An expert poses a conundrum by questioning the wisdom of other experts in other fields:
I wanted to thank you for posting that stuff about rethinking the RICE protocol for injuries. It’s amazing how easily something like that becomes “wisdom,” when it doesn’t make sense from a practical Christian perspective, or even an evolutionary one. Why would the human body in all its glorious design require such strange interventions to function well? What did injured people do before they had easy access to ice and had the luxury of staying off their feet for extended periods of time? It makes no sense.
Anyway, not long after you posted the RICE thing, I tweaked my back pretty hard after a heavy deadlift session. I found that fifteen minutes of applied heat, followed by 30 minutes on the stationary bike and some stretching has made the pain totally manageable. Today it’s all but gone. And, amazingly, I didn’t have to give up any of my weight training over the last week. I think about all the people I’ve known who’ve had injuries like that go on and on and on after following RICE, and it was probably avoidable.
This whole thing reminds me of other ludicrous and destructive ideas endorsed by some authority, like the low-fat / high-carb nonsense that directly led to the obesity epidemic. As an “expert” myself, I find that if something that contradicts thousands of years of common sense is endorsed by an expert, I’m even less likely to trust it.
At this point, there is less than a 50 percent chance that any “expert knowledge” is correct. Your best bet is to ignore “the scientific consensus”.