HYDROTHERAPY

Welcome back to Medicine Health. Today we're going to talk about therapies that can be helpful. We've done previous ones about therapies a little more interventional. Today we're focusing on therapies that are a little easier to do, do at home, etc. You can have other people help. And this module here is on hydrotherapy. And so hydro has to do with water and therapy is therapy, so it must have to do something with water therapy. Now, hydrotherapy is about as old as humanity as far as we can tell, because people have been using water and heat and cold and the manipulation of the body temperature for literally as long as we have recorded types of medical interventions. Now, hydrotherapy can mean a number of different things. So some people will think, oh well, you know, my big bathtub has hydrotherapy jets, so that must be what hydrotherapy is. That can be because it's water being used, you know, to pulsate on your muscles or whatever it's doing. But hydrotherapy as a larger type of a practice is, as I said, very old, but also the use of hot and cold and alternating of heat and cold applications to do something with the physiology of your body. So there's a large, large number of hydrotherapy-specific protocols that are used all around the world. And many of them, many of the traditional ones have a few things in common. One is that often there, if you're doing a whole body treatment, there's a phase where you heat your body up and you get it very warm so that, you know, your capillaries are dilated and your blood is circulating around and, you know, the heat is causing all of this movement. And then there's a movement to a cold environment. often something like, you know, going from a hot plunge to a cold plunge, something like that. And the idea behind that, and there is some research to, you know, back all of this up, is that it starts to not only, you know, move your blood, which is not a bad thing anyway, and that helps, you know, to circulate the blood through the liver and the spleen and do all the good stuff your blood does, but also it turns out that there's some of the chemistry, the cytokines that help you with immune function, that can be kind of sped up and enhanced as you are doing the hydrotherapy treatment. Now, a common hydrotherapy that doesn't involve immersing in water baths, etc., is sometimes known as a constitutional hydrotherapy treatment. And this often is where you are a little more passive, so you're not, you know, jumping in and out of a hot or cold tub or something. But rather you are on a treatment table, much like, say, a physical therapy table, etc., massage table maybe. And normally there are below and around you, there would be a sheet and then a blanket to keep the heat in. And a lot of them use the area of the chest for this type of a treatment. So there would be both a source of hot towels, so moist hot towels, so they're wet and quite warm, not so warm warm that they burn you, but they're quite warm. And they would be applied to the chest, and they would be changed to a certain point until you were warm enough. And usually there's a certain amount of minutes for this. And then that— you'd be wrapped up to keep all that heat in. Well, then you would move to the cold phase. And so they unwrap you, they take the hot ones off, put the cold ones on, and then wrap you back up. Now, it's a little bit of a stimulating event if had that done to, to be on the cold part of a hydrotherapy treatment. But you need the contrast between hot and cold for that type of a contrast therapy to work in most cases. So if you look at, you know, very old uses, meaning, you know, hundreds of thousands of years old, a lot of these were immersive or maybe sauna and, and then cold, which is another very common use. Now in other of these modules on therapies, we talked about heat therapies, particularly like hyperthermia and sauna and that sort of thing. So hydrotherapy in many of its formations does use this contrast idea of hot and then cold. Now, if you go to many places in Europe, if you go to many places in Asia, really a lot of places around the world, As I said, there's sometimes hot and cold bathing. So maybe a very hot bathing pool or tub or something like that, and that's used to heat you up for a certain amount of time. Then you go to a reasonably cold pool. And now, you know, what I've noticed with the magic of the internet and people filming things, etc., it's very, you know, if you look at like the Wim Hof, you know, breathing and cold water applications, things like that. That's a type of a hydrotherapy treatment. So now you have people, you know, in their backyard, they've got a cattle tank full of ice water, or, you know, now they have these little special things that keep, you know, keep it all cold. That is essentially a hydrotherapy treatment as well. Now, most of the standard ones to get a contrast heat you up first. A lot of people use their sauna to do that and then go into the cold plunge. It does take a little getting used to. I mean, unless you really like cold water, it does take a little getting used to, to do the cold application part. So clinically, I've seen this used for any number of things. A lot of times it's used for acute, you know, colds and flus and things like that where you've been kind of sedentary and it's a way to get your body and your blood moving a little bit even though you're not feeling well. Yeah. I've seen them used with children, you know, to kind of help them resolve a fever, et cetera. And I've seen them used for a number of other purposes. Now, beyond the contrast type of hydrotherapy, one thing that you wanna keep in mind is that some other hydrotherapies involve maybe very specific sorts of applications of water or heat or cold. So you might have something Like in, uh, in, uh, probably origin from Germany as far back as we can read, or, uh, somewhere over in the neighborhood. Uh, there are other things such as what's called a wet sheet pack, and, uh, that would be where you have a cool, uh, type of a sheet and you're wrapped up in it, uh, kind of like a mummy. And, and usually they put an outer covering on that as well. Um, There's also variations of the sauna, hot and cold, that people do. A lot of people do that at their gym. They don't realize they're actually doing a hydrotherapy treatment. But one of the things that, uh, I used to tell people is if you get hot enough with the first treatment, the warming part of the treatment, the cold actually— your brain will start to want cold. It'll actually try and get you to go into the cold plunger. It'll want the cold towels, etc. And so one of the things is if you're doing this sort of constitutional hydrotherapy and someone else is helping you and they are, you know, they wrap you up, get you all warmed up, unwrap you quickly, take the hot one off, put the cold one on, wrap you right back up. The idea is to take off that cold towel when your body warms it back up. And so that's part of the, the, uh, alternative nature of moving the blood around, which again can be very stimulating to your system. Now normally if you're doing that, one like a constitutional treatment where somebody is doing the applications, you're going to wind up with usually at least 3 rounds of hot and cold to kind of get essentially like a pumping action going on in your body. So it's to kind of train your body to do, you know, this hot-cold movement, get the blood moving, etc. When I've been in Asia and Europe, a lot of times you'll have areas that are for hydrotherapy and there'll be instructions on wall where, you know, be in this bath for this much time, then go into this bath which is colder, and then go back and forth. So it's pretty similar, but the applications can be a little bit different. There are also things that are a little bit alternative, such as— and the exposure I've had to it, there are certainly people much more knowledgeable about hydrotherapy than me— but is a French version of hydrotherapy, which is also common to many other parts of the world. So they may not have invented it. Maybe they popularized it about 100 years ago. And that would be a cool or cold pool, which has water about up, you know, 6, 8 inches above your feet. And then it has stones in the bottom of the pool. Now, these are not sharp stones. These are nice rounded ones. So you're sort of getting a little pumping action into your feet, starting to move the blood in your feet, but also there is cool water around your feet. Around it. What will happen is if you— your body has this natural response where if you cool an area down, it's going to try and warm it up. So one of the reasons that's given by people who are proponents of, you know, these altering, alternative sort of treatments is it's a way to force your body to think about your extremities. In this case, it would be your feet and ankles for the most part, and to get the blood moving down there, which may be useful for any number of reasons. People with circulatory problems, people with other problems as well. I've even seen people do either just a cold application on the feet like this procedure I'm telling you about, or a hot and then cold and a hot and a cold on the feet, and seen it help headaches in some people because again, it's kind of moving the blood from one part of the body to another. Now, You might think, well, this all— I mean, it sounds very traditional, it sounds like old-school medicine, but like, does this have any place in, you know, quote-unquote modern scientific medicine? And in the show notes, I'll put in some information about that and how commonly heat as medicine or hot and cold as medicine is actually used in different therapies and different treatments. And it's not so much that it doesn't work or it is unscientific, et cetera. A lot of it is it can be very time and operator dependent, meaning you need somebody there to do it or someone to guide you through the procedure, et cetera, especially if you're sick. And so a lot of times it winds up, if you're in a facility, there might be maybe a physical therapist involved in doing some heat treatment or hot Cold, something like that. If you're at home, you can be trained to do certain things at home, or like I said, even at the gym, you know, where you've got hot and cold applications that you have available to you. So hydrotherapy, again, when I say, you know, in the show notes, after we get these produced and get the video over onto YouTube and all the pod burners, you know, uploaded, I will upload the show notes, which will have any references and resources and maybe links to other people's videos that you can watch about stuff too. But I bring the hydrotherapy up because here on Medicine Health we're in this long series of Why Can't I Get Better? But I want to take a number of these little modules and focus on the fact that there are things that can be done. And a number of the first treatments I talked about are kind of very either expensive or they're technology dependent or practitioner dependent, etc. Here we're trying to focus on things that can either be low impact with the practitioner and cost or even be done at home or at your gym or someplace like that. Well, we're about to run out of time here for this session. So hydrotherapy, it is many, many different things. It is part of every traditional type of medicine that I have studied. There's mentions, you know, back to Hippocrates and even before that, certainly, because people but just sort of naturally gravitated to the idea that possibly heating the body up and cooling it down and heating it up again might do something for the body. So we really appreciate, uh, the growth of all of the channels. So whatever feed you're on, or YouTube, etc., like, share, subscribe. We're doing new things all the time. We're adding all the time. Uh, check— click on the notifications so that, you know, if the algorithm goes down, you'll still get notified when we put new things up. But that's enough for hydrotherapy right now, and we'll go on to the next module.