How Cryotherapy Can Help You Manage Arthritis
It can be hard to explain to someone on the outside, but when you suffer from osteo- or rheumatoid arthritis, it’s more than just aches and inflammation. It impacts your quality of life most days. You’re not able to be as active as you might like to be, and it can even have a severe negative impact on your mood, making you more stressed, anxious, or depressed. Finding pain relief that makes this manageable is essential to making osteo- or rheumatoid arthritis livable, and many people living with arthritis are finding relief through whole body cryotherapy.
Why?
The Next Level of Cold Therapy
The Arthritis Foundation has long recommended cold therapy for acute pain when it comes to arthritis. For some, this means applying ice packs or even a bag of frozen peas if you’re in a pinch. It slows blood flow to a particular area of your body, thus reducing the inflammation and swelling that cause your pain to flare. It also temporarily slows nerve activity on the site of pain, so that essentially, your body fails to remind itself to be in pain. Cryotherapy takes cold therapy to the next level, using extremely cold temperatures for a couple of minutes to refresh your whole body.
Flight-or-Fight Response
The effects of arthritis are more than just physical pain. Constant pain from inflammation can also cause stress to build up, which can, in turn, worsen your inflammation. It’s a vicious cycle. Cryotherapy can help this, too, by activating your body’s “flight-or-fight” response. In doing so, it activates endorphins and other positive hormones, releasing them through your nervous system. These hormones have been proven to reduce stress and boost your mood. They can even help you to have more energy throughout the day so that you can focus on what you love rather than your pain.
Improves Your Mobility
When it comes to arthritis, it’s essential to keep moving, to reduce swelling, improve joint function, and keep your pain at a low. This can seem like a bit of an oxymoron sometimes, especially when you wake up with stiff, swollen joints that hurt to move. This is perhaps the most common challenge that arthritis sufferers face. When you have cryotherapy treatments, your inflammation will be reduced, and your body will feel refreshed. Combine that with the lower stress and boosted mood, and you’ll find that you want to move. And the more you’re able to move; the more manageable your arthritis will be.
Arthritis can be a challenge to live with. The important thing is to keep your pain at a manageable level so you can live your life. Cryotherapy can help with proven effects of cold therapy now applied to your whole body. At CRYO850, we offer cryotherapy in comfortable cryo chambers with electric, nitrogen-free treatments to avoid nitrogen burns. Contact us today for more information or to set up an appointment.