cryotherapy

Can Cryotherapy Help With My Chronic Pain?

/ Thomas Cohn, MD

cryotherapyCryotherapy is a fancy way of saying “cold therapy,” and while you may have noticed some newer cryotherapy clinics popping up in your city, humans have been using cold temperatures to help treat injuries for hundreds of years. The science behind the idea isn’t new, but modern medicine is always looking to improve techniques and make them even more successful at treating an issue. Below, we take a closer look at how cold therapy can help you manage a pain condition, and how new cryotherapy techniques are being implemented across the US.

What Is Cryotherapy?

Cryotherapy is a medical technique that relies on colder temperatures to cause a certain effect on the body. Injury or overstress of a joint can trigger an inflammatory response in the body. This natural inflammation is designed to protect the area from further stress and injury, but inflammation can actually be uncomfortable in and of itself, and it can delay the healing process. However, if you put an ice pack or a cold pack on the area, it will cause blood vessels to constrict, decreasing circulation, swelling and fluid pooling in the injured area.

Icing an area or jumping in a cold bath can be a perfect treatment or recovery option for patients dealing with aches caused by stress or injury. If your joints are aching or your back is throbbing after a day of activity, ice the area to help reduce swelling and maintain mobility in the affected area. Cold therapy can be especially helpful after pursuing active treatments for an injury, like physical therapy or controlled exercise that can cause an inflammatory reaction.

Cryotherapy In Its Modern Form

As we mentioned above, cryotherapy has also been modernized into another form of therapy. When you head to a cryotherapy clinic, you can enter a specialized padded chamber that is filled with liquid nitrogen that turns into a gas. The temperature inside the chamber can drop as low as -240 degrees in a matter of seconds, but it’s not as shocking to the system as an ice bath because your body isn’t in contact with a cold object, just the cold gas around you.

Clients stand in this chamber for a very short period of time, typically about 2-3 minutes, but that’s enough time for the body to start triggering a natural response that can help with things like joint pain and arthritis. The process works by shocking your body into thinking it’s freezing, which stimulates a semi-hypothermic response. Your heart rate drops, your breathing slows and your body redirects its energy towards keeping your core temperature up. Your rate of blood flow also increases, helping to speed up your body’s natural healing mechanisms and flushing toxins out of your joints. These toxins are then filtered out of your body by your liver and kidneys, helping to reduce uncomfortable inflammation.

So the next time your knee starts to swell or your back starts to ache, head to the freezer, grab a bag of frozen peas and do a little cold therapy from the comfort of your home. And if you’re interested in clinical cryotherapy or hands-on techniques that Dr. Cohn and his team can provide, reach out to his office today.

Is Cryotherapy Worth The Trouble?

/ Thomas Cohn, MD

cryotFor the stars, major sports athletes and the exercise enthusiasts, one of the newer trends is cryotherapy. In short, it involves immersing oneself in extreme cold after an intense workout. The intense variety is a liquid nitrogen vapor chamber with the head outside and the body exposed to minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit for at the most three minutes. It is supposed to prevent inflammation and promote faster recovery from intense physical activity. The main focus of treatment is for athletes, but there have been claims that it helps a number of conditions like Multiple Sclerosis, Rheumatoid Arthritis, migraines, fibromyalgia, Alzheimer’s, chronic pain and anxiety.

Cooling, ice and cryotherapy work on the premise of decreasing inflammation throughout the body. Cryotherapy is an inexpensive treatment, probably costing about $15 per session, but that can add up quickly if you do it after every workout. During a workout, the body produces increased waste products of metabolism. In general, these do not necessarily cause pain and inflammation. In fact, after a workout, one may want to flush the waste products out of the body versus rapidly cooling down the body and decreasing the body’s elimination of any of these waste products. Furthermore there is absolutely no scientific evidence to prove that cryotherapy works or helps athletes or any of the above illnesses.

Simpler is Often Better

Local inflammation can be helped with icing in the initial phase during the first 24 to 48 hours. An ice pack is an inexpensive and simple way to decrease blood flow to an area and diminish inflammation. After the first 48 hours, heat is helpful to increase blood flow and get rid of any inflammatory products left over. Throughout that time, adequate hydration of the body is needed so the natural processes can eliminate waste products versus accumulating locally and causing pain.

Fads for health often are merely just hype. Many are costly, and most have little to no scientific basis to be helpful. Whole body cooling for instance, if not done extremely carefully, can easily stress the heart and cause frostbite burns. Further, it may cause vessel constriction and prevent the body from eliminating waste products produced with exercise. Most fads are often an exaggeration of practical strategies for a problem. Changing hydration with drinking a sport’s drink to getting intravenous hydration with vitamins after athletic events, or slowing down and breathing deeply after a race compared to wearing an oxygen mask and breathing pure oxygen gas are both examples of this. There really is no science behind any of these trends and mostly are targeted at high profile individuals who are then emulated by others.

As far as cryotherapy goes, it surfaced a couple of years ago and the science is still not present. In 2016, the Food and Drug Administration actually posted a statement saying there is no evidence of any of the claims of helping athletes or curing diseases. Maybe the best advice the old KISS principle, keep it simple stupid, and try the ice pack when needed.