Sanjay Gupta

And then they started to extrapolate that thinking.

Well, look, what do we do when someone has an injury, like you sprain your ankle or something?

You rest it, you ice it, you compress it, and you elevate it.

That's right.

All those things are designed to decrease blood flow, decrease inflammation.

And we just learned that if you have low inflammation, you're more likely to have chronic pain.

So then they started to say, well, instead of rice, how about meat?

You know, coming up with clever acronyms, I guess.

But that stands for mobilization, exercise, analgesia if you need it, and treatment if you need it.

Like if you have a broken bone, obviously you want to treat it.

But the idea of mobilization instead of rest as a basic principle was really what they were driving at.

And when you explored that research even more, it was this idea that those inflammatory markers, inflammatory mediators, they're doing something at the site of injury.

Um, and they're helping heal.

So even though you might get some swelling and things like that, in a sense, you're letting the body do its job.

And movement is actually important because you're actually increasing blood flow as opposed to decreasing it.

So again, I want to be clear, like if you've broken a bone or something, you shouldn't be walking on it.

You know, you shouldn't be using it.

But for most people with these less significant injuries, instead of decreasing inflammation at the time, letting the body do its job seems to be more associated with a decreased likelihood of chronic pain.

It's an unbelievable story.

Yeah.