The benefits of using heat for pain relief
Using Heat for Pain Problems
When and how to apply heat for therapy … and when not to!
Published 2007, updated 2010
by Paul Ingraham, Vancouver, Canada
Not sure when to use ice or heat? Start with this super-short overview:
The Great Ice vs. Heat Confusion Debacle.
Please note that you should rarely (almost never) ice low back pain.
Therapeutic heating — “thermotherapy” for therapy geeks — is more useful than most people realize, because
painful muscle problems
are more common than most people realize. Pain caused by muscle spasm
and muscular trigger points (muscle knots) is common and often severe,
yet routinely mistaken for other kinds of problems. Consequently, one of
the cheapest and best treatments — heat! — is routinely neglected.
Mustard plasters were widely used and probably brought
about relaxation of muscle spasm through the heat generated by the
plaster. Sometimes folk medicine is more sensible than ‘modern’
medicine. In any case, I suspect that the low-key, nonthreatening
approach to back problems characterized by an earlier time helped to
prevent the kind of long-term, disastrous courses that exist today.
John Sarno, Mind Over Back Pain: A radically new approach to the diagnosis and treatment of back pain
Everyone should understand heating the same way everyone knows how to
put on a band aid. It is a cheap, drugless way of helping an amazing
array of pain problems related to muscle dysfunction, especially
neck and back pain. Heat will not single-handedly “cure” such problems, but it is directly therapeutic, as opposed to “just” relieving symptoms.
What heat is for
Heat is primarily for
muscle pain, and for
stress relief. Warm Buddy
heat packs and heat wraps
offer a warm moist penetrating heat, that penetrate the muscle tissue
and relieve aches and pains fast and without the need of any over the
counter pain medication.
The trick is knowing what muscle pain is. Muscle causes much more
pain than most people are aware of. Some kinds of muscle pain are
obvious enough — like the pain you get after the first ski trip of the
season, or charlie horses in the night — but these are relatively
isolated and obvious examples. Also, heat isn’t especially useful for
them. Charlie horses are pretty fast, and for most people a rare
problem, thankfully. And that post-exercise muscle soreness is virtually
immune to any kind of therapy.
But muscle knots …
When you say that you have “
knots in your muscles,”
you are actually talking about trigger points. A trigger point is a
small patch of contracted, stagnant, swampy muscle tissue. Instead of
the whole muscle being in
spasm, just
a little piece of it is in spasm.
If you’d like to detour and learn much more about trigger points, see
Trigger Points & Myofascial Pain Syndrome: A guide to the science of
muscle pain, with reviews of every possible self-treatment and therapy
option, even for the most difficult cases.
Trigger points are likely to be
the most common cause of
undiagnosed and unexplained aches and pains, especially stubborn or
recurrent headaches, neck cricks and backaches. It is a much more common
cause of pain than the more widely reported repetitive strain injuries
(RSIs), nerve pain, or herniated disks. Trigger points also complicate
essentially all other injuries: they usually appear in response to other
kinds of pain and dysfunction, and then often begin to overshadow the
original problem.
And heat is a good therapy for trigger points.
What heat is not for
Never apply heat to a fresh injury! Really. Just don’t do it! That’s what icing is for. Ice is for injuries.
And what’s a “fresh” injury? Any time tissue has been physically
damaged, it will be inflamed for a few days, give or take, depending on
the seriousness of the injury. If superficial tissue is sensitive to
touch, if the skin is hot and red, if there is swelling, these are all
signs that your injury is still fresh, and should
not be heated.
Here’s an example of what can happen when you heat an inflamed
injury: When I was still in school, and my father had not yet learned to
call me before asking a doctor about his aches and pains, he went to a
drop-in clinic following a traumatic knee injury. The physician on duty
prescribed heat! This is shockingly wrong, but the results spoke loud
and clear: his knee swelled dramatically, outrageously, causing severe
pain and immobility.
Bear in mind that heating is for muscle knots or trigger points and muscle spasm, but
not for
physically injured
muscle — muscle strains, pulled muscles, torn muscles. Damaged muscle
is usually inflamed, not in spasm, and trigger points are a minor factor
in the aftermath of the injury. It’s usually obvious that you’ve
torn
muscle because there is always a very clear, nasty “oh shit” moment of
trauma, where you know — instantly — that something has gone quite
wrong.
However, you may be understandably confused about the difference between spasms, knots, tears, etc.,
especially
if you have back pain, where it can and does sometimes get all mixed
together. People routinely believe that their backs and necks are
injured when in fact they are just suffering from trigger points. I have
other articles devoted to clearing up this confusion.
If you think you have a muscle strain, but you’re not sure, a great
article for helping you sort it out is Save Yourself from Muscle Strain!
If back pain is your issue and your not sure what’s causing it, get thee to Save Yourself from Low Back Pain!
And the article (Almost) Never Use Ice on Low Back Pain! is
specifically devoted to helping people understand why heating back pain
is almost
always better than icing it.
How heat works
It’s not scientifically clear exactly why heat is such a treat.
However, a good guess is that there are several minor positive effects
that add up to … therapy. Most of these effects are also beneficial in
other ways. Not incredibly beneficial, and not even notably different
from icing: for instance, a 2010 study showed quite clearly that
both ice packs and hot packs were beneficial for neck and
back pain,
and about equally so.1 But a small therapeutic effect is still valuable
even if it’s small, and there are probably situations where it works
even better — after all, these were people with acute pain bad enough
that they went to the
hospital. They may have been a bit beyond the help of a
hot pack!
Trigger points are known to be aggravated by stress (“fight or
flight” hormones and neurology). As long as we aren’t overheated to
begin with, being warm is a pleasant and comforting sensation. Our
comfort zone is a warm place. Heat almost always relaxes you overall.
Warm Buddy heat pads the best for all back pain and muscle pain relief. Offer warm moist penetrating heat.
Overall relaxation usually reduces resting muscle tone. You can have
“tight” muscles without actually being in spasm. There are many degrees
of increasing muscle tone between relaxed and “spasm.” A true
muscle spasm is very strong and painful, like a charlie horse. But many people live in a state of
near
spasm — their muscles always clenched and exhausted. This state is both
uncomfortable in itself, causing the same kind of muscle discomfort
that you have when you are exhausted from exercise … but without the
endorphins. And of course it also aggravates trigger points. So any
reduction in muscle tone is quite helpful. And the reduction in stress
hormones makes it a more therapeutic (lasting) effect, as opposed to
just momentary symptom relief.
Our comfort zone is a warm place. Heat almost always relaxes you overall.
Although scientists don’t really understand the physiology of why
trigger points come and go, they have certainly identified why they
hurt
— the stagnant, swampy tissue fluids inside a trigger point are a
disgusting bath for nerve endings. Heat facilitates circulation
somewhat, helping to wash away metabolic waste products, and bring fresh
oxygen and nutrients to the area. No one knows how strong this effect
is.
As with everything about trigger points, there are many (many)
variables, and consequently it is very hard to study, and everyone gets
different results. But heat seems to have enough relevant benefits that
many people get at least temporary, partial relief from trigger point
pain by heating. And some people find it downright curative.
Cancer – skin stimulation:
Skin stimulation
In this series
of techniques, pressure, warmth, or cold is used on the skin, while the
feeling of pain is lessened or blocked. Massage, pressure, vibration,
heat, cold, and menthol preparations can also be used to stimulate the
skin. These techniques also change the flow of blood to the area that is
stimulated. Sometimes skin stimulation will get rid of pain or lessen
pain during the stimulation and for hours after it is finished.
Skin
stimulation is done either on or near the area of pain. You can also use
skin stimulation on the side of the body opposite the pain. For
example, you might stimulate the left knee to decrease the pain in the
right knee. Stimulating the skin in areas away from the pain can be used
to increase relaxation and may relieve pain.
We have many customers who have gone through chemotherapy and have found our
heat packs
to be of great relief for their after pain, all our heat packs can be
used hot or cold depending on the type of therapy required.
Warm Buddy make the best heat packs for relieving pain and stress
Warm Buddy Company
creates products that promote relaxation and provide natural relief
from aches, pains and stress. We have been following this philosophy
since 1995, while creating our world famous aromatherapy heat wraps, heat packs, eye pillows and the original warm up plush animals.
Warm Buddy rejuvenating heat therapy products have become recognized
for their superior quality and long heat holding ability. Warm Buddy
heat wraps and heat packs are safe, easy to use and highly effective.
Simply heat in the microwave or cool in the freezer as desired.
All Warm Buddy heat therapy products are Approved medical devices by Health Canada for the relief of aches pains and stress.
All Warm Buddy heat therapy products are proudly
made in Canada.
Heat and Pain Relief
We instinctively know that heat is good for pain relief, but do we know why?
Scientists have found a molecular basis for the long-standing theory
that heat, such as that from a hot-water bottle applied to the skin,
provides relief from internal pains, such as stomach aches, for up to an
hour.
Dr Brian King, leader of the team that carried out the research at
the UCL Department of Physiology, said: “The heat doesn’t just provide
comfort and have a placebo effect – it actually deactivates the pain at a
molecular level in much the same way as pharmaceutical painkillers
work. We have discovered how this molecular process works.”
The team found that when heat is applied to the skin near to where
internal pain is felt, it switches on heat receptors located at the site
of injury. These heat receptors in turn block the effect of chemical
messengers that cause pain to be detected by the body.
How does heat help?
- By increasing tissue elasticity, heat reduces your resting muscle tension and helps to relax those nasty painful knots.
- Your pain is quickly eased via the sedation and soothing of any pain-irritated nerve endings.
- The deep heating effect increases your blood flow to the painful
area, bringing more nutrients to the injured area while flushing out the
injured debris. This helps to quicken your healing rate.
- The deep heat also promotes a speedier healing rate by stimulating
your natural metabolic rate. In other words, there is more energy
available to fix the injury quicker.
WA+G
Check out this video on
heating pads for back pain
