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, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Thing of Things AI use policy

dynomight recently wrote an article calling for bloggers to state publicly whether and how they use AI

via Thing of Things July 6, 2026

Agentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes on agentic coding from Galapagos Island

I've been using AI fairly heavily since last November and the whole thing is a funny experience. An agent will do something that, if a human did it, you'd immediately fire them. My reaction, of course, is to act as if this is great and spin up a t…

via Posts on July 3, 2026

Variable fonts aren't universally supported

I make a lot of webpages. I also use Lockdown Mode on iOS and MacOS for a bit of extra security. Sometimes I realize that I forgot to test on Safari and it looks like crap, or I test and don’t notice that there’s been a problem for months (as was the case…

via Home June 27, 2026

more     (via openring)