How Your Body Heals

This post is going to be a very simplistic view of the steps your body goes through to heal an injury. Although I could spend hours writing about this subject, the goal is to provide a concise framework of the healing process to help you understand how to facilitate this process when recovering from an injury.

First, lets get something out of the way. YOUR BODY HEALS ITSELF. No physician, nurse, PT, OT, naturopath, chiropractor etc can HEAL you. All of these health care professionals simply seek to help provide the optimal environment for your body to heal itself.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, lets get into the steps your body takes from injury to healing!

Injury - You roll your ankle and sustain a small tear in one of the ligaments at the ankle 

Seconds after the injury - your body sends in inflammatory proteins to help clear out the debris/dead tissue, and build a scar to patch the torn area. 

10 days to 1 month post injury - the scar begins to settle into place and mold it self along the lines of the stress placed on it. 

1 month to 1 year post injury - the scar is still delicate but will become more resilient and robust if it is progressively stressed and given time to adapt. Additionally, during this time, your brain/ankle connection is recovering from the injury as well and becomes more efficient with targeted training (stability). 

Seems simple, right? Well it actually IS this simple. It just also happens to be very HARD to recover from an injury.

To help optimize the body’s healing process we need to manipulate so many variables in our life including, sleep, nutrition, stress management, exercise load, avoiding overuse early on, anxiety related to re-injury etc.....

When you are recovering from an injury, your goal should be to control the variables you can to promote the optimal environment for you body to heal. If you can do that successfully, you will build your self up stronger and more resilient than you were prior to the initial injury and decrease your risk of having to go through the process again!

Best of luck on your recovery journey! If you are interested in learning more about how Blue Iron Physio can help, click here, to set up a call with Dr. David Schwartz.