Sprained joints

Symptoms & Treatments
1

I keep spraining my ankles and they take months to heal. My Dr just said, yea anytime you hurt a joint it will take a long time to heal. I was wondering if anyone has a suggestion on how to help speed the healing process.

2

Anytime you leave a "sprain to heal itself, it won’t and you WILL re-injure it EVERY TIME.

Every ligament injury needs rehabilitation. Otherwise, your sprained ankle wil not heal completely and you will re-injure it. All ankle sprains, from mild to severe, require three phases of recovery:

  • Phase I includes resting, protecting and reducing swelling of your injured ankle. This is called RICE (two to three days is plenty of RICE: Rest, Ice, compress and elevate:

    Rest your ankle by not walking on it. Limit weight bearing. Use crutches if necessary; if there is no fracture you are safe to put some weight on the leg. An ankle brace often helps control swelling and adds stability while the ligaments are healing.

    Ice it to keep down the swelling. Don’t put ice directly on the skin (use a thin piece of cloth such as a pillow case between the ice bag and the skin) and don’t ice more than 20 minutes at a time to avoid frost bite.

    Compression can help control swelling as well as immobilize and support your injury.

    Elevate the foot by reclining and propping it up above the waist or heart as needed.

  • Phase II includes restoring your ankle’s flexibility, range of motion and strength.

  • Phase III includes gradually returning to straight-ahead activity and doing maintenance exercises, followed later by more cutting sports such as tennis, basketball or football.

Once you can stand on your ankle again, your doctor will prescribe exercise routines to strengthen your muscles and ligaments and increase your flexibility, balance and coordination. Later, you may walk, jog and run figure eights with your ankle taped or in a supportive ankle brace.

It’s important to complete the rehabilitation program because it makes it less likely that you’ll hurt the same ankle again. If you don’t complete rehabilitation, you could suffer chronic pain, instability and arthritis in your ankle. If your ankle still hurts, it could mean that the sprained ligament has not healed right, or that some other injury also happened.

There is NO WAY around this. PsA patients shoula always consider targeted PT to prevent chronic injury.

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3

Thanks so much. That was a comprehensive answer. I will definitely talk to my doc about getting into some rehab.