Written by Hulet Smith, OT
People living with pain and stiffness are advised to maintain a healthy, active lifestyle and include movement and exercise in their regular routines to help strengthen the muscles, loosen the joints, and sustain crucial circulation, this can often seem like a Catch 22 proposition. You know you need to stay active to relieve the pain, but sometimes the pain just feels like too much.
Fortunately, there are a number of tried and true pain-relieving tips for people who live with joint pain, and one of the most effective is heat therapy, or heat combined with compression therapy. Although cold treatments have their own therapeutic benefits for pain, and are especially helpful as temporary applications for hot and inflamed joints, heat is what most people report as being the most soothing for various types of chronic joint pain.
Therapeutic heat can be applied through a variety of methods, with or without compression. Heat alone helps to make joints more flexible, encourages circulation, and provides soothing, pain relieving effects. It stimulates your body’s own healing forces, dilating blood vessels and reducing muscle spasms.
Heat combined with compression therapy delivers all of these same benefits and more, amping up the intensity of the therapy. A variety of gloves and other compression garments are specially designed to help reduce pain, protect the affected joint, and enhance circulation as well as the movement of fluids that cause swelling.
For those times when it feels like your whole body hurts, taking a warm shower or soaking in a hot bath is a great solution. Investing in a whirlpool tub, especially one that is deep for extra submersion, is a great way to ensure you have an effective method of soothing relief for your whole body. Similarly, if you have access to a heated pool, going for a swim is a great way to soothe away pain while also getting in some great, pain-free exercise.
This age-old remedy is still a popular way to relieve pain, and warm stiff and aching joints. A hot water bottle doesn’t require any power source or even a microwave to heat. Just add hot water, place the bottle on the affected joint, and it will provide healing warmth for hours.
Moist heat penetrates more deeply into the body's tissues than dry heat, making it more effective at relieving pain and stiffness. You can make your own moist heat pack by placing a wet washcloth into a freezer-style bag and heating it in a microwave. Start at a minute and then check it, adding time in 30-second intervals. Once it reaches your desired temperature, wrap this cloth inside a thin towel and place over the painful area.
For less mess, and a more convenient method of applying moist heat, pre-made moist heat packs are also available and can be reused for long-lasting relief. Electric moist heat packs are another option, drawing moisture from the air to offer soothing comfort and deeply-penetrating heat therapy.
Heat combined with compression offers enhanced relief and healing over either heat or compression used alone, and there are a wide variety of compression garments and supports for any joint that may ail you. Specifically for arthritis sufferers, specially-designed arthritis gloves that incorporate both compression and warmth are a great way to alleviate pain while still allowing you to engage in the activities you love.
For other body areas, compression garments and supports come in all sorts of designs with some braces offering added heat sources, while other supports utilize specific materials that help retain the user’s own body heat as the source of warming.
The popular squeeze-ball gets a pain-relieving upgrade with the added benefit of either hot or cold therapy in these isometric hand exercisers. Keeping the hands active helps to strengthen the surrounding muscles, tendons, and connective tissues for healthy function, while adding heat or cold to the process makes the exercise more comfortable.
Another longtime favorite pain relief remedy for sore and aching joints, paraffin baths use melted wax to coat the hands, feet, or elbows into for deep and soothing pain relief. Smaller joints can be dipped into the baths for easy application, or specialized brushes can be used to paint wax onto joints that are too big or awkward to dip.
While all saunas can be helpful to alleviate pain, Far Infrared (FIR) saunas utilize infrared heaters that emit radiant heat, as opposed to conventional saunas that transfer heat by circulating hot air. Radiant heat is absorbed much more deeply into the body’s tissues, and provides penetrating relief for pain and inflammation.
Heat therapy is a wonderful tool to help mitigate pain, warming and relaxing tight muscles and inflamed joints so you can relax and enjoy life. To learn more about other pain-relieving heat and compression products, please see Rehabmart’s comprehensive line of Hot and Cold Therapy products and Compression Garments. Additionally, for more help with compression, check out our article on Compression Therapy Garments: Levels of Pressure & How to Choose.
Co-founder/CEO of Rehabmart, Pediatric Occupational Therapist, husband, and father. Passionate about connecting special needs kids with superb nutrition, sensory integration, and complementary health strategies. Excited about Rehabmart's mission to become the premier online educational platform which empowers caregivers by spotlighting innovative devices and interventions to achieve optimal patient response and recovery.
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