Even though inflammation helps the body fight off infections and heal wounds, it can sometimes be harmful.
You have quite a bit of leeway. Indeed, you may be doing it right now. This is because many of the best ways to reduce inflammation are things you should already be doing.
In this article, we’ll talk about the most important things you need to know to avoid, diagnose, and treat chronic inflammation.
How to avoid deleterious inflammation
Here are the top six anti-inflammatory strategies:
- Have a low-inflammatory diet.
- Exercise frequently. Physical activity may be able to change how the immune system works and reduce different kinds of inflammation.
- Keep your weight where it needs to be.
- Weight-related inflammation is caused by too much fat in cells, which causes inflammation all over the body. To stop this, you must avoid gaining weight.
- Take care of your stress levels.
- Strictly speaking, you should not smoke.
- If at all possible, you should try to stay away from diseases and conditions that cause inflammation, such as infections, allergies, and cancer.
Is testing necessary?
Even while it’s not advised to check for inflammation now and then, there are times when doing so might be useful. Inflammation tests can help doctors figure out what’s wrong with someone or see how well their treatment is working.
The problem is that there currently aren’t any gold-standard diagnostic tests for inflammation.
Regular checks with a doctor are the best way to spot inflammation early on. The first thing you should do is make an appointment with your primary care physician, do a physical exam, and prescribe any appropriate testing. Anticipatory treatment does not often include testing for inflammation.
How to treat inflammation
When treating an inflammatory disorder, anti-inflammatory medications might be useful. And many of these alternatives come in cheap generic forms approved by the FDA. Furthermore, these treatments have been available for quite some time.
However, anti-inflammatory medications alone are generally not the best solution for persistent inflammation. This is because these medicines regularly require continuous dosing for extended periods of time and frequently have intolerable negative effects. It is preferable to identify and address the underlying source of inflammation. Taking this course of action has the potential to treat or at least significantly reduce many forms of chronic inflammation. This strategy has the potential to obviate the need for further anti-inflammatory methods.
Despite the fact that we now know that chronic inflammation is associated with a variety of chronic illnesses, squelching inflammation may not always be the best or even the only treatment. Fortunately, there are things you can do to combat and even avoid potentially harmful inflammation.
Sometimes it might be difficult to maintain a lifestyle that reduces inflammation. However, there is an extra benefit if you are able to do so: anti-inflammatory practices have health benefits that extend far beyond inflammation reduction.