How to Deal With Swelling
Swelling is one of the crucial factors for deciding whether hot or cold treatment is appropriate for a given injury. Here is a general rule of thumb: if an injury appears to be producing swelling, you will want to lower the temperature of the afflicted area. If swelling does not appear, you should probably use heat, instead.
Both hot and cold treatments have their own respective strengths and weaknesses for these purposes. When treating injuries that involve swelling, it is important to reduce blood flow to the area. Minimizing blood flow will expedite the healing process and reduce the amount of pain that the injury causes to the afflicted individual. Cold treatments are generally more capable of reducing blood flow than hot treatments.
The term cryotherapy can mean a variety of different things. It can refer, for example, to the practice of freezing warts off of the body, or similar procedures that use either liquid nitrogen or solid carbon dioxide. In the case of Biofreeze, however, cryotherapy simply refers to the application of certain cooling agents to the skin with the intention of treating muscle and tissue pain and injuries.
Products like Biofreeze employ cryotherapy or cold-temperature treatment. Such practices have existed for the treatment of muscle pain for hundreds of years; they remain a prevalent form of treatment today for those who suffer various types of degenerative diseases and sports injuries.
If possible to use it pre-emptively, Biofreeze works best in this way. In other words, if you have just completed a taxing workout, and you have the premonition that you will soon become sore, this is the best time to apply cryotherapy techniques like Biofreeze to your muscles. The goal is to head-off swelling before it starts.
Heat does bring its own respective therapeutic uses to pain management. It boasts the capacity to soothe excessively tense, stressed, or even damaged muscles, similar to cold therapy. In some cases, heat therapy provides a better remedy to joint stiffness than cold therapy, and can sometimes revive some degree of movement to the afflicted area. Heat can also restore blood flow to areas with bad circulation.
These outcomes are all desirable, but they will generally become priorities a few days after you suffer a serious injury, or subject your body to the stress of an intense workout. For the above reasons, it makes sense to think of cold treatments as “first aid” solutions to recent injuries, and heat as more of a long term, rehabilitative solution.

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