For Fresno! Onwards, valiant soldiers!
I am in search of a good cold-conducting chillifying skin-and-muscle-temperature-lowering icepack unit. Flist, do you have recommendations? Don't tell me Coldpac - I already forked over forty dollars for one of their wraps, and while it gave me aforementioned cold burns on my skin (that, five weeks later, are just now starting to fade - my right
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Here's the thing with ice-packs and other therapeutic chilling devices. Generally there is a relative temperature reduction your therapist is looking for, where your tissues in question need to drop x degrees for a y time period to help with inflammation, clotting, fluid issues, whatever your thing.
This is complicated by two factors. The relative temperatures and thermal masses of the target tissues and your cold pack, and the insulation of the intervening materials(your wrap, skin, air gaps, so on).
Getting colder and colder ice-packs really only helps you with duration and relative temp, in a practical sense. Because your tissue isn't actually getting anywhere near the temp of normal ice anyway. So you're just increasing the relative temperature difference(and possibly thermal mass), which can help with powering through insulation, but it's a bad way to do it, because sometimes, as you've found, the insulation is stuff like air gaps and your skin, and the insulation factor changes over time, causing little bits of you to hit low temperatures quickly without transmitting heat from the deeper target tissues, leaving you with toasty internals and flashfrozen skin.
So, if you're having problems with this, the solution isn't colder packs(which will exacerbate the problem), but better conduction between your target tissues and the cold pack. Your therapist is probably recommending normal ice because it's safe. The relative temp differential ain't so bad, so people don't hurt themselves by accident as much, and it can work in the right setup.
But you're not likely to be able to use optimal conduction, like suspending in water kept at the target temp, or a golden themalsink molded to your body part.
The best practical wraps are wet surfaces, reaching towards that water suspension idea, like the hot wet towels in spas. But their duration is low, and it can be hard to keep them the right temp, they want to equalize to body temp, or be ice-cold. Next best is fluid and gel and other direct contact cold-packs shaped for direct application which are best cooled to somewhere above freezing, so they can cool to target temperature with as little insulation as possible.
But those can be hard to come by. So your best bet is just rigging up some constant insulation(like ace bandages or towel straps) nice and tight so that they cool at a predictable rate, and altering the temperature of the cold pack to the efficiency of the insulation and the target cooling. If you have some time for fiddling, the easiest is by filling a water pack with ice and water of varying salinity, allowing the freeze point to drop until you feel it's doing it's job.
But work the insulation angle as much as you can. You want as good and constant contact with the skin as close and comprehensive to the target tissues as possible. old style hot/cold water bottles were often better than what we have now, with treated canvas or similar that could be applied directly to the skin, with very little setup or insulation, just water with a few ice cubes in it. Their weakness is that you'd have to hold them there, they aren't movement friendly.
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My mom had one of the fancy schmancy wet neoprene wraps for her knee, pre-replacement, that had a circulation unit and everything, and for all the technology that went into it, nothing worked as good as an ice bath.
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~wipes off monitor~
THIS.
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AZURE.
BLUE.
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