Fractured Rib or Bruised Rib

Hi Andrew

My thoughts: you are doing a wonderful thing. You can’t immobilize ribs because you have to continue breathing. :cheese:

So what you are doing now is limiting your practice sufficiently to stop it hurting too much. I don’t think you can avoid discomfort in healing your ribs. After all, it is very likely that coughing or sneezing or wearing a seat belt or any number of things that are a normal part of your life are now causing twinges or even sharp pain. The mere act of breathing will help your recovery, the expansion and contraction of your chest will mean that any chance of scar tissue forming around the injury is minimized.

A classic opinion of treatment can be: “if it hurts, don’t move it”. This is definitely not true in all cases. Consider backache. So many different presentations of back pain, so many different treatments. Sometimes THE treatment is to do backbends. But many people would give a blanket opinion that you should rest and not do anything.

Of course you have to monitor your particular situation and be vigilant for any worsening of your pain/discomfort. Your doctor may have (albeit begrudgingly) allowed you to go to yoga because of the physical considerations of trying to minimize your discomfort – and even perhaps because you have indicated that it has not been confirmed whether it is a bruise or a fracture. I am guessing that if Doc thought it was really bad you would have had x rays and you would know if there was a risk of damaging tissues around the fracture by doing your yoga or other movements. What a non-hot-yoga-practicing-doctor might not be taking into account is the ability for your body to heal itself greatly aided by attending class… I won’t go into all the benefits here but I think we are singing from the same hymn book

Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂

(Webmaster, is mentioning a product ok in the forum?)

No problem at all when it is directly answering someone else’s post – Gabrielle & I decided to keep any blatant ads out of the forum altogether, but for sure, feel free to leave helpful links/mention products whenever you have them.

(Note to all: Affiliate links are specifically not allowed. Unfortunate if we allow those then we become targets for the drug spammers – and we all know what that means! Ugh!)

Thanks for asking!

Robert

Hi Torqued

I will be interested to know how long it takes before you no longer take the meds! I wonder if they are allowing you to resolve the muscle spasming sufficiently to avoid worsening your problem, and even allow you to heal it with the help of your yoga.

Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂