Iced!

Dominick Veltri

Iced! The Illusionary Treatment Option

Gary Reinl

Every since I was young I was always told to ice my arm after I pitched in a game. Even to this day I am told by doctors that I see, and often times athletic trainers, to ice an injury. I recently had a conversation about icing after pitching with the athletic trainer here at Belmont that sees over the baseball team. Reluctantly, she seems to be moving away from icing. Our trainer has been in contact with the Nashville Sounds trainers, a Triple A baseball team here in Nashville, about what they do with their pitchers after they throw. She told me that they never ice, and that after they throw they immediately start doing bands that get their muscles contracting and keep their arms moving. I guess what I am trying to get at is that I am witnessing what Gary Reinl talks about in Iced! The Illusionary Treatment Option. I am literally seeing how icing is becoming obsolete in a first hand experience. Overall, I really enjoyed this book and the first hand experiences that Gary gives about how not icing works. This book was a great read and I would definitely recommend it to anyone because it gives such practical knowledge.

One of the main points that Gary tries to make is how people are now starting to figure out that ice doesn’t help the healing process of an injury at all. He starts the first chapter by telling a story of a boy whom a train hits and his arm is severed completely. This importance of this story is to show the first use of ice on an injury, which is in 1962. However, Gary puts a little twist on this by telling us that the doctors put the kids arm on ice to stop the flow of fluids in the arm and prevent damage to the tissue. With a severed limb this is fine, but with inflammation and swelling this is not okay and we will explore this later. Gary states, “after forty years of widespread use, there is no peer-reviewed, indisputable published evidence that the use of ice improves the...