What is the purpose of inflammation?

If you get an actual injury, you want to take anti-inflammatory drugs because they prevent further tissue damage from too much blood rushing to the area.

You do not want to take anti-inflammatory drugs for your everyday soreness and inflammation, as this is just your body's way of repairing microtears in your muscles.

Why would your body send too much blood, and how could blood damage the tissue?

To heal. Ibuprofen slows the healing process by hindering prostaglandin synthesis, which along with causing inflammation also stimulates tissue repair. Don't take ibuprofen. Same thing goes for a fever (trying to reduce it, when it's meant to help kill off the infection in the body).

Inflammation itself isn't pathologic. It's your body trying to eliminate infectious pathogens (in the case of infections) or repair damaged tissues (in the case of injuries).

Anti-inflammatoryies are generally used to reduce the SYMPTOMS to gain some functionality when necessary. But inflammation in and of itself is a helpful - albeit inconvenient at times - repair mechanism.

get ugly wrote:

Why would your body send too much blood, and how could blood damage the tissue?

The blood carries immune cells (to kill infection), growth factors, and nutrients to heal. Like the person above says, it's NOT pathologic.

so then why is it good to ice a bump to reduce swelling? is the swelling that occurs after a bump different than inflammation?

great question

According to the research, the ability of ice to "improve tissue healing" is questionable, but it does help to decrease pain. See the following meta-analysis (comprehensive review of the research):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15496998

Bmagic wrote:

so then why is it good to ice a bump to reduce swelling? is the swelling that occurs after a bump different than inflammation?

Also, if you're referring to scar tissue (massaging with an ice cup), it's the mechanical stimulus that has a positive effect on healing, while the ice just helps to reduce pain. Any low, gentle mechanical stimulus is effective for healing by stimulating the blood supply (and thus growth factors) to the area.

To the OP: That's a great question and shows that you have good common sense/intuition. There are two good answers above. Indeed, think twice (or thrice) about taking anti-inflammatories for local injuries.

Agree: this is a great topic.

Recently a young relative going to med school asked me to help translate a paper on the mechanisms of the body's resposnse to inflammation and infection and when both go on at the same time as in the case of trauma with lesions.

It was about 25 pages mostly of data and definitions that were hard to digest. But as an exercise, it really drove home the point that inflammation can't be reduced to a symptom that needs to be subsided with a drug.

Inflammation can go into overdrive with some serious injuries or fevers. If there's too much blood pooling in an area you could get more tissue damage or just have problems getting around.

The body can also get screwy in fevers and set the temperature high enough that you'll die, so in that case you clearly should act to reduce inflammation.

clear and logic thinking wrote:

According to the research, the ability of ice to "improve tissue healing" is questionable, but it does help to decrease pain. See the following meta-analysis (comprehensive review of the research):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15496998

This was really interesting with regard to ice therapy. I think there are a lot of parallels between ice therapy and anti-inflammatories. Does a similar meta-analysis exist for ibuprofen?

I think we may have a confusion in semantics, but inflammation is in fact pathologic in the sense that cell damage occurs from even slight inflammation. Inflammation is a mixed bag of tricks. It has many beneficial properties, but many harmful effects to the body. We NEED inflammation for protection, but it does not come without cost. There are definitely situations where taking anti-inflammatories are a bad idea, because they can downregulate parts of inflammation that we need. However, the cyclo-oxygenase pathway is one small part of the inflammatory process. We are not stopping the whole process by blocking one enzyme.

The way I view it is that inflammation IS essential for healing. However, the first responders to injury are neutrophils which aren't the sharpest tools in the shed. They secrete cytokines and cytolytic chemicals to promote the inflammatory response and try to clean up the cell damage by phagocytosis. This early response necessarily incurs collateral damage to neighboring healthy cells. Macrophages typically step in to turn the tide from destruction to healing (M1->M2 for mr med student above ;) ).

Ibuprofen has been shown to promote scar tissue formation (inhibits muscle healing/regeneration) so is generally a no-no in terms of muscle damage. Icing on the other hand appears to be more beneficial (or less damaging!).

Now I'm confused. I have a lot of chronic inflamation problems (posterior tib tendonitis, retrocalcaneal bursitis) which my dr. told me to take ibupfrofen to keep in check. Should i stop taking it? is it the reason that these injuries won't go away?

Pittsburgh Joe wrote:

Ibuprofen has been shown to promote scar tissue formation (inhibits muscle healing/regeneration) so is generally a no-no in terms of muscle damage. Icing on the other hand appears to be more beneficial (or less damaging!).

Is this a characteristic of Ibuprofen alone, or anti-inflammatories as a whole?