SAUNA Q&A

All right, got the cool music I tried to talk over that wasn't so cool. Dr. Paul here with Medicine Health doing questions that you have asked through various social media outlets. And this little section we want to do is on heat therapies and sauna. So I did a previous number of videos on this, but recently kind of did a big top-down on sauna and then I got some specific questions to answer around heat therapies and sauna, etc. And so want to get into that, but the first question really was, I get confused because— I'm paraphrasing, there's a lot of questions we just jumbled into one, so hence the paraphrasing. But basically there's confusion around what's the difference if I do the steam room Or if I do a dry sauna, dry heat sauna, or if I do one of the infrared type saunas, so far infrared or near infrared, or what would be the other difference if I went out and like worked out and heated my body up? Or what would be the difference if I submerse myself like in a hot tub or hot bath or something of that nature? The thing to keep in mind is for many of the benefits of heat therapies, not all, for many of the benefits of heat therapies, anything that heats your body up creates the heat benefits. Okay. Generally getting to the point where you are hot enough, say, to sweat, etc., is kind of one of the cutoff points. But you actually get different and particular benefits on the way up to the level of sweating. There are some systems where you may sweat less and some you may sweat more, just because of the type of heat. Now, the way to think about warming your body up is first, how does your body normally do it? Well, my body normally does it through feedback from my brain. There's a place in your brain that has thermoreceptors, heat receptors, and it'll tell you if you're, you know, where your body's temperature should be. And if you're getting too low, so you're too cold, one of the things that'll trigger is shivering to raise your— because you're moving your muscles. If your temperature goes up too high, it will trigger things like sweating. Okay. So your body is already trying to auto-regulate your heat. Well, when I put external forces or internal forces to heat my body up, I'm doing something in excess of just living and just existing. So the first thing would be like exercise. So people will say, well, I don't have access to anything to heat me up outside of maybe my shower, but I do exercise. So we work with that and I will have them exercise, do their exercise, ask how much they sweat, what they wear and all that. So if somebody's really trying to work on detox, I may have them wear an extra layer of workout gear so that they sweat a little bit more and all of that. Now, we always make this disclaimer. This is not medical advice. It's just background information answering questions. You still, you need to run this by your healthcare providers because you can get in trouble sauning. You get dehydrated. If you have an unstable heart, it can be a problem there. If you have unstable blood pressure. So you really want to get sauna and heat therapies cleared before you go and do them. But that being said, you want to make sure you're hydrated enough no matter what, whether you're static sitting in a sauna or you're going to exercise and raise your blood temperature, your body temperature, you're still going to get many of the benefits. But then there's the external thing. So you've got like a dry and a steam sauna, maybe, you know, at your health club, right? And they do different things, but they both heat your body up from the outside. Side in. Now, when you get to other technology such as the spectrum of infrared saunas, there are near and far infrared. Okay, so you have red at one end of the light spectrum. Infrared is technically not real visible or not visible. And so there's a near part and then there's a far part. That's the wavelengths involved. There are differences. Some people think more, some people think more subtle, but there are differences between heating your body up, say, with, you know, hot rock dry sauna, and then actually being in a sauna that has generators of infrared, infrared light wavelengths. So near and far infrared are both perceived by the body to be probably something that's naturally occurring. We're just having a lot of it. Okay. Um, in the case of the infrared bands and spectrums and all of that, those often are recommended by people who are recommending, you know, deeper levels of detoxification, etc. And in some cases, some of those wavelengths do make a difference as far as the enzymes that get turned on and all of that. But what many people in the depuration world, which is the kind of whole body detoxification, which can include saunas and stuff, many people in the depuration world who have looked into heat and all of that will say the bulk of the benefits are just by heating your body up. It doesn't matter how you got your body heated up. Now, there might be specific benefits when you get to, say, specifically an infrared sauna between near and far. But the infrared are going to do a little bit maybe more specific job of heating you and your cells up. So what do these things do? Well, one of the cool things that we're learning more and more about is toxins that actually get into your body and move all the way to your DNA can tag and sit on your DNA, and they call them DNA adducts. And so a DNA adduct is kind of very hard to get off of the DNA, which makes a problem because they mess with the way that the DNA works. So a lot of toxins are DNA adducts, and some research seems to indicate that heat therapies are one of the best ways to dislodge DNA adducts from your DNA in your cells. So that's a pretty huge thing. Now, the next thing is anytime you heat your body up, many of your immune enzymes and other enzymes will speed up. Okay? Enzymes are things that help a process to move more quickly. Okay. Okay, so they get in the middle of the substrate or the base and then the product or the thing that you're sending out, and they speed that reaction up. Well, many enzymes have temperature ranges where they work the best, and some of your enzyme systems, such as especially around your immune system, are really set up so that when you get a fever naturally with an infection, the enzymes upregulate, which is very important. And so as they upregulate, they do more intermediate activity with your immune system. So again, heat can be very useful for immune things. Well, we're running down on time here, but to summarize with heat therapies, number one, the first goal is to heat your body up however you do it. The next goal would be if you're working for a specific outcome and you're working maybe with someone who does detoxification or depuration, they're going to tell you what their favorite intervention is. And you can work with that, but heating your body up is the first goal no matter how you do it. We speed up a lot of enzyme systems that are good for cleaning up and immune activity, etc. We have a lot of sped-up detoxification and depuration enzymes, so things to move the junk out of our body. We increase the removal of DNA adducts, toxins that actually get into your nuclear material, and it actually helps your metabolism to speed up, which can be very useful for a number of things. But we are out of time for today. I'm Dr. Paul Anderson, Medicine and Health. I want to thank you for listening. Please like, share, and subscribe. We're on all of the pod burners. We're on YouTube. We're on Contact Doc Radio Live and on all of their back material. And we do livestream this on Facebook as well. dranow.com is the best place to get the link for all of the stuff. But I'll see you next week on the radio. Thanks.