188. PEACE & LOVE: A New Way to Heal Injuries

2025-09-02

Forget the ice pack. There’s a better way to heal. Dr. Andrew Fix challenges the old RICE (rest, ice, compression, elevation) protocol and shows how it can actually slow recovery instead of helping it. Ice and anti-inflammatories may ease pain in the moment, but they also keep the body from doing the work it’s built to do. In this episode, Dr. Fix lays out PEACE (Protection, Elevation, Avoiding anti-inflammatories, Compression, Education) and LOVE (Load, Optimism, Vascularization, and Exercise), a framework that focuses on protecting the injur...

Forget the ice pack. There’s a better way to heal.

Dr. Andrew Fix challenges the old RICE (rest, ice, compression, elevation) protocol and shows how it can actually slow recovery instead of helping it. Ice and anti-inflammatories may ease pain in the moment, but they also keep the body from doing the work it’s built to do.

In this episode, Dr. Fix lays out PEACE (Protection, Elevation, Avoiding anti-inflammatories, Compression, Education) and LOVE (Load, Optimism, Vascularization, and Exercise), a framework that focuses on protecting the injured area, restoring blood flow, loading the body in safe ways, and leaning into an optimistic mindset. He explains how injuries can be turning points, moments to learn more about your body and build resilience for the future.

Have you ever thought about whether your recovery habits are helping you heal faster or keeping you stuck? Dr. Fix will make you rethink the way you care for yourself when injury strikes.

Quotes

“If we take those things, if we ice, if we take anti-inflammatory medications, NSAIDs, just know that you are basically trading one thing for another. You’re trading some symptom relief, pain relief, and reduction in swelling for quicker healing, right? The term that I like to use a lot is you are effectively kicking the can down the road in terms of letting that injured area heal.” (07:13 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
“We need to be positive. We need to think about what we can do, not what we can’t do. We need to be visualizing and imagining what our recovery is going to look like, what our performance is going to look like when we return from this injury, when we rehab, when we get back to doing things.” (18:02 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
“Ditch the rice protocol. Instead, if you deal with an injury, we’re gonna do peace and love. We’re gonna give it peace and give it love. Protection, elevation, avoiding anti-inflammatories, compression, education, load optimism, vascularization, and exercise. It’s as simple as that.” (24:02 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
“If you are dealing with an injury, especially if you’re not sure what you’re dealing with, make sure you get it checked out by somebody so that they can point you in the right direction.” (24:33 | Dr. Andrew Fix)
“Sometimes our body is going to need a little bit of TLC because of an injury or a breakdown that occurred. But if we can think about what’s the learning moment here in this injury, you, a lot of times, can wind up better after the fact than you ever were before.” (25:47 | Dr. Andrew Fix)

Links

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DHTcTHQp1OC/?hl=en

https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/54/2/72

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