Preparing for Cold & Flu Season: HYDROTHERAPY, HEAT & OTHER THERAPIES

Good day and welcome back to Medicine Health. Dr. Paul Anderson. I'm Dr. Paul, and we are doing how to prepare yourself best for cold and flu season, natural edition. So we've done sections on supplemental vitamins and minerals, we've done herbs, we've done lifestyle modifications, and the 4th section that I want to talk about here on Medicine Health would be heat therapies and hydrotherapy. Now this obviously is a really long topic, so we're going to shorten it up to just a few minutes just so you get a flavor for things. We've talked about these things before on other programs, but just to start out with, most people are aware that of course heat would be like one of the oldest medical interventions that we know about. There are, you know, quotes from Hippocrates about heat and all of that. And obviously, you know, we know that our body does a lot of biochemical and immune activity to create fevers when we're sick. And part of the fever is to get the immune system kind of worked up, ready to fight things. And part of it is to put us biochemically in a position where we're more likely to fight well and heal and all that. So a lot of times what people would say and look at, even in, you know, even in older and ancient times, would be, um, all right, well, if I get a fever and I'm sick, what if I heated myself up? Would that be helpful? Now, I do always like to say on these things, you know, what I'm talking to you about, these, these are, uh, ideas from the world of medicine. Uh, there's research for these things, etc., but this is not medical advice. So before you go out and you know, do something like heat yourself up or whatever, please talk to a healthcare provider. Because there are certain types of underlying conditions and there's other things where you might have to be very careful with raising your body temperature. That being said, it can be very useful. Now, there we've done another program just on hyperthermia, the science and the medicine of raising the core body temperature. And that we would do with people and we would actually have internal probes in their body and we would watch to see how much their core body temperature rose, not by the mouth, but actually internal temperature probes. And there's 4 different levels of heating the body up. But one that's really available to folks and is very doable a lot of times can be sauna. And while probably the infrared saunas are going to be a little bit more activating to your cellular milieu, uh, to some of the enzyme systems and other stuff because of the way the infrared saunas work. Really, anything that heats your body up will cause many of the good positive effects. So let's say you don't have an infrared sauna, but you could do a dry sauna. Let's say you don't have a dry sauna, but you could do a steam room. Let's say you don't have that, but you do some other way to heat your body up. There used to be, um, Well, still are types of hydrotherapies we're going to talk about where they would just be basically a hot bath that warmed the body up. So anything that heats your body up will do it. Now, I've had people say, well, you know, I can't afford or don't have access to any type of a sauna, but I would like to heat myself up. Now, if they were mobile, what I would recommend that they would do would be when they're moving, Okay, remember movement is another way to say exercise, but it sounds a little bit better. I would have them put one extra layer on to what they would normally wear and go and do their movement until they started to sweat at least. And that's actually enough heat generation to help out. Now the more the better, but you also have to be careful, you know, you get dehydrated and other stuff with heat-type therapies. So with heat, The first thing is it will not only speed up immune system activity, it'll speed up certain cytokine and enzyme activity in the body, but also it will trigger, uh, your cells to turn over, to have cell respiration, uh, and to have the cell, uh, energy process that goes through, which also ejects a lot of toxins. So you wanna make sure when you're heating yourself up or you're doing hyperthermia, et cetera, you've got enough hydration so that the, the fluid around your cells stays well hydrated and you move all that junk out. Because sauna, heat, hyperthermia therapies are going to help you detoxify. And this usually leads to other questions where people say, well, what about hydrotherapy? I've read about that. Now, hydrotherapy has been around a long, long time and there are different traditions of hydrotherapy, but one of the commonalities often is that there's a heating up portion to the body and then a cooling down portion. And so I've done different types of these, like in the French tradition or the German tradition or even the American tradition that borrowed from everybody else, where you get really, really hot, say through an infrared sauna, and then they have a cool-down tub or you get hosed off or there's other things that happen. There's also constitutional-type hydrotherapies where we would have people in a room, it's a very stable situation, and we would have ways to heat them up front and back on the core over their chest. And we get 'em hot to a certain level and then we change out and put cold towels on. And believe it or not, when you get that hot, the cold actually kind of feels good. And we would then wrap them back up and they would heat the cold towels up and change the towels out. And the idea is to try and get the body through the hot and the cold action to kind of have basically a pumping action of the circulation. But there's also a lot of other things that happen when the heating and cooling go on. I mentioned shifts in immune chemistry and enzyme activity and many other things. A lot of the same benefits we get from movement and exercise, like getting the blood moving and getting it filtering through the organs, getting the lymph circulating, those are helped out by heat therapies and/or hydrotherapy. Again, like I would say, you know, find a practitioner who's trained in these things. Not going to be as many trained in these things, but your— more traditional practitioners, some of your Chinese medicine practitioners, any licensed and board-passed naturopathic physicians. A lot of people in the chiropractic community do this, sometimes physical therapy, sometimes a whole number of other groups that do this. Now, if you're looking at hyperthermia, you know, as we use it, say, in the oncology world, It depends on what country you're in. Right now, hyperthermia in the United States is done via studies that are going on, basically. I won't get too more specific than that. In Canada, there are clinics that already have it, and they don't have to be under any particular study guidelines. If you're in a different country, it may be done right alongside your other therapies in the hospital. But looking at immune function and everything, you know, working out to the point of heating yourself up, regular types of sauna if you can do it. And then if you're looking at doing hydrotherapy, find somebody who knows how to do that, and that can be very effective as well. All of those are really, really useful, and we've got other programs on them. If you want to find all the links, you can just go to dranow.com, D-R-A-N-O-W dot com. As far as the pod burners and the YouTube, please like, share. We love you to subscribe. We're going to getting a lot more subscribers. That's great. And also do the notifications because, uh, sometimes the algorithm shoves you over to the side and no one knows what you're doing. And we, we go from, you know, thousands of views to 50 views and, and all that. If you have notifications, it helps out with that too. But I'm Dr. Paul Anderson. We're out of time for today, and I will see you all on the radio next week.