Ice, wraps and medicine are all in the pain and swelling treatment arsenal but 3TV shows you a treatment that is setting a gold standard for patients.
At the Beijing Olympics Keri Walsh had everyone talking about the strange tape she was wearing on her arm. Since then that tape has made its way into more and more therapy rooms and lots of people are benefiting from it.
Steve Frey, an occupational therapist at St. Joseph's Hospital, says he has had great success with it for treating pain. "According to how you put the tape on you give the muscle feedback to either tighten up or you put it on the opposite way and it helps the muscle to relax."
It is called Kinesio tape and it is used over and around muscles to assist and give support or prevent muscles from over contracting. "I've used it on patients’ necks shoulders backs, legs and to decrease the pain, to increase the facilitation of the muscle to increase how it works."
Frey adds, “The tape itself it stretches and, according to how you put it on the muscle, is to what it does to the muscle. It gives it feedback, either to relax or it gives it feedback to facilitate, to contract if you’re wanting to get the muscle working more.
Jim Phelps says he has a bad neck having injured his vertebrae when stowing his ATV. His pain has been tremendous but the tape has been helping. "Since he put the tape on in 5 minutes I've already had quite a bit of relief in there. I'd say 75 percent of relief of the pain that I had."
The other thing that Phelps has found he likes about the tape is it means his pain meds have been limited to Tylenol. "I'm not big on taking pain meds. No so this is another avenue."
The Kinesio tape has other uses as well. It has been proven to cut down on swelling. "It's always been compress, compress, compress to get swelling out and this actually, what it does is it goes on at a stretch so it lifts the skin and causes convolutions to allow the fluid to flow out and therefore getting rid of all the swelling."
All of this may have you thinking it is something you would like to try on your own but Frey says it has to be done by someone who is trained on its placement so there are no adverse effects.
