This article was medically reviewed by Luba Lee, FNP-BC, MS. Luba Lee, FNP-BC is a Board-Certified Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP) and educator in Tennessee with over a decade of clinical experience. Luba has certifications in Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS), Emergency Medicine, Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS), Team Building, and Critical Care Nursing. She received her Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) from the University of Tennessee in 2006.
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Warm compresses can be used to treat a variety of issues, from muscle soreness to joint stiffness. While you can buy heat packs at the pharmacy, it's just as easy to make one yourself with simple, cheap materials you probably already have laying around your house. Warm compresses can help to reduce pain from menstrual cramps, abdominal muscle cramps, and muscle spasms.
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Before treating a condition with a warm compress, make sure you know whether your medical issue is best treated by the application of heat or cold, and make sure you take the proper safety precautions to protect yourself from potential burns.
This article was medically reviewed by Luba Lee, FNP-BC, MS. Luba Lee, FNP-BC is a Board-Certified Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP) and educator in Tennessee with over a decade of clinical experience. Luba has certifications in Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS), Emergency Medicine, Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS), Team Building, and Critical Care Nursing. She received her Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) from the University of Tennessee in 2006. This article has been viewed 1, 795, 573 times.
To make a warm compress, moisten a clean washcloth, then fold the cloth neatly and place it into a resealable plastic bag. With the bag left open, microwave the cloth for 30-60 seconds, then carefully remove it from the microwave and seal the bag. Wrap the plastic in a clean towel and place the wrapped compress against your skin. For tips from our medical reviewer on when to use a warm compress, keep reading!Doctors and physical therapists often recommend hot and cold therapy to soothe the aching or stiff joints of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and to increase mobility. Together, these methods to temporarily relieve RA pain are referred to as thermotherapy.
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While there is little evidence that thermotherapy is medically beneficial, a review published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews of hot and cold treatment for rheumatoid arthritis concluded that superficial moist heat and cryotherapy (cold packs or baths) can be used as palliative, or supportive, therapy.
Still, hot and cold treatments won't prevent rheumatoid arthritis flares. “Using heat or cold can be helpful, relieving, and soothing. However, exercise, joint protection, and other forms of education, as well as protective splinting can be more beneficial, ” says Lisa Maggiore, a registered and licensed occupational therapist at Greenwich Hospital in Connecticut. And, of course, making sure you are taking the most appropriate medication.
For someone with an inflammatory disease like RA, applying heat may seem counterintuitive. But since heat works to reduce muscle tension and stimulate blood circulation, many patients find that applying something warm — even if it just means warming your clothes in the dryer before dressing, or lying with a heated blanket prior to getting up in the morning — simply feels good on the joints.
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According to the Arthritis Foundation, when you warm up a sore joint, the heat enlarges your blood vessels, allowing more blood, oxygen, and nutrients to be delivered to the tissues.
Although there aren’t recent studies for rheumatoid arthritis, researchers conducted a study on 35 people with chronic, nonspecific neck pain that was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in August 2020. They found that those receiving thermotherapy with a salt-pack for 30 minutes twice a day for five days (in addition to performing a neck stabilization exercise) improved stiffness more than the control group.
Gentle heat in the morning can improve your range of motion, explains Katie Palmer, a physical therapist in Newtown, Pennsylvania. It can relieve some of the joint pain and the stiffness and prepare your body for exercise or to get up and get moving and out the door.
Hot And Cold Therapy For Joint Pain Relief
One version of hot therapy is the paraffin, or wax, bath, similar to what's used in nail salons to soften the skin and nails. The paraffin is heated to a prescribed temperature and then you dip in your hands, wrists, and fingers, and it forms a coating, Palmer explains. Then you wrap your paraffin-covered hands and wrists in a little towel, and it gives you a nice moist, deep heat that can help eliminate some of the pain and stiffness of RA.
Palmer recommends paraffin therapy for the hands when they're stiff, like first thing in the morning, but not when the joints are inflamed.
In addition to putting heat on targeted areas, you can also warm up your whole body by taking a warm bath or shower or by swimming in a heated pool.
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If your joints are inflamed, it makes sense that something cold could ease the inflammation and thus the pain. The main benefits of cold therapy are reducing inflammation, swelling, and soreness, as well as temporarily relieving joint pain caused by an arthritis flare.
Cold therapy is best during an acute flare, Maggiore says. “Cold therapy is helpful as it can lower joint temperatures, reduce pain, and decrease inflammation, ” she says.
One simple method of cooling the joints is a cool-water soak in a tub. Just don't let the water get so cold that you become chilled.
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Cold packs that you place directly on an aching joint include everything from common items — bags of frozen peas or gel packs found at the drugstore — to complete systems of coolers, cooling pads, and devices shaped to certain parts of the body, like the knees and back.
Others who should avoid or limit cold therapy are people with Raynaud's syndrome, a condition in which small blood vessels in the fingers or toes constrict when exposed to cold. If you have this syndrome, you probably should not use cold therapy on the affected parts of your body.
If you're using one of these hot or cold methods and it doesn't bring relief, or it seems to make the rheumatoid arthritis symptoms worse, talk to your doctor.
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