Why You Get SICK From SAUNA (Woozy // Flu-Symptoms)

Are you interested in using sauna or other heat therapies to help out with detoxification and depuration, but you can't do it because you have intolerance to heat? Maybe you feel weird or funny or dizzy after you get out of the sauna. In this video, I've got 8 questions that came in from you guys, the listeners, and we wanted to take this chance to answer those 8 questions that really revolve around sauna tolerance. Welcome to my YouTube channel. I'm Dr. A, and I talk about integrative and holistic measures to help with chronic illness, among many other things. So let's dive into this sauna Q&A. The first one says, can detoxification intolerance be caused by sluggish drainage pathways, such as mast cell activation, histamine problems, MTHFR, Et cetera. And yes, these can be things that might make you more sensitive to detoxification, depuration, stimulating things like heat therapies. Usually when we have people, and you can go check out, and we'll link it at the end, we've got one on a sauna horror story that was a sort of exemplary of this. We have people who have been doing a lot of work, but they haven't really had the strength to get into, you know, starting to get toxicity out of them, or maybe they have genetically slow detoxification pathways, or they have genetic SNPs like MTHFR or MAO SNPs or COMT or any of these, so their body just doesn't quite do things the way that the physiology book says that they're supposed to, or maybe they have mast cell activation disease, mast cell syndrome, etc., or histamine overload. Well, all of that can be one of those things where, if you picture it this way, that your body is sitting at the state that it is, and maybe you have either toxicities that are in there or pathways that don't work or genetic issues, but you've kind of made a physiologic peace with all that, so you kind of feel the way you feel. Well, all of a sudden you go and you heat your body up. Well, that's going to then move toxic material around in your body, and if those pathways, either through inflammatory processes like mast cell issues, or through genetic slowdowns, or just a huge load of toxins that can't get through, I speed up the movement of toxins, toxicants, now I can't get them out of your body. So I have a supply that rises and an elimination that is too slow. So yes, to that person's question, that intolerance to doing things like saunas and other detox things can be the sauna moves things too quickly, but the body can't get rid of them on the other side. So there's sort of a couple ways to look at this idea of heat intolerance. In many cases, it can come from the answer to question number 1, Which is I just have a lot of toxicity in my body and I start to exercise and heat myself up, or maybe I go out in the sun too long, I'm working and I feel really bad. Well, that can be because I stirred the toxicity up by moving my body and heating it up, but my body can't get rid of it. The other thing of many can be my chemistry can be shifted to where my body prefers colder temperatures, and there's different types of things, chemistry in the body that can be induced over time, like heat shock proteins and other heat-related molecules. And in some people, the shift between the tolerance of heat and all of that and their baseline can be slowed down by the fact that they have not upregulated some of this literal heat tolerance chemistry. So normally when we see that and you have heat intolerance, you have to go very slowly into doing things like sauna or any other heat therapy. And it doesn't mean you can't do it, but it means you might look sort of like, oh, you go to the sauna at the gym maybe, or you've got one at your home, or you're using your neighbor's. Maybe you're only able to do a few minutes at a time when you start, but then you can add a couple of minutes at a time till you tolerate it more. And you'll see this with many things. And there's, there's a bunch of reasons why your body needs to go in baby steps, but really the heat intolerant person just needs to go very slowly, if at all possible. The third question people ask, more than one definitely asked this, is heat therapy not advisable for somebody with lymphedema? So lymphedema is where you have a backup of fluid in your body because the lymphatics are not returning the excess fluid back into your venous system. And so the answer to that is maybe yes and maybe no. Now, why do we say it that way? Well, there's a lot of reasons for lymphedema. If you have lymphedema that's secondary to a cardiovascular disorder, you really would want to make sure you're cleared by your cardiologist or whoever takes care of your heart issues before you do any sorts of heat therapy, because there can be other reasons heat would be bad if you have cardiovascular disorder. Doesn't mean you can't do it, but you need to have a conversation with whoever takes care of your cardiovascular health about that. So that's one reason, maybe yes, maybe no. Another reason can be we can have Lymphedema secondary to things like cancer and other things. And so if you know you have cancer and maybe they did some surgery and removed some lymph nodes, so things get backed up. In those cases, again, as long as you're working with a healthcare practitioner to help you with your heat therapies, often you can do it in that case. But again, you need the practitioner to kind of clear you for that. In other cases, the lymphatic slowdown can be due to chronic inflammation, which could be like mycotoxins from mold or mast cell disorders or chronic infections. Infections or any number of other chronic illness things. In those cases, the heat can be very useful, but again, you have to balance that with, can I get the lymph moving after my heat experience? And then can that actually be part of helping me? For example, there's a protocol at Tico Hospital that I consulted with long ago, and it was in their oral surgery department. And so they were taking amalgam fillings out and Replacing them, using all the filters and everything, they would do a lot of detoxification during the process. Well, what they would do is after your oral surgery for the day and stirring up all those toxins, they would send you, and you would often get a lymphatic massage, a very specific type of massage to move the lymph around. If you imagine you've just absorbed some of the toxins, even with the best measures, the lymphatic massage would stir it up so the people would actually feel worse, and then they would do sauna or hot and cold after, and that would actually make the patient feel better because they could move the toxins out. So the presence of lymphedema or edema problems, you got to know why, and if it's due to an organ issue such as cardiovascular, cancer, etc., you really need to see what your physician that takes care of that issue for you thinks about the heat therapy. If it's something that's secondary to chronic illness and there's not, you know, a major organ involved, it can be very helpful, but sometimes you have to— there's a little bit of a push-pull where you're doing some things to help the lymph get moving. That can be a number of lymphatic massages, one, jumping on a rebounder, just walking will do it, and then using the heat kind of in sequence to your tolerance. Well, there are a number of possibilities for this with people. Sometimes it's people who are heat intolerant, and due to the chemistry I mentioned earlier, points that were brought up, your body has not shifted over to where your autonomic nervous system starts to move the sweat through the larger sweat glands, etc. Sometimes it can be due to vascular flow and the fact that your peripheral vascular flow is minimized for a number of physiological reasons. Normally people, as long as they tolerate the heat, can get up to a particular level where they will start to sweat. One of the troubles with people who don't sweat in the beginning, if the body is heated up, one of the ways the body gets rid of junk is out through the sweat glands. Now obviously it'll move it through the liver and the gut and then also, you know, out through the kidneys, so you've got other ways out. But if you're not sweating at all, sometimes you can have some post-treatment sort of not feeling well because your other way out through sweating is just not happening for you. In most people that I've run into that don't sweat when they're in the sauna, we can usually find some instance where they do sweat, whether that's during fever or exercise or some other thing. And so if that's the case where they do have a time that they remember when they do sweat or they did sweat, then it can be autonomic nervous system. That's the automatic nervous system that has a sympathetic and parasympathetic side, and that can get a little bit confused. So you see that sometimes in people who have things like POTS and a number of other disorders that go on. Technically speaking, all things being equal, there's nothing dangerous about having sauna during a menstrual cycle. The only thing that one would want to check in with is, do you have symptoms during saunaing? Say you get dizzy or something, or you feel kind of sick after the sauna, or you get dehydrated easy. Is there anything about that? And you would know your menstrual cycle and symptoms, etc. Would there be anything about those symptoms the sauna creates that would make it worse with your symptoms that you get around your cycle? Now, if there are a low amount of symptoms, probably no problem at all, but it's not dangerous. Well, what happens is that when your body is heating up, so hot bath, exercise, hot tub, going outside when it's hot, whatever way your body heats up, your body has natural feedback through your temperature regulation system in your body, which is largely controlled by your brain's sense of how hot it is outside, that will shift the blood flow around in your body. So, when you're hot, your blood flow is increased. And so you might look at somebody maybe who just got out of a sauna or a hot tub and they seem really red and rosy. Well, that's because the body is moving the blood flow to the peripheral circulation. It's opening up blood flow. And if your body and your blood pressure have, have come to equilibrium at a good blood pressure and you've not opened all this external blood flow, then the next step that would happen would be, I've got a good blood pressure and all of a sudden, Now I have all this other opening of blood vessels, so the blood is going out to the bigger amount of open blood vessels, and naturally it diffuses the volume, so the blood pressure can drop suddenly. This is one of those things where if people have unstable blood pressure, or people are on blood pressure medications, etc., and they've got the blood pressure really low, or maybe they have heart failure, they'll be cautioned not to do sauna, or not to do, you know, a hot tub or something, because A sudden drop in blood pressure, if you already have your blood pressure too low, can create a hypotensive crisis. So again, if you tend to get really woozy and dizzy, but you have heart works well, etc., it can be sort of like getting used to exercising. You might have to just do little bouts of it to get your blood pressure so it stays regular. But certainly, if you're having that problem where your blood pressure drops due to anything, but especially heat therapy, you want to get that checked out and then. Consult with your doctor about how much heat you really are going to be able to tolerate. I did another video about this, we'll link it there at the end, about hot water. So we'll stick with hot water first, then we'll get to hot tubs. Hot water, there's actually research that I mentioned in the other video, if you submerge yourself in hot water, you actually can sweat a large amount. Here's the other thing that the research showed. If you're in cold water, but you're swimming hard because of the physical activity, you'll also sweat out a lot of sweat. So hot water actually is a way to create the movement of toxins out. Now, each type of therapy that heats your body up works differently, but the bottom line is, if you're using heat to help with moving junk outta your body, any way you can heat your body up is the first goal. Now, you may derive other benefits from other types of heat therapy. You might get more out of infrared sauna versus hot water versus whatever, but the first thing is just to heat your body up because that does most of the work. So a hot tub can help you detox. Now, if it's a community hot tub or you don't have any control over the chemicals that go in there, you may have to look at the pluses and minuses of You're going to sweat out more stuff and detox, but on the other hand, you're marinating in chemicals that you don't want. There are hot tub maintenance systems that can use a number of either low or no chemical means. And I am not a hot tub engineer, but there are other non-chlorine type of things that can be done. And so the, if, especially if you have control over the hot tub, that's the way that I usually tell people. When you go outside, whether you take a walk, or you're working outside in the yard, or you're just heating your body up, it's very similar to going in a sauna, okay, because your body temperature increases, and you have the added effect of the muscles moving and working. When you're doing such things, you're going to start to do a number of things like moving toxins around. While you can, you're not going to be able to get rid of them. Simply from the heat elevation, feel sick from dehydration, electrolyte shifts, and changes in your heat shock proteins and other heat-related chemistry. That can be one reason you get flu-like symptoms, but another reason can be either the movement of toxins in the body that get stirred up and then they can't get out. That can make you feel very flu-like, and/or you actually can activate your immune system due to the heat. Okay, this is in medical hyperthermia, we actually try to do this, but what happens when you activate your immune system due to the heat rising in your body, which could be happening in this case, it turns on your immune activity against resident viruses, bacteria, etc., that we all have in our body. Some people carry a higher load of these sort of chronic viruses, bacteria, and stuff, and so when we activate the immune system, through heat, we feel flu-like because we're actually trying to fight with something that's there that we didn't know was there. So it could be toxicity-oriented, it could be heat chemistry-oriented, it can be dehydration electrolytes, and it actually can be your immune system actually gets stirred up. So those are in the first installment of Q&A around sauna and heat-type therapies. We talked about the Big 8. We're going to do a whole other video on some more questions that we got, but if you like this video, you might like one of these other ones we're gonna post here. We usually try and post multiple links to you. You can go to the main YouTube site and we've got playlists there as well. But I'm Dr. A, and I'll see you on the next video.