July 29, 2024 • 14 mins
In this episode, Dr. Paul Anderson explores hydrotherapy, the therapeutic use of water to support health and wellness. He covers:
4o mini
- What is Hydrotherapy?: An introduction to hydrotherapy, including its history and the principles behind using water for therapeutic purposes.
- Types of Hydrotherapy:
- Hot Water Therapy: Benefits of warm baths, hot springs, and saunas for relaxation, improved circulation, and muscle relief.
- Cold Water Therapy: Uses of cold baths, ice packs, and cryotherapy for reducing inflammation, numbing pain, and speeding recovery.
- Contrast Therapy: Alternating between hot and cold water to enhance circulation, reduce muscle soreness, and support recovery.
- Health Benefits:
- Pain Relief: How hydrotherapy can alleviate pain from conditions like arthritis, muscle strains, and injuries.
- Improved Circulation: The role of water temperature and pressure in enhancing blood flow and reducing swelling.
- Relaxation and Stress Reduction: How immersion in water can promote relaxation, reduce stress, and improve overall mental well-being.
- Techniques and Applications:
- Home Hydrotherapy: Tips for creating a hydrotherapy routine at home, including using baths, showers, and hot tubs.
- Clinical Hydrotherapy: Overview of hydrotherapy treatments available in clinical settings, such as therapeutic pools and contrast baths.
- Safety and Precautions: Guidelines for using hydrotherapy safely, including temperature considerations, duration of treatment, and contraindications for certain conditions.
- Integrative Use: Combining hydrotherapy with other treatments and lifestyle practices for enhanced health benefits, including exercise, nutrition, and stress management.
- Personalized Approaches: How to tailor hydrotherapy treatments to individual health needs and conditions, and the importance of consulting with healthcare providers.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome back to medicine health, and today we're going to
talk about therapies that can be helpful. We've done previous
ones about therapy is a little more interventional. Today we're
focusing on therapies that are a little easier to do
do at home, et cetera. You can't have other people help.
And this module here is on hydro therapy. And so
(00:22):
hydro has to do with water, and therapy is therapy,
so it must have to do something with water. Therapy. Now,
hydro therapy 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
(00:42):
temperature for literally as long as we have recorded types
of medical interventions. Now, hydro therapy can mean a number
of different things. So some people will think, oh, well,
you know, my my big bathtub has hydrotherapy jets, so
(01:03):
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
(01:24):
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 the many of the traditional ones
(01:45):
have a few things in common. One is that often
there if you're doing a whole body treatment, there is
a phase where you heat your body up and you
get it very warm so that you know, your cap
layers 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
(02:09):
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
(02:30):
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 it doesn't involve immersing in water baths,
(02:55):
et cetera, is sometimes known as a constitutional hydrotherapy treatment,
and this often is where you are a little more passive,
so you're not 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,
et cetera, a massage table maybe, and normally there are
(03:21):
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 that they
(03:41):
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 be wrapped up to keep all that heat in well.
Then moved to the cold phase, and so they unwrap you.
(04:03):
They take the hot ones off, but the cold ones on,
and then wrap you back up. Now it's a little
bit of a stimulating event if you've ever had that done,
to be on the cold part of a hydrotherapy treatment.
But you need the contrast between hot and cold for
(04:23):
the 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 then cold,
which is another very common use now in other of
these modules on therapies we talked about heat therapies, particularly
(04:45):
like hyperthermy and sauna and that sort of thing. So
hydro therapy 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, and really a lot of places
(05:06):
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
(05:27):
people filming things, et cetera, it's very you know, if
you look at like the whim Hoff uh, 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
(05:48):
these little special things that you keep it all cold.
That is essentially a hydro therapy treatment as well. Now,
most of the standard ones to get a contrast, heat
you up first. A lot of people use their sonnet
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
(06:09):
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 colds and
flus and things like that where you've been kind of
sedentary and it's a way to get your body and
(06:31):
your blood moving a little bit even though you're not
feeling well. I've seen them used in with children, you know,
to kind of help them resolve a fever, etc. And
I've seen them use for a number of other purposes.
Now beyond the contrast type of hydrotherapy. One thing that
(06:52):
you want to keep in mind is that some other
hydro therapies involve maybe very specific sorts of applications of water,
heat or cold. So you might have something like in
probably origin from Germany as far back as we can read,
or somewhere over in the neighborhood. There are other things
(07:16):
such as what's called a wet sheet pack, and that
would be where you have a cool type of a
sheet and you're wrapped up in it, kind of like
a mummy, and usually put an outer covering on that
as well. 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
(07:38):
hydrotherapy treatment. But one of the things that 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
(08:00):
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, it's all warmed up.
Unwrap you quickly takes the hot one off, with the
cold one, unwrap 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 alterative
(08:23):
nature of moving the blood around, which again can be
very stimulating to your system. And 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 three rounds of hot and cold to kind of
get the essentially like the pumping action going on in
(08:44):
your body. So it's to kind of train your body
to do, you know, this hot cold movement, get the
blood moving, et cetera. When I've been in Asia and
Europe a lot of times, you'll have areas for hydro
therapy and then there'll be instructions on the wall, you know,
be in this bath for this much time, then go
(09:06):
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 alterative, such as and the exposure
I've had to it. There's certainly people much more knowledgeable
(09:26):
at hydro therapy than me. But is a French version
of hydro therapy, which is also common to many other
parts of the world. So they may not have invented it,
it maybe popularized it about one hundred years ago. And
that would be a cool or cold pool which has
water about up six eight inches above your feet, and
(09:51):
then it has stones in the bottom of the pool.
Now you're not sharp stones, these are nice rounded ones,
so you're sort of getting a little pumped action into
your feet, starting to move the blood in your feet,
but also there is cool water around it. What will
happen is if your body has this natural response where
(10:11):
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 are proponents of these altering alterative sort
of treatments is it's a way to force your body
to think about your extremities. In this case, it would
(10:32):
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, or 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
(10:54):
then cold and a hot and a cold on the
feet and seen it help headaches in some people because
is 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
(11:14):
place in 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 is medicine or hot
and cold as medicine actually used in different therapies and
different treatments. And it's not so much that you know
(11:34):
it doesn't work or it is unscientific, et cetera. It's
a lot of it is. It's it can be very
time and operator dependent, meaning you need somebody there to
do it or someone to guide you through the procedure,
especially if you're sick, and so a lot of times
(11:56):
it winds up if you're in a facility, there might
be maybe if phys therapists 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 hydro therapy again, when I say,
(12:17):
you know in the show notes, well, 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 hydro therapy
(12:37):
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, et cetera. Here we're trying to focus
(12:59):
on things that can either be low impact with the
practitionery cost, or even be done at home or at
your gym or someplace like that. But 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,
(13:23):
you know, back to Hippocrates and even before that, certainly
because people just sort of naturally gravitated the idea that
possibly heating the body up and pulling it down and
heating it up again might do something for the body.
So we really appreciate the growth of all of the channels.
(13:43):
So whatever feed you're own or YouTube, etc. Like share, subscribe,
We're doing new things all the time. We're adding all
the time. Check click on the notification 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.
Welcome back to medicine health, and today we're going to
talk about therapies that can be helpful. We've done previous
ones about therapy is a little more interventional. Today we're
focusing on therapies that are a little easier to do
do at home, et cetera. You can't have other people help.
And this module here is on hydro therapy. And so
(00:22):
hydro has to do with water, and therapy is therapy,
so it must have to do something with water. Therapy. Now,
hydro therapy 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
(00:42):
temperature for literally as long as we have recorded types
of medical interventions. Now, hydro therapy can mean a number
of different things. So some people will think, oh, well,
you know, my my big bathtub has hydrotherapy jets, so
(01:03):
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
(01:24):
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 the many of the traditional ones
(01:45):
have a few things in common. One is that often
there if you're doing a whole body treatment, there is
a phase where you heat your body up and you
get it very warm so that you know, your cap
layers 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
(02:09):
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
(02:30):
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 it doesn't involve immersing in water baths,
(02:55):
et cetera, is sometimes known as a constitutional hydrotherapy treatment,
and this often is where you are a little more passive,
so you're not 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,
et cetera, a massage table maybe, and normally there are
(03:21):
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 that they
(03:41):
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 be wrapped up to keep all that heat in well.
Then moved to the cold phase, and so they unwrap you.
(04:03):
They take the hot ones off, but the cold ones on,
and then wrap you back up. Now it's a little
bit of a stimulating event if you've ever had that done,
to be on the cold part of a hydrotherapy treatment.
But you need the contrast between hot and cold for
(04:23):
the 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 then cold,
which is another very common use now in other of
these modules on therapies we talked about heat therapies, particularly
(04:45):
like hyperthermy and sauna and that sort of thing. So
hydro therapy 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, and really a lot of places
(05:06):
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
(05:27):
people filming things, et cetera, it's very you know, if
you look at like the whim Hoff uh, 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
(05:48):
these little special things that you keep it all cold.
That is essentially a hydro therapy treatment as well. Now,
most of the standard ones to get a contrast, heat
you up first. A lot of people use their sonnet
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
(06:09):
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 colds and
flus and things like that where you've been kind of
sedentary and it's a way to get your body and
(06:31):
your blood moving a little bit even though you're not
feeling well. I've seen them used in with children, you know,
to kind of help them resolve a fever, etc. And
I've seen them use for a number of other purposes.
Now beyond the contrast type of hydrotherapy. One thing that
(06:52):
you want to keep in mind is that some other
hydro therapies involve maybe very specific sorts of applications of water,
heat or cold. So you might have something like in
probably origin from Germany as far back as we can read,
or somewhere over in the neighborhood. There are other things
(07:16):
such as what's called a wet sheet pack, and that
would be where you have a cool type of a
sheet and you're wrapped up in it, kind of like
a mummy, and usually put an outer covering on that
as well. 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
(07:38):
hydrotherapy treatment. But one of the things that 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
(08:00):
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, it's all warmed up.
Unwrap you quickly takes the hot one off, with the
cold one, unwrap 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 alterative
(08:23):
nature of moving the blood around, which again can be
very stimulating to your system. And 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 three rounds of hot and cold to kind of
get the essentially like the pumping action going on in
(08:44):
your body. So it's to kind of train your body
to do, you know, this hot cold movement, get the
blood moving, et cetera. When I've been in Asia and
Europe a lot of times, you'll have areas for hydro
therapy and then there'll be instructions on the wall, you know,
be in this bath for this much time, then go
(09:06):
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 alterative, such as and the exposure
I've had to it. There's certainly people much more knowledgeable
(09:26):
at hydro therapy than me. But is a French version
of hydro therapy, which is also common to many other
parts of the world. So they may not have invented it,
it maybe popularized it about one hundred years ago. And
that would be a cool or cold pool which has
water about up six eight inches above your feet, and
(09:51):
then it has stones in the bottom of the pool.
Now you're not sharp stones, these are nice rounded ones,
so you're sort of getting a little pumped action into
your feet, starting to move the blood in your feet,
but also there is cool water around it. What will
happen is if your body has this natural response where
(10:11):
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 are proponents of these altering alterative sort
of treatments is it's a way to force your body
to think about your extremities. In this case, it would
(10:32):
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, or 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
(10:54):
then cold and a hot and a cold on the
feet and seen it help headaches in some people because
is 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
(11:14):
place in 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 is medicine or hot
and cold as medicine actually used in different therapies and
different treatments. And it's not so much that you know
(11:34):
it doesn't work or it is unscientific, et cetera. It's
a lot of it is. It's it can be very
time and operator dependent, meaning you need somebody there to
do it or someone to guide you through the procedure,
especially if you're sick, and so a lot of times
(11:56):
it winds up if you're in a facility, there might
be maybe if phys therapists 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 hydro therapy again, when I say,
(12:17):
you know in the show notes, well, 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 hydro therapy
(12:37):
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, et cetera. Here we're trying to focus
(12:59):
on things that can either be low impact with the
practitionery cost, or even be done at home or at
your gym or someplace like that. But 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,
(13:23):
you know, back to Hippocrates and even before that, certainly
because people just sort of naturally gravitated the idea that
possibly heating the body up and pulling it down and
heating it up again might do something for the body.
So we really appreciate the growth of all of the channels.
(13:43):
So whatever feed you're own or YouTube, etc. Like share, subscribe,
We're doing new things all the time. We're adding all
the time. Check click on the notification 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.
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