Hi, I'm Natalie with Veritas Health, and today I'm going to give you guys some information on using heat and/or ice for your low back pain. A question I get a lot as a physical therapist is should I use heat or ice and when should I use these?
What I recommend is for the first 72 hours after an injury, so when you're in that acute phase, you should only use ice. This is because ice is going to help decrease inflammation, help constrict superficial blood vessels, and help with your pain control. To use ice, you can use a number of different methods. You can run to your local drugstore get an ice pack such as this, or you can use a homemade ice gel pack like this. We have some other videos on our website that’ll give you some information if you do want to make one of these. When you're using ice, I recommend you use a towel just across that surface and then apply it to yourself just to give your skin a protective barrier.
You want to start with about ten minutes of ice, but if your pain is severe, you can work yourself up to about 20 minutes. Just be sure to check your skin, make sure nothing's getting red, nothing's getting irritated, and that ice isn't giving you any sort of discomfort in that skin area. If you're using your ice pack in a body location where you're going to be laying on top of it, I also recommend checking more frequently that you have any skin irritation. I also recommend not falling asleep on top of the ice pack, as that can make the ice stay on you too long and cause some damage to your skin.
Once you're past that first 72 hour mark so you're leaving that acute inflammatory phase, then it's appropriate to use either heat or ice or a combination of both. You can find what feels better for you and listen to your body on that. For using heat, I recommend either using an adhesive hot pack, which you can get at your local drugstore, or an electric heating pad. Both of these options are great and they work very similar, so find what you feel is more comfortable. For both the adhesive and the heating pad, I recommend starting with ten minutes and working your way up to about 30 minutes as you feel necessary. Just be sure to check your skin to make sure nothing is red or irritated. And once again, I recommend not falling asleep on top of these.
Also, if you do have any sort of like topical anti-inflammatory medication or icy hot, don't use heat or ice on top of that as that can cause an uncomfortable chemical reaction. Heat is helpful because it causes some superficial vasodilation of the blood vessels helps bring in more blood flow, and then also helps modulate pain within your nervous system. You can definitely use a combination of heat or ice. Alternate between and see what feels best for you. To learn more about the use of heat and ice for back pain, please visit us at Spine-health and be sure to subscribe to our channel for more videos like this one. Thanks for watching!
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