3 Tips For Recovering From An Injury To Your Ribs

3 Tips For Recovering From An Injury To Your Ribs

With many injuries, you can take medicine, get bandaged, or do some other treatment that can help you to feel better. But with some injuries, like if you get bruised or broken ribs, there really isn’t much that you can do.

Since you can’t put a cast on a broken rib and wraps may only work in some situations, knowing how to care for this type of injury can be a challenge. So if you’re recently experienced an injury to your ribs, be it from a car accident or something else, here are three tips for recovering from bruised, cracked, or broken ribs.

Try To Breathe Normally

Although it can be painful to move your ribs and your lungs when you’re hurt here, breathing normally is one thing that it’s important to try to do.

If you don’t use your lungs the way they should be used, like by taking shallow breaths or avoiding coughing when you need to, there’s a chance that you could develop lung infections. And if this happens, you’re going to have much bigger issues than just your lungs. So although it might be uncomfortable, try to breathe as normally as possible and cough to clear your lungs when need be.

Don’t Do Anything That Causes More Pain

Because you can’t do much to protect your broken ribs like you can when you break other bones, you’ll have to make sure you’ve very careful about avoiding anything that might cause you pain in your ribs and potentially make your injury worse.

If you have a physical job, you might need to take some time off in order to heal your body. Additionally, you should stop exercising or doing anything that’s going to overexert you. As a good rule of thumb, if there’s something that you’re doing that causes you a lot more pain in your ribs, it’s best to not do this thing until you’re feeling better.

Dealing With The Pain

Injuries to your ribs can take a few weeks to start really feeling better. So while you’re trying to deal with the pain, there are a few things that might help give you some relief.

If you’re able to, take over-the-counter pain medication to hopefully take the edge off of the pain. Along with this, you can also use ice packs on the hurt area a few times a day to help ease your pain and reduce any swelling that still might be present. While these things likely won’t take away the pain completely, they should help some.

If you’ve been injured to your ribs, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you learn what you can do to help with the pain and move your recovery along quicker.