Why does ice help with swelling?

Moment Of Um

Lemonada Media

Kids & Family, Education For Kids

4.4 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2024

⏱️ 5 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you’ve ever banged your knee pretty badly, you might have noticed the knee swells up to larger than its normal size. To ease your pain and make the swelling go down, maybe someone handed you an ice pack. But why is it ice that does the trick to reduce swelling, and does anything else work? We asked physical therapist Karen Litzy to help us find the answer. Got a Moment of Um question that’s making your brain swell? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll help get it all sorted out. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of um.
0:06.5	Answering those questions that make you go...
0:09.0	Um, um, um, um, um.
0:12.0	Um, um, um, comes to you from APM Studios.
0:25.5	I'm Mark Sanchez.
0:27.2	Um.
0:29.2	Hey, before I start this episode, I just have to do something really quickly.
0:32.5	I forgot to water the garden yesterday.
0:35.0	Let's hop outside and take care of that, okay?
0:41.2	Okay? water of the garden yesterday, let's hop outside and take care of that, okay? Yeah, I love my garden. I grow carrots and potatoes and several different kinds of kale,
0:47.1	including dino kale, curly kale, red Russian kale, and...
0:51.6	Oh, oh, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, Ow. I can't believe I left a rake in the yard. Oh, oh, oh, my knee. Oh, look at that. It's already swelling. Can someone get me some ice? We're all out. Oh, shoot. How are we out of ice? I never have it when we need it.
1:12.8	It doesn't really help that much anyway.
1:15.7	Hi, I'm Svea from Toronto, Ontario.
1:18.7	And my question is, why does ice help with swelling?
1:24.3	When you apply ice to an area, it helps to constrict the blood vessels leading into that area that is thought to help decrease swelling around the affected joint.
1:37.3	But if only it were that simple.
1:40.3	Hi, I'm Karen Litsy.
1:45.1	I'm a physical therapist based in New York City.
1:48.5	And what ice also does is it helps to cool the skin surface temperature.
1:54.1	And that is thought to help decrease pain or what we call an analgesic effect, which is a fancy way of just saying it
2:03.0	helps to decrease pain. So when you have less pain over the area, you're more likely to move it
	...

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