Why Do You Get Inflammation?

Did you know that inflammation is part of the body’s immune system response to foreign pathogens and irritants? Patients get inflammation for many reasons, but the top reason is because the body is trying to remove something harmful from your system. If you eat something you’re allergic to, your body will inflame, and you can experience swelling, trouble breathing and more. When you’re injured, the area of the injury swells and inflames. Inflammation is not all bad. In fact, it actually helps the healing process and protects your damaged tissues. However, prolonged inflammation can cause more harm than good. Find out reasons why you get inflammation, what it does to your body, and how you can heal faster from your injuries!

What Is Inflammation?

Inflammation happens as a reaction of an injury in the body or an infection. Generally, inflammation causes a part of your body to become red, swollen and hot. Those symptoms might not be too too bad for some people, but inflammation is often accompanied by pain that’s usually chronic. This is because your body’s white blood cells release chemicals into your blood to clean foreign bodies from your body. This causes swelling, redness and pain. Even though you get many undesirable symptoms with inflammation, it actually happens so that your body heals, which is a good thing. This healing is a type of defense mechanism in the body.

When you get injured, your body seeks to top that injury from progressing. It wants to heal itself, so it sets off different reactions to try to help your damaged cells. Having inflammation actually means that your body is trying to heal itself. However, you can get worse symptoms if you have inflammation for too long. If a part of your body is inflamed, your immune system is at work. However, you don’t want your immune system to always have to work overtime. When it does that with certain conditions, it can have bad side effects, such as with allergic reactions and arthritis.

Allergies and Their Reactions

Did you know that the swelling and symptoms you have from an allergy are because of your immune system? When you eat something you are allergic to, your body sees that food as a foreign object it must get rid of. It does that by creating different symptoms in your body, such as swelling, redness, rashes and more. Inflammation is just one symptom that can happen with a food allergy, and it can actually make your condition life-threatening. For people with severe food allergies, their tongue and air passages can swell to the point of not being able to breathe. You never want swelling to get this bad, which is why you should always seek to keep inflammation controlled when you do have it.

Arthritis and Swelling

Inflammation happens to many patients who have arthritis. Millions of people have this condition, and there are actually over 100 different types of arthritis depending on where it is in your body. The Arthritis Foundation reports that over 50 million adults and 300,000 children in the United States have some form of arthritis. Osteoarthritis is the most common form of arthritis. This is when the cushion between the bones wears away. That causes bones to rub against each other, and the body’s response is to cause pain, swelling and stiffness.

The body’s response is different with rheumatoid arthritis. With this type of arthritis, the body sees the joints and their cushioning as a foreign body. The body then attacks those joints with internal inflammation to get rid of infection and prevent disease. However, you need your joints to move around. This autoimmune response is a type of mistake in your body, as your body shouldn’t be attacking itself. Getting treatment for inflammation from arthritis is very important, as uncontrolled inflammation can cause joint erosion, and can damage your internal organs.

Risks of Inflammation

Rheumatoid arthritis is a type of autoimmune disease, meaning that your body triggers an inflammatory response when there aren’t any actual foreign bodies or viruses to fight off. You have to get inflammation under control of your tissues will end up damaged. Generally, inflammation happens as a response to injury, and your symptoms can go away with proper physical therapy and healing measures. That is the ideal situation. However, if you don’t get your symptoms under control, you will gain problems such as fever, fatigue, headaches, chills, muscle stiffness, loss of appetite and more.

At our office, we offer patients anti-inflammatory injections that reduce their symptoms and especially their pain. The needle is used to penetrate the joint or area around the nerve that is injured so that medication is delivered right where your symptoms occur. These anti-inflammatory injections provide rapid, localized pain relief that lasts weeks. There are very few (if any) adverse side effects and you with have restored range-of-motion. Adding medicine to your injured joints can also add a replacement substance to a knee or other joint to stop arthritis progression and joint deterioration.

Reduce Your Symptoms Today

Millions of people with deal with inflammation. This is especially true if you have diseases or conditions such as diabetes, arthritis, alzheimer’s, cancer, cardiovascular problems, pulmonary diseases, neurological conditions or autoimmune diseases. You may have a condition that will take awhile to heal from or will always be around, but that doesn’t mean your pain and other symptoms need to stick around. For patients who have inflammation, call Texas Spine & Sports Therapy Center today at (512) 806-0015!