Health at Home: How Bathing Effects Your Lungs and More
Research on the benefits of contrast bathing
Obligatory disclaimer: I don’t give health advice. I just report on findings from my own research. Your own personal health decisions should be made by you with the help of medical professionals you trust.
If you’ve ever taken in a dive in a cold lake, or an ocean, or dipped into a very hot bath, perhaps you’ve noticed it . . . the water temperature affects the way the chest feels. Your breathing may change.
Even if you’re only having a hot foot bath, the sensation can carry up to your chest.
This was something I discovered at a spa, indulging in a foot bath. The woman who oversaw my footpath mentioned the benefits of the hot bath, followed by a cold rinse, and, in her own experience with various lung problems like bronchitis since childhood, swears by the benefits of the hot and cold foot bath. Especially when she feels a respiratory sickness coming on.
I had never heard of this, but it did resonate with me, having noticed the sensations in my chest well before she’d mentioned anything of the potential lung health benefits.
Specifics of the technique vary per source, but essentially the gist of my own spa experience was about 20 minutes of bathing in hot water, followed by a cold water rinse outside the tub, followed by maybe 10 more minutes or so of hot bathing.
Lung hydrotherapy appears to be the name for this sort of bathing. With scientific literature stating of hydrotherapies more broadly:
The use of water for various treatments (hydrotherapy) is probably as old as mankind. Hydrotherapy is one of the basic methods of treatment widely used in the system of natural medicine, which is also called as water therapy, aquatic therapy, pool therapy, and balneotherapy. Use of water in various forms and in various temperatures can produce different effects on different system of the body. . . . Based on the available literature this review suggests that the hydrotherapy has a scientific evidence-based effect on various systems of the body.
Another technical term (perhaps for this specific type of hydrotherapy) appears to be a contrast bath. Even WebMD mentions it as a form of physical therapy to treat:
sprains
Rheumatoid arthritis
Carpal tunnel syndrome
Soft tissue trauma
And, contrast bathing could be used on anything from “Hands, Wrists, Forearms, Elbows, Feet,” etc.
There are other scientific studies which claim contrast baths “improve postexercise recovery” and improve “the tissue hemodynamics” (blood flow) “and oxygenation”.
Surely this is not a “miracle cure”, but it appears to be an age old natural health practice that has been obscured in recent times, and perhaps it can be used more at home.
Sources:
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