Get Sick With Heat? Your Top 6 Questions For Heat Intolerance (Sauna Edition)

Have you ever suffered with sickness due to heat tolerance problems after you got out of a sauna, maybe a hot tub or something? In this video, we want to get into questions that you guys have asked over on the Instagram page and on the YouTube page. If you haven't checked me out on Instagram, it's just dra online. Check me out over there. Welcome to my YouTube channel. I'm Dr. A. And we get into integrative and holistic measures for helping people with chronic illness. And we want to dive into this Q and A video video because you sent some great questions over. So let's get into these six areas that people had questions about. Number one, does the sauna have to be infrared or can a regular hot bath or steam sauna, etc. Be just as useful as an infrared sauna? So this is always a question that comes up a lot and it kind of depends what you're going for. So the way I normally answer this, and because I don't have any stake in any type of sauna sales or hot tub sales or anything, I have no stake in any of that. The way I normally start is if you're going to help your body in moving junk around and helping it get out, etc. The first criteria is to warm your body up. And we've done other videos on this, we'll link them at the end. But the bottom line with that is the first criteria is whatever you can do to heat your body up. That could be going out for a brisk walk or if you can't really get sweating doing that, you put an extra hoodie on and go out for a walk. I bet you'll sweat a little bit more. That will heat your body up. Being in a hot bath or a hot tub also do that. And it's been shown in people do sweat out quite a lot of fluid, even in a hot bath. The next level would be bath or a steam sauna. Again, it's going to heat up your body and then you get into the wonderful world of infrared radiation, which is normally reserved for sauna type apparatus that are going to be tuned to the infrared spectrum. And so if we look at the color spectrum, we start over on the side of red, then it goes orange, yellow, etcetera, etcetera. Etc. Over to violet and then ultraviolet. Well, on the red side, if we go pre red, that's infrared. Infrared then is divided up into near infrared and far infrared. All infrared waves will heat things up. If you go beyond infrared, you get into things like microwaves and Stuff like that. So that's not what we're talking about. But in the infrared spectrum, it all will heat things up. But the further you go into far infrared, the more you will get to deeper tissues and heat up the water molecules at a deeper level in the body. So a lot of times the devices that are used to generate infrared therapies are categorized either as near infrared or far infrared. And far infrared has quite a wide spectrum. Most of the saunas, if somebody is going to do an infrared type sauna most of the time, we will recommend that they do a far infrared type sauna simply because it gets to the deepest levels. But remember, the first criteria is just to heat your body up any way you can. Second question is, how many days per week is reasonable without losing too many minerals? And how long should the sessions be? Is there maximum time you should spend in the sauna? Basically, this person's asking questions about, you know, is there a safety limit or what should I be shooting for? Like all other things, kind of like with exercise, we don't know what our tolerance is until we do something. And because heat therapies like sauna can kick up a lot of junk in the body, toxicants and toxins and other nasty stuff that our body has to get rid of, we're not sure how quickly, quickly our body can dump those things. So it's always good. I always recommend people start with short amounts, do five minutes, get out, if that feels okay, do 10. And normally we're doing treatments, you know, in the non medically supervised world. So you're at the gym or home or whatever, somewhere between five minutes and ramping up to 20 to 30 minutes, that's kind of the average. I don't recommend people start at 30 because if you have an intolerance to the heat or you're detoxifying too quickly, et cetera, you can get kind of sick doing that. So go up slowly. How many days a week? Same answer, really. I generally have people start and do every other day, see how they do, if that works out and they really want to hit it hard. And do, you know, four days in a row or five days a week or whatever. Great. There are some people who do seven days a week. It's all about tolerance. And tolerance has to do with your physiology, any pathologies you have, but also how much toxicity you might kick up in your body. Some people will feel amazing when they get done with asana, and some people will feel pretty rough. And if you're feeling pretty rough, you either need to slow down the frequency or the amount of time, or you need to check in and see am I getting dehydrated, etc. So basically, it's your tolerance. If you're, you know, if you checked out with your doctor, you don't have a cardiovascular problem, you're hydrated enough, your electrolytes, you're eating and drinking all this stuff, you're going to be pretty stable up to your own personal tolerance. But start five minutes, work your way up, do it every other day max, and then expand to what your body will let you do. And if you have any symptoms, talk to your doctor about the symptoms. Number three question on this round is, is if you sauna, is it recommended to take a binder? Would a binder help with detoxification intolerance? Generally, yes. So a binder can be fiber in foods, it can be fiber from a fiber supplement, it can be an extra binder, things just as examples such as activated charcoal or diatomaceous earth, other things like that. All of those things hold on to the junk that are in the GI tract, But also the bile that comes in to help you digest carries a lot of toxins with it. So the binder can hold on to those things. And the toxins that might come either directly into the gut or through the bile could be metal, they could be chemicals, they could be biotoxins, kind of like a mycotoxin. And the binders can help with that. The two biggest things to help with getting rid of toxins that move around are enough hydration and then some kind of a binder. The third factor, which is hypercritical, is because the binder is going to go through the GI tract. You cannot be constipated if you are detoxifying, doing saunas, et cetera. You also can't be constipated if you're taking a binder. And so, so the biggest reason binders cause constipation is because there's not enough water going with them. They're not hydrated enough. Well, then imagine you get into the heat, you dehydrate a little bit more. If you get constipated, you'll just recirculate all those toxins back into you. So you want to be having at least a bowel movement every day. You want to stay very hydrated, and you want to have enough of whatever type of binder you and your healthcare provider decide that could be at the food level. It could be food plus fiber. It could be food plus fiber plus something like charcoal or some other Thing number four, what about incorporating contrast or cold between heat sessions? Is that beneficial? And if so, how do you do it? It's really common in traditional cultures where they do sauna as just part of the way they live, that they will heat up and then they will cool down somehow. Now, in northern climes, often it's just going back outside the sauna where the snow is. Sometimes people jump in the water or whatever. In traditional medical hydrotherapy, the. The normal way of doing it is to heat the body up and then to do a therapy that cools the body down. And often, if you read the hydrotherapy, you know, manuals, especially from some of the originators, the idea was always to end with cold. Now, the reason for that is that I get all of this movement, I get all the blood engorgement in the body. I get the toxins moving. And if I just sort of stay and my body doesn't cool down, my natural physiology might actually slow down. I might get a little bit congested and the bad stuff may not move out. The addition of cold after hot helps to kind of have this pumping effect with the blood because it actually does shift some of the peripheral vascular opening that happens with the heat, and then that can actually help with pushing more toxic material and junk out so your kidneys and liver, et cetera, can get rid of them. So the general rule there. There are many, many specific things about hydrotherapy, but the general rule is hot first and then cold. Now, I have been facilities where they do hydrotherapy in a medical context, and they, you know, first you have an exam and they make sure your heart's okay and all of that. But you go into the sauna and you get heated up to a particular level, which is usually quite hot. So you're actually kind of looking forward to the cool water. And then they do a couple of different things. One is you can just go out and do the cold plunge. If you have a gym, usually they have a sauna and a cold plunge combo. So that's why that's there the way I've always found it to be most comfortable. Because the cold plunge on its own, unless you're used to doing that, can be a little disturbing, is to be hot enough from the sauna that I actually really desire to cool down. If that's not available or it's too hard to arrange that or whatever, there are places where they'll just have a hose that people will hose down with that works. The other thing that I've seen used is just some towels that Are kept cold, obviously outside of the sauna, help cool the body down after. So that's basically how you would do it as far as a protocol. You'd have to get more specific and work with somebody who's doing hydrotherapy protocols to get anything more specific than that. But generally the rule rule is heat first and then cold second. Number five tips for detoxifying from mold when mold toxicity is causing more mast cell activation syndrome. And whenever I do detoxification, it brings on mast cell activation flares. How do I tolerate sauna when I have mast cell activation syndrome? Really good question. Really difficult to navigate. So the way that we want to think about this is that the idea of mast cell activation, so subset of your immune cells called mast cells. And we've done a bunch of videos on mast cell activation. What we said in one of them is there's the mast cells, but there's other cells also. And they all do the same thing basically, which is to trigger the release of histamine and other inflammatory chemicals. Well, if you think about this little group of cells, sort of the mast cells are the name brand thing, but there's other ones in there. What triggers them. Mast cell activation in most people is not because the mast cells themselves are just behaving badly for no reason there. Well, the triggers are often things as was mentioned, like mold, mycotoxins, other allergies, chronic infection toxicities. They all push on the mast cells and the mast cell friends and then they dump out all this nasty chemistry, histamine and other inflammatory chemicals. So if you imagine then you go in and you do a detox stimulant, depuration stimulant. Like you go in and you get some heat. It stirs too many things things up. And then the mast cells which are already on a hair trigger just go like boom. And then you get more mast cell symptoms which can be extremely uncomfortable. So the real answer to how to tolerate sauna with mast cell is sometimes you can't until you calm down all the other triggers. And that can take quite some time. I've had some people with mast cell activation problems where they can do a little bit of sauna. It's not a big deal that other people where any heat triggers them and throws them off and so and everything in between. So what we recommend for folks is you got to look at how many underlying triggers for your mast cell problems are there. And again, go to the playlist on the main YouTube channel. We've got a big mast cell playlist. But the big triggers are mold, mycotoxins and other biotoxins, chemical toxins, metal toxins, chronic infections, allergy syndromes, other things of that nature. So you got to work on those to lower the underlying triggers. And what you'll find is at a certain point, then you can add in heat thereafter therapies to help out with the removal of some of the other toxins. And so it's sort of like in the beginning, it's catch 22 where you need to detox, but heat can't be part of it because you're too toxic and mast cells are overwrought. As time goes on and you get the other triggers down for the mast cell activation, you'll find you actually start to tolerate the heat and actually starts to feel better. There's not one right answer. It's more deal with the underlying triggers and eventually you will be able to tolerate heat. And then the final question on this round was really an is sauna therapy recommended during active chemotherapy cycles? If so, what's a standard way to do that? Well, a standard way to do that would be individual to each person. So as you listen to other videos I've done, half of my patient population have complex chronic illness and the other half have advanced cancer. So this is an area that we work with and around all the time, much the same, as I would say to somebody who had, say, some cardiovascular issues. And sometimes he therapies like sauna are okay for them, sometimes they're not okay for them. There's not a universal embargo on the idea of sauna during active chemotherapy. I know there's a lot of people that will say that. And one of the reasons I say that is that in the hospital, in some cases, depending on where you're being treated, common to give people chemotherapy and then do hyperthermia. So hyperthermia is raising of the core body temperature. Hyperthermia. There's different types of hyperthermia, but sauna would be one type. Hyperthermia has generally shown to be synergistic cancer therapies. And also by synergy, we mean to make them work better. And it can also potentially improve the outcome of the different therapies that you're doing now. That doesn't mean you're always going to tolerate it. So while there's no, as I say, there's no embargo, don't hard and fast, no do sauna with active chemo, you might be too weak for it, you might be too dehydrated for it, et cetera. So this is something when it comes to activ chemo and hyperthermia type therapies, which SANA is included, you really need to work with an integrative oncology provider who knows the limits, knows how to guide you through that and keep you safe during it. I'm Dr. A. If you like this video, check out some of these other ones we're going to link for you. A lot of links to cool stuff. Go over to the main YouTube channel. We got a bunch of playlists for you there. I'll see you on the next video. Sam.