Why Reduce Swelling?

October 19th, 2014
health, medicine
Recently I jammed my fingers, and aside from resting them the standard healing advice is to reduce the swelling with ice, compression, elevation, and ibuprofen (advil/motrin). This is surprising, especially the medication. Why would we evolve swelling, a response to a common injury, if it's harmful? I could believe that in some cases you could have excessive swelling and it would be good to reduce that, but in the typical case you would expect swelling to be useful.

A similar argument applies to fevers: the body raised its temperature, so why does it make sense to come in with acetaminophen (tylenol) and bring it back down? Again, if a fever gets high enough we do need to control it, but we should expect letting the fever run its course to be the healthiest option in most cases.

What is it that these systemic medications do that our bodies weren't able to evolve on their own? Or is the modern environment different enough from the one in which we evolved that a response like fever or swelling once was useful but no longer is? Or maybe it's not useful after all; has anyone done an RCT looking at the impact of swelling reduction actions or medication on healing? Can I get some volunteers willing to self-administer hammer blows? [1]

(This is basically an algernon argument, a use of the evolutionary optimality challenge.)


[1] People would first need to administer the hammer, then check to see which treatment to apply. The trauma must be applied blind.

Comment via: google plus, facebook

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Jealousy In Polyamory Isn't A Big Problem And I'm Tired Of Being Gaslit By Big Self-Help

The nuance is in the post, guys

via Thing of Things July 18, 2024

Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quickly

non-trust is reasonable • trust lets collaboration scale • symptoms of trust deficit • how to proactively build trust

via benkuhn.net July 13, 2024

Coaching kids as they learn to climb

Helping kids learn to climb things that are at the edge of their ability The post Coaching kids as they learn to climb appeared first on Otherwise.

via Otherwise July 10, 2024

more     (via openring)