What's going on Feldman fans? I just came up with that and it sounded a lot better in my head than it's out loud. Regardless, thanks for listening.
Thanks for tuning in. I want to talk about inflammation today. What is inflammation? Inflammation gets a bad rap. I'm willing to bet most of you out there have heard of inflammation.
You're just not sure what it is. You know that it's a bad thing and it's a bad guy. Well, today we're going to talk about inflammation.
What it is. Is it good or is it bad? What does it affect? What can get inflamed? What are the signs and symptoms of it?
What are the stages of inflammation and what do I do for it? So without further ado, talking about the musculoskeletal system specifically, because a lot of us are active and most of us just want to know when can we get back to activity. Inflammation is a very good thing. It's your body's initial immune mediated response to start to heal an area. So.
You can injure a muscle, a ligament, a tendon, a bone. Those are the most commonly injured structures in our body for your musculoskeletal system. And what happens when you damage one of them is those damaged cells will actually release certain chemicals that tell your body, we need to start healing. Your body, your immune system, then floods the area with hormones and increases your blood vessel flow to that area. So blood carries all the good stuff.
oxygen, red blood cells, nutrients, everything that you want to heal, your body then sends directly to that area. So again, muscle or tissue gets damaged, damaged cells release chemicals. Those chemicals tell your body, your body recognizes those chemicals to mean that there's an injury and your immune system sends hormones to that area, increases blood vessel delivery or dilates your blood vessels to get more blood there.
And then you have inflammation to that area, right? You have increased fluid delivery to that area. This is a good thing.
Now keep in mind, those chemicals or hormones are also very noxious to your nerves, those localized nerves. So you're going to have a localized pain response. Now this is twofold. One is purely chemical in which the nerves are irritated. But the good thing about that is that's your body's way of telling you that you need to protect yourself.
If we have a painful area and your body knows that it has to rest, then it's going to take time to heal. Your body's going to want to protect it and not have you move it. Well, what better way to have us avoid moving something or using something and make it be painful.
So again, there's so many reasons why inflammation gets a bad rap, but it's absolutely necessary. And there's a wonderful method to the madness. This is really cool.
Now we all know I'm a geek about this kind of stuff. So moving along, inflammation rushes to that area, right? Blood vessels, uh, you know, new blood, other fluids in your body that are going to attempt to start healing the area. So your immune system dictates that, and it starts that healing process. And it's absolutely necessary to start that process.
And that's going to last anywhere from zero to four days. We call this the acute phase of inflammation. Okay.
So those biochemical markers are going to cause that inflammation to last anywhere from 24, 48 hours up to four days is that acute phase, right? Sharp spike in pain. And then it's going to gradually dip off after the first few days. Now we're into the subacute phase of injury or inflammation. That's going to last anywhere up to two weeks where you're going to transition out of those bleeding and inflammatory phases into what we call the proliferation and remodeling phases.
Those are the two phases that we want. That's where you start to get into healing. Those are the first initial stages of your body healing that area, meaning you're going to start to lay down new tissue.
So if I pull a muscle or tear a muscle, my body's going to start to lay down new muscle cells. Or if it's a tendon, I roll my ankle, my ligament, my body's going to start to repair the ligament by putting down new ligament cells or cells that are going to strengthen into a ligament. So after that, after you get the new cells there, That's the remodeling phase where think of like what you do to your house. You put the new stuff up and then you start to neaten everything up. You paint, you put in new stuff here and there.
So during the remodeling phase is where we start to exercise, load the tissue, and get the capacity of that tissue back to where you want it to be. So you have your initial injury. For a couple days, you're bleeding, it's inflamed, and then we want to transition into the phases where your body lays down new tissue and then starts to strengthen that tissue.
Now that can be very risky because a lot of people are going to get back to activity too quickly. Pain levels are down, the inflammation is down, you feel like you're moving better, and you get tempted to start moving again. But your tissue capacity is not there.
There's still a big risk of injury, and this is why we don't want people to jump back into activity too quickly when they have true inflammation. Not all pain is inflammation in the body, but when you do have a legitimate inflammation, we need to respect that. We need to understand what's happening to the tissue.
And we need to understand that we cannot do what we were doing a week ago, two weeks ago, or even the day before. We can't get back to the same level of activity because the tissue cannot handle it. It's still very weak, very immature tissue.
So how do you recognize whether you actually have inflammation? Well, there's five clinical signs and classic signs of inflammation. You're going to have... swelling, you're going to have warmth, you're going to have redness, you're going to have pain, and you're going to have a loss of movement or loss of function.
Now that pain comes because, like I said, those chemical markers cause pain in the area to help protect us. So that's why it's going to be painful. It's going to be painful rest.
It's going to be even more painful with movement. Okay. Now you have redness and warmth and inflammation. Well, that's because more blood is going to that area.
So you're going to have more redness because of the blood. You're going to have warmth because your blood is actually. Warm and that's how we keep our body warm and you're gonna have some red sorry some swelling there too that increased fluid is going To cause that area to expand so it will be visible fluid from visible swelling and inflammation So those are the five symptoms and signs that you can think of or that you want to think of when you're dealing with an Injury and deciding what is the prognosis going to be because that's what we look at when we decide how are we gonna get this Athlete back to activity how we're gonna get this individual back to activity and movement So we manage expectations and we set our prognosis as such. And that's really the long and short of inflammation.
It gets a really bad rap, but it's quite necessary for the body. It's the first stage in your body healing itself. If you take nothing else away from this talk, I want you to remember that. It's necessary and you want to facilitate the body to continue down that healing process. So you don't want to continue to push yourself and move if you have some inflammation.
You definitely want to respect that. Rest. obviously get in touch with a good healthcare provider and make sure you're moving through those phases as quickly as possible so you can get back out there.
So just keep in mind, the initial phase is going to last for a couple of days, a high spike in pain, and then it's going to drop off. And then afterwards, your body's going to start to heal itself. And that process can take up to weeks or a couple of months, depending on the extent of the injury. So that's inflammation in a really quick six or seven minute nutshell.
If you guys have any questions, please let me know. You know, this is the fun stuff that we want to talk about. You know, managing people's expectations is a large part of what we do. So there's inflammation. If you want to know anything, let us know.
Drop a like, share this video to any of your friends, and we'll see you guys out there.