All right, hey there, Dr. Ryan Hetland here. Welcome to today's Chiroprac-TIP.

And today I'm wearing an ice pack around my neck and just for the fun of it, I wanted to show you how cool these things were, but also, I wanted to give you a tip on when do you ice versus when do you heat and in what order?

The order is oftentimes even more important as well and I'll get into that. The basic reason is you ice for inflammation, so, of course, if you strained an ankle, you wouldn't want to ice that or you do anything that increases inflammation, you strain your neck acutely, you're going to put ice on your neck and that will help as well.

But the thing that ice does not do is it doesn't really help you relax. It doesn't help muscles relax, so heat packs, you know, something like this where it's a soft pack where it can be hot or cold, you can heat this thing up.

You can have several of these things and one I would do heat for the muscles, to relax the muscles. Oftentimes when you're injured, you have a combination of things going on.

You have inflammation, but you also have muscle tightness and spasm that needs to let up too, and so what can you do? You can heat on the muscles of the shoulder and the neck, and then you can ice along the directly, along the center part of your neck like I was showing you, like this, so that way you're decreasing any swelling that the heat brought on from heating the muscles.

So if you're going to do both, it would be best for you to use the ice after you heat to decrease any swelling that the heat might have brought on.

So, just a Chiroprac-TIP for you, especially if you're injured and you're using ice packs or heat packs and just know that that's the best order for you.

Feel free to ask any questions of me. I'm here to help you. Have a great day.