If you go to your doctor with a wound or a sports injury, he will do the very worst thing for you – he will try to reduce the inflammation. But don’t blame him, it’s the way generations of doctors have been taught at medical school, and only this week researchers have discovered the therapy is wrong.
Doctors have always been taught that it’s important to reduce the inflammation as quickly as possible – but researchers have now discovered that it’s nature’s way of healing damaged muscles.
Faced with an acute muscle injury caused by trauma – such as a sports injury – or by chemicals, infections or drugs, the doctor usually prescribes an NSAID drug in order to reduce the inflammation. Once the inflammation is under control, the wound will begin to heal, he says.
But what he’s been taught is the exact opposite of the way the body works. Inflammation is an important part of the healing process, as researchers from the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio have revealed this week.
Inflammatory cells around an acute muscle injury produce a high level of a growth factor that naturally increases the rate of muscle regeneration, they have discovered.
(Source: FASEB Journal, 1 October 2010; doi: 10.1096/fj.10-171579).
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