I've been advised by my trusted doctor never to let them touch mine except with laproscopy, when and if. I lifted some jammed logs I shouldn't have about five - six years back getting in the wood in Fall, then was unloading and spreading 4" rock too fast into a mucked-up "road" I needed passable with a wheelbarrow with thunder and lightning coming in about dusk the same day, and tore one myself somehow. Must be getting old. I can't afford surgery or down-time, being a hill-billy dirt farmer and jack of all building trades for a living. Wear a good jock and keep trucking, work on stuffing it back in when it gets worse, do exercises to strengthen the abdominal wall, like snap crunches, positive and negative leg lifts. Sometimes it gets better for a while, then wham. I know they generally don't heal, but I have a Great Physician, and figure He will provide one way or the other. Better Half has come up with an herbal concoction purported to help these heal which she is going to get the funnel and the stick if I don't imbibe willingly, so I'll let you know how that works. God works in mysterious ways, and if He can use Baalam's Ass, and me, well, she is wAy up from there...
I have to disagree on the hernia belt, though. I hate the thing and agree it bruises, but there are times on the place for certain heavy tasks, and certainly times in my work, that I don't have the luxury of deciding not to exert full-tilt-boogy if something slips putting up a beam, or taking down a wall, or working a steep roof, or any number of other things, where that thing can save tearing a new one, or opening the old one, or quite literally save my sorry butt, by allowing me to exert fully absent further damage and the debilitating pain which might otherwise accompany some emergency reaction, and cause my strength to fail.
Tras
"They who have put out the people's eyes reproach them of their blindness."
John Milton, 1642