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In Defense of Shivering

1/19/2015

In last week's Musings, I talked about the health value of sweating. I mentioned that I make sure I go to hot yoga 5-6 times a week. And I talked about Whole Body Hyperthermia as a treatment for cancer. One of my readers wrote back, and said that she is currently in Mexico having Whole Body Hyperthermia. I wanted to update that this treatment is not limited to Germany, but is also available closer to our own shores.

But, as well as heating up my body, I also have been making it frigidly cold. Today, I am going to talk about the benefits of being VERY, VERY cold for a short burst of time. I have been going into a chamber that is 260 degrees below 0 (Fahrenheit). This process is called Whole Body Cryotherapy (WBC), and is offered now in NYC. The maximum length of time in the chamber is 3 minutes. For my first two sessions, I made it to 2 ½ minutes. Yesterday, I broke the 3 minute barrier.

I do notice that my essential metabolism seems to have changed since I have been doing the cryotherapy. Last week, when frigid weather finally hit New York, I was walking around in a light coat, and truly enjoying the cold air. Today (temp 25 degrees), I bundled up my trunk for my morning Lilly-dog walk), but went out with bare legs (shorts to knees), and the cold air actually felt rather exquisite to me. I FELT the cold, but it felt like an interesting sensation, rather than a discomfort.

WBC was first used in Japan in 1978 by Dr. Yamauchi. He found that it reduced pain and inflammation in his patients for whom no other treatments were working. In the two decades since, technology has allowed us to perfect the application through sophisticated equipment. And, we have seen that the healing impact is not just limited to inflammation, but affects the endocrine, immune and nervous systems.

This is how it works: as you enter the cryo-chamber, the sudden drop in heat stimulates the temperature receptors of the body, prompting the brain to transmit messages throughout the body. The skin temperature has dropped to 32 degrees; as the brain processes this new development, it sends signals to the body to protect itself, and activates an immune response that produces a host of benefits.

This process is what I have been speaking and writing about for several years now: The Hormesis Effect. Hormesis is the application of a stressor that stimulates the phenomenon that I call BOUNCEABILITY: the resilience to recover from the stressor and actually come to a better, healthier state (better adaptability, stronger, more fertile, less pain, less inflammation, longer life, etc.) than before the stressing agent was applied.

When you exit the chamber, blood is pumped vigorously around the body, which in turn enhances the oxygen supply and removal of toxins. The cold also triggers the nervous system to release feel-good endorphins. As well, the body's natural anti-inflammatory reaction to extreme cold results in pain reduction.

The procedure has been especially embraced by athletes. The world's fastest man, Usain Bolt, used a cryosauna at the 2012 London Olympics. Alberto Salazar used it when coaching Olympic medalists.

These are the results you can expect:

BEAUTY AND ANTI-AGING
*Cellulite reduction
*Boosted metabolism promoting weight loss
*Skin conditions ameliorated - including psoriasis, blemishes and acne
*Collagen production - skin toned evened, visible signs of aging reduced

HEALTH AND WELLNESS
*Pain relief from joint disorders, rheumatoid diseases and fibromyalgia
*Decreased muscle soreness, spasms and inflammation
*Improved post-surgery recovery
*Alleviation of depression, anxiety, fatigue, insomnia, migraines and the effects of stress
*Lowered incidence of colds and flu
*Prevention of conditions like osteoporosis

SPORTS AND FITNESS
*Faster recovery from stress of competitive sports or training
*Reduced inflammation, swelling and pain
*Enhanced energy and endorphin release
*Improved muscle and motor unit activation
*Greater testosterone levels in men

The NY center is called Kryolife. Owner Eduardo Bohorquez sent me home with a packet of papers: world-wide studies on WBC. They are serious studies on a wide range of health benefits documented by WBC. Their website is KryoLifeHealth.com

La Casa clients will receive a 10% discount for the treatments.

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In Defense of Sweating

1/9/2015

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I get a lot of calls from people from all over the world; some seek information about holistic therapies; some call just to share their experiences with healing. This week I received a most fascinating call from a woman named Shirley Mitchell Williams. She called wanting to know more about La Casa's ozone steam cabinet. Shirley told me that she had been diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer that had mestaticized throughout her body: into her bones, organs and lymph glands.

She saw various doctors: the first suggested a double mastectomy; the next wanted to do that plus chemo; the third doc wanted to do both of those plus radiation. The fourth doctor she saw told her that she had 90 days to live, that none of those treatments would help her, and that she should go home and put her affairs in order. She did go home: but she decided to not put her affairs in order (having spoken to her, I would conclude that her emotional and spiritual affairs were already in order). She decided to pray and fast. On the third day, she felt the presence of Jesus, and she started sweating. She understood her sweating as a message, and she began a practice of sweating with a vengeance. Three times a day, she took herself into a hot sauna. We are now three years later, and Shirley is cancer-free, telling her remarkable story of healing. (She has a book, Stage 4 Cancer Gone.)

I am a long-time advocate of sweating as the easiest, and perhaps most powerful form of detoxification. We at La Casa have understood the necessity for detoxification, and colonics remain our most popular therapy. But sweating has not been generally understood to be as powerful as colon cleansing. It's been unfortunately understood to be a poor first cousin.

However, there is now a groundbreaking study that confirms the importance of sweating in detoxification. A 2011 study published in the Archives of Environmental and Contamination Toxicology explored the effects of bioaccumulated toxic elements within the human body and methods of excretion from the body:

"Toxic elements were found to differing degrees in each of blood, urine, and sweat. Serum levels for most metals and metalloids were comparable with those found in other studies in the scientific literature. Many toxic elements appeared to be preferentially excreted through sweat. Presumably stored in tissues, some toxic elements readily identified in the perspiration of some participants were not found in their serum. Induced sweating appears to be a potential method for elimination of many toxic elements from the human body."

The researchers make the important observation that "Biomonitoring for toxic elements through blood and/or urine testing may underestimate the total body burden of such toxicants." They recommend sweat analysis as an additional method for monitoring bioaccumulation of toxic elements in humans. (Thank you Sayer Ji, and Green Med Info, for this reference.)

I get my daily sweat-fix by doing yoga in a hot room. These days I take Prana Yoga, which is a heated room to about 100 degrees. (There's a Prana studio in the neighborhood of La Casa, as well as in Brooklyn.) But 15 years or so ago, I started with Bikram, whose room is heated to 104 degrees.

Bikram calls the room a "torture chamber," but defends the practice by saying a warm body is a flexible body. He doesn't talk specifically about detoxification, but I do remember when I was doing Bikram that the teacher would quote him saying that taking his classes gives you a mini-heart attack now in order to prevent the big heart attack later. I think the same can be said about sweating, which essentially constitutes the artificial induction of a fever.

In Defense of Fever

Since we began our journey as humans (about 3 hundred million years ago when we began as cold-blooded vertebrates), fever has been one of the body's natural defenses against pathogens. A pathogen enters our body; some aspect of our immune system recognizes that an enemy has taken up residence within us; and the defense mounts. Inflammation is one of the body's three main defenses. The others are isolation--as in a cancer tumor, and regeneration--as in new, healthier cells being formed. (These attempts by the body to self-regulate, and how and why most of us today have lost this ability is described in detail in my book, Deceits of the Mind and Their Effects on the Body.)

Unfortunately, those of us living today have seriously compromised our bodies' abilities to utilize the acute inflammation defense. Children are no longer getting the febrile afflictions that were common when I was growing up: measles, mumps, chicken pox. Those illnesses were crucial for the periodic exercising of our immune systems. They lasted a few days, and then we were romping around again with healthy bodies. Today, mono is more common for teenagers. My daughter, like many of her classmates, had a bout of mono last winter, and was down and out, with a high fever that morphed into a low-grade fever for three months.

It needs to be said here that there is a large difference between acute inflammation and chronic inflammation: acute conditions have a beginning, middle and end, and at the end, you are healthier than you were before the inflammatory response. (Once I got mumps and such, I never got them again because my body had developed antibodies.) Chronic inflammation, on the other hand, leaves your reserves depleted from fighting too hard and for too long. Many holistic clinicians say that most modern ailments are caused by inflammation. But they are referring to chronic inflammation.

Until recently, the mainstream medical community thought that all the modern health threats--from cancer to heart attacks, strokes, to diabetes and Alzheimer's--were all caused by different things and demanded different treatments. But, one scientific study after another has turned all of what medical researchers thought they knew upside down. Because all these afflictions do have one factor in common, and that factor is systemic chronic inflammation.

Now, instead of getting periodic acute inflammatory responses to pathogens, in the form of fevers, we are plagued with the degenerative diseases wherein our immune systems are exhausted, and seem to be sleeping on the job of fighting pathogenic materials (like cancer cells, like plaque that is involved in heart disease).

Thus, I would like to modify Bikram's phrase, and say that hot yoga gives an acute mini-fever now in order to prevent the chronic inflammation that is evident later in the serious and life-threatening degenerative diseases.

When I was Ruth Sackman's assistant at the Foundation for the Advancement of Cancer Therapies in the 1970's, we put together a program with Dr. Donald Cole for whole-body hyperthermia. We worked with a hospital in Queens, and subjected cancer patients with large tumors to over five hours of an induced high fever--over 105 degrees (the temperature at which cancer cells begin to die).

Hyperthermia is being offered today in the US on an experimental basis, but only as a localized treatment, usually using radio waves to heat the tissue, and in conjunction with chemotherapy. The process of heating the tissue was described to one willing patient with breast cancer as being like "microwaving" her breast. Hmmm. Not something I would want to do. I believe the method we used with Dr. Cole is currently performed only in Germany. The clinics there do not use radio waves, and the treatment is not a localized therapy. The German clinics embrace the same concept that Ruth Sackman worked with--that cancer is a systemic disease, and, thus, the treatment should be systemic, as well.

Anthropological medicine (formulated by Rudolf Steiner) has researched the history of cancer patients, and found that they often show a history of not having had the usual childhood febrile diseases that can serve as life-long protection against cancer.

La Casa has two sweat "torture chambers." We have a salt sauna, which is specifically good for the respiratory system. And we have the ozone steam (which Shirley had called about), that not only heats your body, opening up your pores, but then pumps in activated oxygen (ozone). Ozone kills every pathogen known to mankind, and it kills cancer cells upon contact. It is used in the medical practice of 70% of the physicians in Germany. As well, there are whole hospitals in Cuba and India devoted to ozone therapies. You may be wondering why these specific countries have embraced ozone--India and Cuba have in common that they are poor. Germany was essentially bankrupt after the war, and that is when ozone began to be used there. Oxygen is free. That's the commonality. Poor countries look to nature for healing. Nature is free.

Thank you Shirley Mitchell Williams for your inspiring story, and your reminder about the miraculous effect of detoxing through sweating.

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In Defense of Shivering

In Defense of Sweating

Jane G. Goldberg, Ph.D.

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