Cold dunks, heat treatment, and plasma injections are popular for battling inflammation—but we also need the body's defense mechanism to help us mend. What’s a person with aching knees to do?
Members of a cold water dipping group dip into Vermont's icy Lake Champlain to promote good physical and mental health. Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited. In this magnified view of a skin wound, red blood cells become trapped in a mesh of protein fiber, forming a clot that helps prevent blood loss.Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.
Efforts to evaluate the effectiveness of PRP remain a work in progress, in part because it is being used in many different ways. In a 2021 review, Wang and colleagues reviewed 132 studies on the use of PRP for 28 conditions in eight specialties, including musculoskeletal issues, cosmetic uses, and neurology. Overall, 61 percent of the studies supported the use of PRP, though only a third detailed the PRP formulation used.
After an injury, infusions of cold saline reduce inflammation in animals, studies show. And in a 2013 study that included 20 men who ran downhill for 40 minutes at a -10 percent grade, there was a slight reduction in inflammatory molecules among the half of participants who sat in a 40°F ice bath for 20 minutes afterwards. But those results weren’t statistically significant, and the ice bath made no difference in muscle soreness.
In a 2021 review of research on repeated sauna and hot-tub use, University of Oregon environmental physiologist Chris Minson and colleagues found evidence of multiple ways that heat can suppress pro-inflammatory pathways and enhance anti-inflammatory ones in animals and people. Exercise itself has powerful anti-inflammatory effects, Minson adds. Taking anti-inflammatory medications or other measures that impede the inflammatory process can interfere with those benefits, at least in healthy young people. “Inflammation is super important for the healing process,” Minson says. “By knocking it back, it's not necessarily a healthy thing.”If hot tubs and cold plunges feel good, the experience may have benefits beyond inflammation that, in fact, ultimately affect it.