How Long Does a Broken Bone Take to Heal? Stages, Honestly Explained

There’s a moment almost everyone with a fresh cast remembers: the felt-tip pen hovering over white fiberglass, a friend asking what to write, and then the question that actually matters slipping out — so, how long until this thing comes off? The orthopedist’s answer is usually a range, and ranges frustrate people.

That vagueness isn’t evasion. Bone is living tissue, and it repairs itself on a schedule set by which bone broke, how badly, how old you are, and habits as ordinary as whether you smoke. A ten-year-old’s forearm and a seventy-year-old’s hip are, biologically speaking, working with different budgets.

What follows is the honest version: the four stages your body actually moves through, realistic timelines bone by bone, what genuinely speeds or stalls the process, and the warning signs that mean the plan needs a second look.

What actually happens in the first 48 hours after a bone breaks?

The repair starts before you’ve even left the emergency department. When a bone snaps, it tears the small blood vessels running through and around it, and blood pools at the fracture site within minutes. That pooled blood clots into what doctors call a fracture hematoma — and far from being a problem, it’s the construction site for everything that comes next.

Inside that clot, the body stages a controlled inflammatory response. Immune cells arrive to clear out fragments of dead bone and damaged tissue, and they release chemical signals that summon stem cells from the bone’s outer membrane, the marrow, and nearby blood vessels. Those recruits will eventually become the cartilage- and bone-building cells that do the heavy lifting.

This is why the first few days hurt, swell, and bruise so dramatically. Inflammation gets a bad reputation, but in fracture healing it’s the ignition sequence, not the fire. According to Cleveland Clinic, this inflammatory phase typically lasts about a week, and interfering with it too aggressively may not be harmless — some research suggests that heavy use of certain anti-inflammatory pain relievers early on could theoretically slow bone repair, though the human evidence is mixed and far from settled. That’s a conversation worth having with the doctor managing your fracture rather than a reason to endure pain unmedicated.

What you can usefully do in these first days is simpler: elevate the limb above heart level to limit swelling, ice it as your care team advises, and keep the splint or cast dry. The biology is already busy.

The four stages of bone healing, in plain English

Textbooks divide fracture healing into four overlapping stages, and understanding them explains almost every quirk of recovery — including why an X-ray can look unimpressive while you’re actually healing well.

• Stage 1 — Hematoma and inflammation (roughly days 1–7). The blood clot forms, inflammation clears debris, and repair cells gather. Pain and swelling peak here.
• Stage 2 — Soft callus (roughly weeks 2–3). Cartilage and fibrous tissue bridge the gap between the broken ends. The fracture is now loosely connected, like two boards joined with fresh glue — holding, but nowhere near load-bearing.
• Stage 3 — Hard callus (roughly weeks 4–12 in adults). Bone-building cells called osteoblasts convert that cartilage scaffold into woven bone. This is the phase doctors are watching for on follow-up X-rays: a visible cuff of new bone bulging around the break. When they say the fracture is “clinically healed,” they usually mean this stage is well underway and the bone can bear normal loads.
• Stage 4 — Remodeling (months to years). The bulky, hasty woven bone is slowly replaced by organized, dense lamellar bone. The bump shrinks, the internal architecture realigns with the stresses you put on it, and in children the bone can even straighten out modest angulation on its own.

Here’s the honest part most patients aren’t told clearly: the cast comes off after stage 3, but stage 4 grinds on quietly for a year or more. “Healed enough to use” and “fully restored” are different finish lines, and the gap between them explains a lot of post-cast aches.

How long does a broken bone take to heal, realistically?

Six to twelve weeks is the range you’ll hear most often for adults, and it’s a fair average — Cleveland Clinic and MedlinePlus both cite it. But averages flatten a huge amount of variation, so it helps to think in tiers.

Small, well-supplied bones sit at the fast end. A broken finger or toe often mends in three to six weeks. A simple collarbone fracture in a healthy adult typically takes six to twelve weeks. A common wrist fracture — the distal radius, the classic result of catching yourself in a fall — usually needs around six to eight weeks in a cast, per the NHS.

Big weight-bearing bones are a different economy. The tibia (shinbone) is notorious: even uncomplicated breaks commonly take four to six months to solidly unite, partly because sections of the tibia have a relatively thin blood supply. A fractured femur, the strongest bone in the body, generally needs three to six months before it can handle full, unprotected loading, though modern surgical rods often let people walk on it far earlier with support.

Then there’s severity. A clean crack held perfectly still heals faster than a bone shattered into fragments, one that broke through the skin, or one whose ends had to be surgically realigned. An open (compound) fracture carries infection risk that can add weeks or months.

The most useful mental model: your doctor’s estimate is a forecast, not a promise. Follow-up X-rays every few weeks are how the forecast gets updated — and it’s entirely normal for the timeline to shift once or twice along the way.

Which bones heal fastest — and which make you wait?

Blood supply is the hidden variable behind most of these differences. Bones wrapped in muscle, like the femur, are bathed in circulation; bones with skimpy coverage, like the shin’s front edge or the scaphoid in the wrist, heal on a slower drip. The table below shows typical adult timelines for common fractures — expect your own case to vary with severity, treatment, and health.

Bone	Typical healing time (adult)	Worth knowing
Finger or toe	3–6 weeks	Often needs only buddy-taping or a splint
Collarbone (clavicle)	6–12 weeks	Usually heals without surgery; a visible bump is common and normal
Wrist (distal radius)	6–8 weeks	One of the most common fractures at every age
Ankle	6–12 weeks	Unstable breaks may need plates and screws
Scaphoid (small wrist bone)	6–12+ weeks	Poor blood supply; higher risk of failing to heal
Shinbone (tibia)	4–6 months	Among the slowest healers in the body
Thighbone (femur)	3–6 months	Almost always treated surgically in adults
Rib	About 6 weeks	Heals on its own; breathing exercises matter to prevent lung complications

Two takeaways from that spread. First, “broken bone” is about as specific as “car trouble” — the part matters. Second, the slow healers aren’t slow because your body is failing; they’re slow because their plumbing is stingy, and no amount of willpower changes vascular anatomy.

Why do children's broken bones heal so much faster?

A toddler’s broken femur can be solid in three to four weeks. The same bone in a forty-year-old takes months. That gap isn’t a rounding error — it’s biology working at two different speeds.

Children’s bones are wrapped in a much thicker, more biologically active periosteum, the membrane that supplies many of the bone-forming cells. Their skeletons are also still in growth mode, so the cellular machinery for building bone is already running at full throttle; a fracture just redirects it. Blood supply to young bone is richer, too.

Kids get one more advantage adults can only envy: remodeling power. A child’s healed bone can gradually correct a modest bend or angulation over the following years as growth continues, which is why pediatric orthopedists sometimes accept an alignment that would demand surgery in an adult. The younger the child and the closer the break is to a growth plate, the more self-correction is possible.

Growth plates themselves are the caveat. These cartilage zones near the ends of children’s bones are the weakest link in a young skeleton, and fractures through them need careful follow-up, because damage there can occasionally affect how the bone grows afterward. It’s the main reason a seemingly minor injury in a child still deserves proper imaging and monitoring.

At the other end of life, healing slows but absolutely doesn’t stop. Older adults heal fractures reliably; they simply need more time, and conditions like osteoporosis make the original break more likely rather than making healing impossible. A hip fracture repair in an eighty-year-old still unites — the surrounding recovery, from muscle strength to balance, is usually the harder project.

Does a cast make the bone heal faster, or just hold it still?

A cast doesn’t contain anything medicinal, and it doesn’t speed up cell biology by a single day. What it does is arguably more important: it keeps the broken ends aligned and still, which is the one mechanical condition bone healing genuinely requires.

Picture the soft callus at week two — that fragile cartilage bridge. Every time the fragments shift, the bridge tears and has to rebuild. Enough repeated motion and the body gives up on bone and lays down scar-like fibrous tissue instead, which is how nonunions begin. Immobilization isn’t about comfort; it’s about protecting the construction site.

The toolkit varies by fracture. Splints allow for early swelling and are common in the first days. Casts take over once swelling settles. Some fractures do better with functional braces that permit controlled movement. And surgical fixation — plates, screws, or rods — is essentially internal casting: metal holds the alignment so precisely that some patients can move or even bear weight far sooner than a cast would allow. The hardware doesn’t heal the bone either; it buys the biology a stable workspace.

One counterintuitive point deserves emphasis, because it changed orthopedic practice: appropriate stress helps. Bone responds to load — that’s Wolff’s law, the same principle behind exercise strengthening the skeleton. Controlled weight-bearing, when your surgeon or doctor clears it, actually signals the callus to mature faster and denser. Total, prolonged immobilization of everything is no longer the goal; protected, progressive use is. Which is why “can I put weight on it yet?” is one of the best questions to ask at every follow-up visit, and why the answer changes over time.

What slows bone healing down the most?

If there’s one modifiable factor that towers over the rest, it’s smoking. Nicotine constricts the small blood vessels that feed the fracture site, and other components of tobacco smoke impair the bone-forming cells directly. Studies consistently associate smoking with slower fracture healing and substantially higher rates of nonunion — this is one of the most robust findings in orthopedic research, not a scare tactic. Quitting during recovery, even temporarily, gives the fracture a measurably better environment.

Other well-documented brakes on healing:

• Diabetes, particularly when blood sugar runs high, impairs circulation and the function of repair cells; fractures in people with poorly controlled diabetes often take noticeably longer to unite.
• Poor nutrition — inadequate protein, calcium, or vitamin D leaves the body short on raw materials.
• Older age, which slows cell turnover across the board.
• Certain long-term medications, including some steroid-type drugs used for chronic conditions, can interfere with bone formation. Never stop a prescribed medication on your own, but do make sure the doctor treating your fracture knows everything you take.
• Infection at the fracture site, a particular risk with open fractures, can stall healing until it’s controlled.
• Heavy alcohol use, which is toxic to osteoblasts and often travels with poor nutrition.
• Inadequate blood supply, whether from the bone’s anatomy, vascular disease, or the injury itself severing key vessels.

Notice what’s on that list and what isn’t. Cold weather, sleeping position, and the fracture “aching before rain” don’t meaningfully change union rates. Circulation, stability, and cellular health do. Concentrate your effort where the evidence points.

Can food or supplements actually speed up bone healing?

Here’s the honest answer, which supplement marketing rarely gives you: no pill has been proven to make a healthy, well-nourished person’s fracture heal faster than it otherwise would. What nutrition clearly can do is prevent a deficiency from slowing you down — and deficiencies are more common than people assume.

Bone repair is a construction project, and the materials list is specific. Calcium is the primary mineral being laid down in that hard callus; the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements notes most adults need roughly a gram a day from all sources, and dairy, fortified plant milks, canned fish with bones, tofu, and leafy greens get most people there. Vitamin D is the gatekeeper that lets your gut absorb that calcium, and low levels are widespread, especially in winter and in people who spend recovery indoors — which describes nearly everyone in a cast. It’s reasonable to ask your doctor whether checking your level makes sense.

Protein is the quiet workhorse. Roughly half of bone’s structure by volume is a protein scaffold, mostly collagen, and healing demands extra. Older adults recovering from fractures are particularly prone to falling short, and inadequate protein intake has been linked with slower recovery after hip fracture.

Beyond those three, the evidence thins fast. Vitamin C, vitamin K, magnesium, and zinc all play supporting roles in bone metabolism, and a varied diet supplies them; proof that extra amounts accelerate healing in people who aren’t deficient is weak. The strongest dietary move during recovery isn’t exotic — it’s eating enough, eating protein at each meal, covering calcium and vitamin D, and going very easy on alcohol.

What if the bone isn't healing? Delayed union and nonunion

Roughly 5 to 10 percent of fractures don’t heal on the expected schedule, so if your follow-up X-ray disappoints, you’re in well-mapped territory rather than medical mystery.

The vocabulary matters here. A delayed union means healing is happening, just slower than typical for that bone — often defined as little progress by around three months. A nonunion means the healing process has essentially stopped, usually declared when there’s no radiographic progress over several months and enough total time has passed (often six to nine months) that spontaneous healing is unlikely. A malunion is different again: the bone healed, but in a poor position.

Certain fractures are known repeat offenders. The scaphoid in the wrist and the middle of the tibia both have marginal blood supply and top the nonunion lists. Open fractures, high-energy injuries with shattered fragments, and fractures in smokers or people with uncontrolled diabetes also carry elevated risk.

The encouraging part: modern orthopedics has a deep bench of responses. Depending on the cause, doctors may extend immobilization, adjust weight-bearing, treat an underlying problem such as a vitamin D deficiency or a smoldering infection, try bone stimulation devices (the evidence for these is genuinely mixed — some studies show benefit, others don’t, and honest surgeons say so), or move to surgery with bone grafting, which transplants your own bone or a substitute to jump-start the biology. Nonunion surgery has high success rates.

What a stalled fracture is not is a verdict. It’s a detour that adds months, not a door closing — and identifying the reason it stalled is usually the key that reopens it.

Why does it still hurt after the cast comes off?

The cast removal appointment carries a quiet betrayal for many patients: the saw whirs, the shell splits open, and the arm underneath looks pale, shrunken, oddly hairy — and it aches. Nobody warned them that liberation day is often the start of a second recovery, not the end of the first.

Several ordinary things are happening at once. Muscles lose size and strength remarkably quickly when immobilized — noticeable wasting can set in within a few weeks — so the limb is genuinely weaker. Joints that haven’t moved in six or more weeks stiffen as their capsules and ligaments tighten; a wrist fresh out of a cast often can’t bend even halfway to normal. The skin is dry and sensitive. And the bone itself, while united, is still mid-remodeling, so deep aching with use, weather changes, or at day’s end is common for months.

All of that is expected. What deserves a call to your doctor is different: sharp pain at the exact fracture site when you load it, pain that’s worsening rather than gradually easing week over week, new swelling, numbness or tingling, or a limb that feels unstable or gives way. Those patterns can signal incomplete healing or a complication, and they’re worth imaging rather than toughing out.

A rough rule of thumb clinicians offer: expect the total recovery — from injury to feeling genuinely normal — to take about twice as long as the immobilization did. A wrist casted for seven weeks often feels fully itself around three to four months. Knowing that in advance turns a discouraging plateau into an expected chapter.

When can you drive, work, and get back to sports?

These are the questions people actually organize their lives around, and they deserve more precision than “when you feel ready.”

Driving depends on whether you can control the vehicle in an emergency, not just cruise comfortably. With a leg or right-foot fracture, most doctors advise waiting until you’re out of the cast, cleared for full weight-bearing, and able to brake hard without hesitation — studies of braking reaction time show it stays impaired for weeks after cast removal. An arm cast is a gray zone; check with both your doctor and, practically speaking, your insurer, since driving against medical advice can complicate a claim.

Work spans the whole spectrum. A desk worker with a wrist fracture might be back within days, typing awkwardly; a construction worker with a tibia fracture may need four to six months before full duties are safe. Ask your doctor for specific written restrictions — “no lifting over a stated weight,” “seated duties only” — because vague guidance helps neither you nor your employer.

Sports follow the strictest timeline, because they load bone unpredictably. The general sequence: radiographic evidence of solid union, then restored range of motion, then strength roughly comparable to the uninjured side, then sport-specific drills, and only then contact or high-impact play. For a simple wrist fracture that might mean three to four months; for a tibia, six months or more. Returning early risks refracture through bone that’s united but not yet remodeled to full density — and a refracture typically heals slower than the original break did.

The pattern across all three: function, not the calendar, is the real gatekeeper.

What does physical therapy do that time alone can't?

Time heals the bone. It does almost nothing for everything around the bone — and that’s where recoveries quietly succeed or stall.

Consider what six weeks of immobilization actually costs. Muscle strength in the casted limb can drop substantially, joint capsules contract, tendons lose their glide, balance and coordination pathways go quiet from disuse, and even the bone around the fracture loses some mineral density from unloading. None of that reverses automatically when the cast comes off. Left alone, a stiff post-fracture wrist or ankle can stay stiff for a very long time; some limitations become permanent.

Rehabilitation attacks each deficit deliberately. Early on, that means gentle range-of-motion work to restore joint movement before scar tissue matures and locks it in — timing matters, which is why therapists push motion sooner than instinct suggests. Then progressive strengthening rebuilds muscle, which does double duty: strong muscles absorb impact that would otherwise transmit straight to the healing bone. For leg fractures, balance and gait retraining reduce the very real risk of a second fall onto a not-fully-remodeled skeleton. And graded loading — carefully increasing weight and impact — supplies the mechanical signal that tells remodeling bone to lay down density where you’ll need it.

There’s also an honest expectations function. A good therapist can tell you whether this week’s ache is normal tissue complaint or a red flag, which spares you both needless worry and needless pushing-through. People who complete prescribed rehab after fractures consistently regain function faster and more completely than those who skip it — the gap is especially stark after ankle, wrist, and hip fractures, where stiffness and weakness, not the bone itself, are what keep people from their lives.

Do bones really heal stronger than before? The myth, examined

You’ve probably heard it, possibly from someone signing your cast: a broken bone heals back stronger than it was. It’s one of medicine’s most cheerful myths, and like most durable myths, it grew from a kernel of truth.

The kernel is the hard callus. During the middle months of healing, the fracture site is wrapped in a cuff of extra bone that’s genuinely bulkier — and briefly more resistant to breaking at that exact spot — than the original. If you X-rayed and stress-tested the bone at, say, month four, the old fracture line might indeed be the toughest section, simply because there’s more material there.

Then remodeling does its job. Over the following one to two years, the body treats that bulky callus as inefficient overbuilding and methodically trims it away, replacing hasty woven bone with organized lamellar bone aligned to normal stresses. The endpoint, in a healthy healer, is a bone restored to approximately its original strength and shape — often so thoroughly that an old, well-healed fracture can be hard to spot on an X-ray years later. Not weaker. Not stronger. Restored.

Why does the honest version matter? Because the myth encourages exactly the wrong behavior at exactly the wrong moment. Believing the healed spot is reinforced, people return to high-impact sport or heavy labor early, loading bone that’s united but still porous from disuse and mid-remodeling. Refracture risk is real in that window. The accurate mental model — my bone is rebuilding toward normal, and normal takes a year or more — leads to better decisions than the flattering one.

When should you see a doctor during fracture recovery?

Most fracture recoveries are uneventful, but a short list of symptoms should always trigger a call — and a shorter list means going to an emergency department without waiting.

Seek emergency care immediately if you notice:

• Fingers or toes beyond the cast turning pale, blue, or cold, or becoming numb — possible signs the cast is too tight or circulation is compromised
• Severe, escalating pain that medication doesn’t touch, especially with a tense, swollen limb; this can signal compartment syndrome, a pressure buildup that damages muscle and nerve within hours and is a true surgical emergency
• Fever with increasing redness, warmth, or drainage near the fracture or a surgical wound, suggesting infection
• Sudden shortness of breath or chest pain after a leg fracture or period of immobility, which can indicate a blood clot traveling to the lungs
• New calf pain, swelling, or warmth in an immobilized leg — a possible deep vein clot

Call your doctor’s office promptly (same day or next) for:

• A cast that has cracked, softened, gotten soaked, or feels suddenly loose or tight
• Pain at the fracture site that’s clearly worsening after week one rather than easing
• New numbness, tingling, or weakness anywhere in the limb
• A sore or foul smell developing under the cast
• Any fall or impact on the healing limb, even if it seems fine afterward

And keep every scheduled follow-up, even when things feel great. Those routine X-rays are how delayed healing gets caught early, when the fixes are simple — a mediocre X-ray at week six is far easier to address than a nonunion discovered at month eight.

Stress fractures: the slow break with its own timeline

Not every broken bone announces itself with a snap. Stress fractures — hairline cracks from repetitive loading rather than a single impact — creep up on runners, dancers, military recruits, and anyone who ramped up activity faster than their skeleton could adapt. The pain typically starts as a vague ache during activity that fades with rest, then gradually stops fading.

Their healing math runs differently. Because the crack is incomplete and usually well-aligned, most stress fractures heal with six to eight weeks of relative rest, according to Mayo Clinic — no cast required in many cases, though a walking boot or activity modification is common. “Relative rest” is the operative phrase: swimming or cycling often stays on the menu while running comes off it, because the goal is removing the specific repetitive load, not immobilizing the person.

Location changes the stakes considerably. Most stress fractures in the shin’s inner edge or the metatarsals heal predictably. A handful of sites — the navicular bone in the midfoot, the front edge of the tibia, the base of the fifth metatarsal, the femoral neck — have poor blood supply or high mechanical stress and are labeled “high-risk,” sometimes needing strict non-weight-bearing or surgery to avoid progression to a complete break.

Two follow-up questions are worth raising with a doctor after any stress fracture. First, why did it happen? Training errors explain many, but low vitamin D, inadequate calorie intake relative to training, and reduced bone density explain others, and those are fixable. Second, how do I return? The evidence favors a gradual, structured ramp — jumping straight back to prior mileage is the classic route to a repeat crack in the same spot.

Frequently asked questions

How long does a broken bone take to heal in adults?

Most adult fractures unite in about six to twelve weeks, though full strength takes longer. Small bones like fingers may heal in three to six weeks, wrists typically need six to eight weeks, and large weight-bearing bones such as the tibia or femur often require three to six months. Severity, alignment, blood supply, age, and habits like smoking all move the timeline in either direction.

What are the stages of bone healing?

Bone heals in four overlapping stages. First, a blood clot (hematoma) forms at the break and inflammation clears debris, roughly the first week. Second, a soft cartilage callus bridges the gap over weeks two to three. Third, that scaffold converts to hard bony callus between roughly weeks four and twelve. Finally, remodeling replaces the bulky repair bone with organized, dense bone over months to years.

Do bones hurt while they are healing?

Yes, some pain during healing is normal and follows a pattern. Sharp pain dominates the first one to two weeks, easing to a dull ache as the callus forms. Mild aching with activity or weather changes can persist for months while remodeling continues. Pain that steadily worsens instead of improving, sharp pain at the fracture site under load, or new numbness warrants a call to your doctor.

Can a broken bone heal in 2 weeks?

Not solidly, in almost all cases. By two weeks, most fractures have only a soft cartilage callus — the ends are loosely connected but cannot bear normal loads. Very young children with minor fractures come closest to fast timelines, and small hairline cracks in kids may be reasonably stable within a few weeks. For adults, even the fastest-healing bones, like fingers, generally need at least three to six weeks.

How can I make my broken bone heal faster?

You can’t speed healing beyond your biology’s ceiling, but you can remove obstacles. Don’t smoke — it’s the biggest modifiable factor slowing bone repair. Eat adequate protein, calcium, and vitamin D, keep blood sugar controlled if you have diabetes, follow your weight-bearing instructions exactly, limit alcohol, and attend every follow-up. Controlled, doctor-approved loading actually signals the healing bone to strengthen; unauthorized loading tears the repair apart.

Why is my fracture taking so long to heal?

Slow healing usually has an identifiable reason. Common culprits include smoking, uncontrolled diabetes, low vitamin D, inadequate immobilization, poor blood supply to that particular bone (the scaphoid and mid-tibia are notorious), infection, older age, or certain long-term medications. If X-rays show little progress by around three months, doctors call it delayed union and start investigating causes — most of which can be addressed.

Does a bone heal stronger after a break?

No — this is a myth with a kernel of truth. During mid-healing, the bulky hard callus briefly makes the fracture site more resistant to breaking than surrounding bone. But remodeling then trims that excess away over one to two years, and the final result is approximately the bone’s original strength. Believing the healed spot is reinforced tempts people back to impact sports too early, when refracture risk is real.

How do doctors know when a fracture is healed?

They combine two kinds of evidence. Clinically, a healed fracture no longer hurts when pressed or loaded, and the limb functions without instability. Radiographically, X-rays show bridging callus — new bone visibly spanning the fracture line on multiple views. Neither alone is enough; a fracture can look incompletely healed on X-ray while functioning well, which is why follow-up visits assess both before clearing full activity.

How long does a broken bone take to heal in the elderly?

Older adults heal fractures reliably, just more slowly — often several weeks to a couple of months beyond typical adult timelines, depending on the bone and overall health. A wrist fracture that unites in seven weeks in a young adult might take ten or more in an eighty-year-old. Nutrition, vitamin D status, and early mobility work matter even more at older ages, and the surrounding recovery of strength and balance is usually the bigger project.

Is it normal for a healed fracture to ache years later?

Occasional mild aching at an old fracture site — with weather shifts, heavy use, or fatigue — is common and usually harmless, particularly if the break involved a joint or needed surgery. What’s not typical is pain that’s new, worsening, constant, or accompanied by swelling and reduced function; those patterns deserve evaluation, since they can reflect arthritis in an adjacent joint, hardware irritation, or, rarely, an incompletely healed fracture.

References

• Cleveland Clinic — Bone Fractures
• MedlinePlus — Fractures
• NHS — Broken arm or wrist

This article is for general information only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Please consult a qualified doctor about your individual situation.