Christopher Ellis explains why the RICE protocol for injuries is outdated. Dr. Merkin, who created RICE, now says rest doesn't help healing and ice restricts blood flow, preventing white blood cells from reaching the injury. Ellis recommends a podcast with Gary Rinald, inventor of the MARC Pro, for alternatives.
And then finally, the RICE protocol. The rest, ice, compression, elevation. That was written by Dr. Merkin, and he has since retracted that statement saying that we should not be doing that. I am not a fan of resting. I mean, you can recover and resting are different topics, but just doing nothing solves nothing. So rest is a no-no. Ice. All right, this is the big one. So I did a podcast with Dr.— with, sorry, Gary Rinald, who is— he's the inventor of the MARC Pro. And I did a whole podcast talking about Exactly this topic. He's written a book on it. You should go back and listen to that if you haven't heard it yet. It's a great podcast. And if you think about what icing is, it's vasoconstriction. So why would we want to stop flow? Constriction is the narrowing of the vessels. If you do that, then you stop the ability of fluids to get to the area. You want that blood and the white blood cells to get there to help repair it.
