Home Care for Chronic Pain With Thermalon: Take Control Of Your Pain

Are you one of the millions of people living with chronic pain struggling to find a better way to manage your pain? While not a cure, adding heat and cold therapy to a home self-treatment plan can help you live a more productive and comfortable life. Thermalon moist heat wraps, sleeves, and heating pads provide an easy, affordable, and effective way for you to take back control of your life.

What is Chronic Pain?

Chronic pain is defined as pain lasting for three months or longer, causing significant emotional distress or functional disability, not caused by another chronic condition. According to health economists, chronic pain costs the U.S. economy approximately $635 billion each year for medical treatment and lost productivity at work.

Improve Performance When Living with Chronic Pain

Dealing daily with pain is exhausting and costly. Chronic pain robs people of the ability to perform their activities of daily living. Performing your activities of daily living can mean very different things to different people.

For some, performance might mean being able to bend over and touch their toes after years of limited flexibility. For others, making it through a day of sitting at their computer without being interrupted by back pain is improved performance. And for athletes, performance could be your fastest race finish yet, a home run, or an injury-free season.

Feeling better translates into moving more, living a healthier life, living longer, and improving your quality of life. Thermalon hot and cold therapy helps you make healthy habits like moving more a routine. In addition, because Thermalon is easy and convenient, you can enjoy pain-relieving benefits in the comfort of your own home.

Did you know?

Moist heat treatments like those from the Thermalon moist heat wrap penetrate your muscles and tissues more deeply, increasing blood flow to the injured area. The blood brings nutrients and oxygen to promote healing… Patients report greater pain relief after moist heat therapy than dry heat therapy.

Easy At-Home DIY Pain Therapy

Doctors and physical therapists use heat to alter your perception of pain to help you feel more comfortable. The presence of heat on the skin can also be soothing. When people are stressed, they experience higher pain levels and tense their surrounding muscles, sometimes making their pain worse.

Doctors prefer moist heat to dry heat for the treatment of chronic pain for several reasons. First, moist heat penetrates more deeply into your tissues and muscles, getting at the source of the problem. Second, moist heat increases blood flow to injured areas, speeding healing. Third, patients report more effective and longer-lasting relief from moist heat than dry heat from an electric heating pad.

Thermalon’s moist heat sleeves, wraps, and heating pads safely and quickly deliver moist heat at the ideal temperature for treating chronic pain for up to 30 minutes at a time. In addition, they are reusable and quick to reheat in your microwave for just 1-2 minutes. Examples of ways to include moist heat therapy into your daily pain management routine include:

• Applying moist heat first thing in the morning while you have your morning coffee in bed. Start your day off feeling better!
• Relaxing with a warm compress on your arthritic hands before you head out to the garden to do some weeding.
• Take a preheated wrap or compress with you in the car or to the gym, warming up and relaxing painful areas in preparation for a better workout or a more productive day at work.

Heat Therapy is a Warm-Up For Better Results

Warm temperature therapy aids in muscle relaxation, which in turn improves stiffness in sore joints. Pre-treating with moist heat like that from a Thermalon wrap or sleeve will help relax stiff and tight muscles to increase your flexibility and range of motion.

For athletes, this means improved athletic performance and fewer injuries. For others, moist heat therapy can maximize the benefits of at-home exercise or therapy routines prescribed by your physical or occupational therapist. Warming up with your Thermalon wrap or sleeve will help make your exercises less painful, so you will be more likely to challenge yourself and make progress. As part of your chronic pain management plan, Warm heat therapy can help increase your likelihood of sticking with an exercise or activity plan. Staying active is vital for your mental health as well. Exercise releases endorphins and improves sleep quality which also helps to reduce pain.

Incorporating Cold Therapy into Your Home Routine

Deciding when to use hot or cold therapy to treat pain can be tricky. In general, cold therapy is better for a new injury or pain to help reduce swelling. You can keep Thermalon cold therapy products in your freezer for powerful and effective relief of acute pain. The sooner you can apply the soothing, numbing cold therapy, the faster you can reduce swelling and inflammation.

Sports medicine researchers also support using cold therapy to prevent or relieve delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS). DOMS is muscle pain that sets in usually 1-2 days after a new exercise or activity. Start your own at-home DOMS prevention routine using your convenient Thermalon cold wrap or sleeve within 1 hour after exercise or activity. Athletes who follow this post-training cold therapy routine can reduce their DOMS pain for at least the next 24 hours.

Some examples of DIY pain management with Thermalon cold therapy are:

• Reaching for a Thermalon cold wrap to reduce the swelling of that tennis elbow after a particularly tough match.
• Taming that pounding migraine by lying down with the Thermalon sinus/ allergy compress on your forehead or neck for 10 minutes.
• Bouncing back from an extra-hard session with your physical therapist as part of your post-knee replacement treatment plan. Spend 10-20 minutes relaxing with a Thermalon joint wrap – slip over your knee and relax on the couch to help prevent any delayed onset pain or swelling.

Your Role in Chronic Pain Management

Heat and cold therapy actively treat the condition or injury causing your pain. Unlike taking over-the-counter or prescription pain medications, self-treating with Thermalon’s moist heat wraps and cold therapy products does more than just relieve your symptoms temporarily.

Combining regular use of moist heat for chronic pain and cold therapy for acute pain boosts the pain relief provided by pain medications. This means that over time you may need to take less medicine. You could even potentially avoid the need for surgery if your hot and cold home therapy allows you to achieve more in your physical therapy sessions.

Self-treating with hot and cold therapy products from Thermalon also makes you an active participant in your plan of care. You can start to regain some of the control pain may have taken away from you. You do not have to be the victim of your pain or medical diagnosis. You can supplement your doctor’s or physical therapist’s treatment plan with Thermalon’s powerful and effective hot and cold therapy products. 

Pain relief tip:

Moist heat therapy is therapeutic because it treats the cause of your pain, rather than just blocking the pain signals like many as do pain medications or topical pain relievers.

 

April 1, 2024