Treating inflammation depends on whether you’re dealing with a short-term injury or a long-lasting condition. Acute inflammation from a sprained ankle or a cut resolves on its own within days with basic care, while chronic inflammation can simmer for months or years and requires a combination of lifestyle changes, dietary shifts, and sometimes medication. Here’s how to approach both.
Acute Inflammation: The First Few Days
When you twist an ankle, pull a muscle, or sustain any soft tissue injury, inflammation is actually your body’s healing response. Swelling, redness, and pain mean your immune system is rushing blood and repair cells to the damaged area. The goal isn’t to shut this process down entirely but to keep it manageable while your body does its work.
Sports medicine has moved beyond the old RICE (rest, ice, compression, elevation) approach. A newer framework published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine called PEACE and LOVE better reflects what we now know about tissue healing. In the first one to three days, protect the injury by limiting movement, elevate the limb above your heart, compress the area with a bandage or tape, and let pain guide how much you rest. The surprising part: the protocol recommends avoiding anti-inflammatory medications early on, because the inflammatory process itself helps repair damaged tissue. Suppressing it with drugs, especially at higher doses, may slow long-term healing.
After those initial days, the focus shifts to gradually loading the injured area with gentle movement, staying optimistic about recovery (pessimism and fear genuinely slow healing), and getting your blood flowing with pain-free cardiovascular activity. Prolonged rest actually weakens tissue, so returning to normal activity as soon as symptoms allow is the current standard of care.
Anti-Inflammatory Medications
For inflammation that causes significant pain or interferes with daily life, over-the-counter pain relievers like ibuprofen and naproxen work by blocking the chemicals your body produces to trigger swelling and pain. They’re effective for short-term use but come with risks when taken regularly, including stomach ulcers and kidney problems.
Corticosteroids are a stronger option that doctors prescribe for more serious inflammatory conditions. Medications like prednisone and hydrocortisone reduce swelling and also dial down an overactive immune system, which makes them useful for autoimmune diseases where the body attacks its own tissues. Short courses are generally well tolerated, but long-term use carries a real list of side effects: weight gain (particularly in the face, belly, and back of the neck), thinning bones, higher infection risk, elevated blood sugar, mood swings, trouble sleeping, and slower wound healing. Even topical forms can thin the skin over time. These tradeoffs are why corticosteroids are typically reserved for flare-ups or conditions that don’t respond to milder treatments.
Biologic Therapies for Chronic Conditions
When inflammation is driven by an immune system that won’t stop attacking healthy tissue, a class of drugs called biologics can target the specific molecules fueling the problem. One major category blocks a protein called TNF, which is a key driver of inflammation in conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, psoriasis, and ankylosing spondylitis. These drugs are derived from biological organisms rather than synthesized in a lab, and they represent a fundamentally different approach: instead of broadly suppressing the immune system, they interrupt a specific inflammatory pathway.
Biologics are typically prescribed when standard medications haven’t provided enough relief. They’re administered by injection or infusion rather than taken as pills, and because they dampen part of the immune response, they carry an increased risk of infection. For people with severe chronic inflammatory diseases, though, they can be transformative.
What to Eat (and Avoid)
Diet is one of the most effective long-term tools for managing chronic, low-grade inflammation. The core principle is straightforward: whole, unprocessed foods with no added sugar. That means fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, fish, poultry, nuts, seeds, olive oil, and small amounts of low-fat dairy.
Several specific food components do the heavy lifting. Omega-3 fatty acids, found in salmon, mackerel, sardines, walnuts, flaxseeds, and leafy greens like spinach and kale, are among the most well-studied anti-inflammatory nutrients. Fiber from legumes, oats, barley, and bran helps regulate the immune response. Polyphenols, the plant chemicals in berries, dark chocolate, tea, apples, coffee, and onions, also contribute. Brightly colored fruits and vegetables like tomatoes, carrots, squash, and broccoli contain antioxidants that counteract free radicals, which are unstable molecules that damage cells and promote inflammation. Herbs and spices including turmeric, ginger, cinnamon, and cayenne pepper show modest benefits as well.
If you prefer a structured eating plan, the Mediterranean diet and the DASH diet both align closely with these principles. Neither requires extreme restriction. They simply emphasize the foods that help and minimize the processed foods, refined sugars, and industrial seed oils that tend to promote inflammation.
Omega-3 Supplements
If you don’t eat much fish, a fish oil supplement can help fill the gap. A typical supplement provides about 1,000 mg of fish oil, which contains roughly 180 mg of EPA and 120 mg of DHA, the two omega-3 fatty acids most relevant to inflammation. Doses vary widely across products, so check the label for the actual EPA and DHA content rather than just the total fish oil amount. There are no official recommended daily intake levels for these specific fatty acids, but the research supporting their anti-inflammatory effects generally uses doses higher than what a single standard capsule provides. Fish oil in triglyceride or free fatty acid form is absorbed somewhat better than the ethyl ester form found in cheaper supplements.
Exercise and Inflammation
Regular physical activity is consistently associated with lower levels of chronic inflammation, though the relationship is more nuanced than “exercise reduces inflammation” suggests. A six-month study in elderly adults found that even after significant improvements in cardiovascular fitness, blood levels of C-reactive protein (a key inflammation marker) didn’t change. This doesn’t mean exercise is ineffective. It likely means the anti-inflammatory benefits come from long-term patterns of activity rather than a simple dose-response, and that exercise works through multiple pathways including fat loss, improved insulin sensitivity, and nervous system regulation.
Endurance activities like jogging, cycling, and swimming appear particularly beneficial because they stimulate the vagus nerve, a major nerve that runs from your brain to your gut and plays a central role in calming the body’s stress and inflammatory responses. Interval training also activates this pathway.
Sleep, Stress, and the Vagus Nerve
Chronic stress and poor sleep both contribute to inflammation, though the science on sleep is surprisingly mixed in short-term studies. Research on sleep restriction has produced inconsistent results for standard inflammatory markers, with some studies showing increases in inflammatory signals after a week of six-hour nights compared to eight-hour nights, while others show no change or even decreases after total sleep deprivation. What is clear is that consistent, adequate sleep supports immune regulation over time, and the downstream effects of chronic sleep loss (weight gain, insulin resistance, elevated stress hormones) all feed into inflammatory pathways.
Stress management may be more straightforward. Your vagus nerve acts as a brake on inflammation, and you can activate it deliberately. Slow, deep belly breathing is the simplest method: breathe in through your nose for a count of six and out through your mouth for a count of eight. Meditation activates the same pathway. Cold exposure, even finishing your shower with 30 seconds of cold water, stimulates vagus nerve activity and reduces the body’s stress response. Foot and neck massage have been shown to boost vagus nerve activity and lower blood pressure. Even spending time in nature without your phone, or listening to music that gives you a sense of awe, activates this nerve and helps lower inflammation.
How Doctors Measure Inflammation
If you suspect chronic inflammation, a C-reactive protein (CRP) blood test is the most common way to measure it. Normal levels fall below 0.9 mg/dL. Results between 1.0 and 10.0 mg/dL indicate moderate elevation, which can reflect chronic inflammatory conditions, infections, or other health issues. Levels above 10 mg/dL are considered markedly elevated, and anything over 50 mg/dL is associated with acute bacterial infection about 90% of the time. A single elevated reading doesn’t tell the whole story, since CRP rises with any illness or injury, so trending the number over time gives a clearer picture of your baseline inflammatory state.