of any pain and discomfort caused by inflammation-related injuries, so you can recover quicker.
When using compression, you should apply it directly after getting an injury and keep on applying pressure to the injured area for about 20 minutes or until the pain subsides.
Like ice, you can use a bag of frozen vegetables wrapped up in a towel instead of buying some type of expensive compression gear from your local pharmacy store because this works just as well if not better when it comes to reducing pain and swelling from an injury.
Elevation
If you have a minor injury such as a sprained ankle, then elevating it above your heart will help reduce any swelling that may be present in the injured area.
By keeping the injured area elevated higher than your chest for 20-30 minutes or so at a time throughout the day, it can work to get rid of pain and discomfort associated with injuries caused by inflammation.
If you have a more serious injury, such as one that involves the knee or shoulder, then this will not help much because those areas are too large to elevate effectively and there won’t be enough blood flow going into your skin because it is already elevated above your heart.
For these types of injuries, using compression is the best option because it can help speed up recovery time and reduce any pain or discomfort associated with inflammation.
Taking Advil / Ibuprofen
Taking ibuprofen is a good idea if your injury involves inflammation because it can help reduce any pain or discomfort that you are feeling.
You should take some type of anti-inflammatory medication such as ibuprofen, Advil, Aleve, etc to get rid of the pain and swelling, so you can recover from the injury as fast as possible.
Do not take ibuprofen if you are allergic to aspirin because it could cause you to have an allergy attack and get very sick.
If you cannot take ibuprofen or other anti-inflammatory medications, then taking some Tylenol instead might be helpful until the pain goes away enough for you to sleep at night if that is the reason why you are having a hard time falling asleep.
Also, do not take more than one type of medication at once or mix it with alcohol because this could cause some serious side effects that might make your pain worse instead of better.
It’s always a good idea to start with ice. Ice is the number one healer for injuries because it slows down blood flow and reduces swelling and inflammation.
You can use an ice pack or just some frozen vegetables, but this should be done within twenty minutes of the injury occurring at least three times per day until any pain has gone.