In my hometown of Berlin there are hardened ice bathers who take short baths in frozen lakes even in winter—when the water temperature is 40 degrees. Though this is quite impressive, it is important not to expose the body to any shock. We must train the body’s adaptability gradually and systematically by going into cold water for a very short time initially and slowly prolonging the bath.
At the beginning of any cold therapy there needs to be a stable feeling of warmth. For example, feet should be warm before the legs receive a cold Scotch hose treatment. At the Immanuel Hospital in Berlin, we sometimes send patients to a cold chamber where the temperature is negative 166 degrees. But before entering the coldest chamber, patients are sent through two slightly warmer chambers to allow their bodies to adjust to the minimum temperature. They wear nothing but hats, gloves, and warm socks. In the end, they stand in this extreme cold for a maximum of three minutes. The effects are impressive. Pain disappears and inflammations are dulled for hours, even days.
Another phenomenon of bodily regulation was uncovered in recent years: brown fat. Brown fat is special fat tissue that humans—as well as all newborn mammals (with the exception of pigs)—possess. Brown fat cells are packed with mitochondria, which produce energy, and which give the cells their brownish color and create warmth through oxidation. Brown fat protects newborns from becoming hypothermic and helps animals raise their temperatures when emerging from hibernation.
Though it was once believed that adults hardly possess any brown fat, studies conducted by the biologist Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt in Maastricht show that adults are able to store more brown fat if they are exposed to cool temperatures for prolonged periods of time.19 This happens at a temperature of 60 degrees. Brown fat facilitates sugar regulation and reduces the risk of getting diabetes. It is healthy, in other words, to stay in cool, slightly uncomfortable, rooms for hours on end. Your body will get used to the low temperatures after a couple of days. People who tend to feel cold quickly should still seek out the cold in order to train their system with short provocations.
Sebastian Kneipp’s recommendation to sleep with open windows was affirmed by a study conducted by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases: At night, one group slept in a cool room with a maximum temperature of 66 degrees. The other group slept in a room with temperatures higher than 75 degrees. After one month, the group that slept in cool temperatures showed more brown fat in their bodies, and their sugar and fat metabolisms were improved.20 So, remember: Open windows in the bedroom!
ON THE DIGESTIVE FIRE AND THE WARMTH OF LIFE
The understanding of energies is more sophisticated both in Ayurveda—the traditional Indian medicine—and in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) than it is in European naturopathy. In both systems, “life warmth” plays a preeminent role. In Ayurvedic medicine, everything revolves around agni, the digestive fire, while in Chinese naturopathy kidney warmth is central. According to both traditions, we should tend to our inner warmth and stoke the digestive fire when temperatures outside are down. The easiest way to do this is by eating certain foods and drinking hot water or tea, especially with the addition of warming spices. It is no coincidence that it is these spices that are used in our holiday cookies, i.e., during the cold season: cloves, cinnamon, ginger, or cardamom. It’s good to drink ginger tea or eat heavily seasoned soups (with mustard seeds or chili) on chilly days. Similarly, chicken soup is particularly satisfying on cold days not because of the chicken, but because of the spices it contains, like ginger, onion, or garlic.
Both Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine divide foodstuffs into “cool” and “warm” categories—a simple but generally helpful guide for decisions. Cucumber and melon, for example, are cooling, while most savory or hot spices, wine, or honey are warming. In the past, seasonally available foodstuffs corresponded to the seasons. Today, however, one can eat strawberries or watermelon on an icy, freezing day in January. But instinctively, most people choose not to do so. Watermelon for dessert on Christmas Eve? Probably not.
Alcohol is not a remedy for the cold. A beverage high in alcohol content may warm you up in the short run and convey a feeling of warmth in your belly. But since it also facilitates heat emission, you actually end up losing heat faster. So after a snowball fight or an ice bath, it’s better to opt for a nonalcoholic herb-and-spice tea rather than a brandy.
Our body’s ability to generate heat in response to a cold stimulus isn’t always “turned on”—a lack of exercise, fatigue, stress, or a poor diet can contribute to this. In these cases, naturopathy has a stronger method at the ready: hyperthermic baths (also known as Schlenz baths, after the Austrian naturopath Maria Schlenz). These baths can be taken in your bathtub at home: You start with a water temperature of 98.6 degrees (equal to body temperature) and keep running the water hotter and hotter, until the limit of your comfort is reached. The bath takes twenty to thirty minutes.
Being in a sauna can also work, but since water is a better conductor of heat than air, a hyperthermic bath gets more intense results. You can also utilize the warmth-inducing effect of spices. Adding powdered ginger to the bath will allow you to feel the pleasant effect of the heat even more. After taking a hyperthermic bath, you should not seek to cool down immediately as you would after going into a sauna. Instead, you should allow the heat to release fully.
Body temperature can most effectively be heightened by water-filtered infrared radiation of the whole body. This type of treatment involves hyperthermia induced by infrared light. In order not to increase the skin temperature too much, which would be uncomfortable or even painful, the infrared light is water-filtered. This leads to a warming effect two to five centimeters under the skin, hence in the deeper tissue, making this treatment very helpful for treating pain like the kind of pain that occurs as a result of fibromyalgia. A single water-filtered infrared radiation treatment can also notably improve the mood of depressed patients—current research demonstrates that the effect lasts for over two weeks.21 The exact cause of this astonishing effect is not quite clear, though we can note that people with depression are often cold and sweat less. Hyperthermia activates mitochondria, which are functionally impaired in the brains of people suffering from depression. Interestingly, mitochondria are also thought to be significantly responsible for aging processes, and so the lower percentage of inflammatory and cardiovascular age-related illnesses in the warm, southern parts of the world could be related to that.
PATIENT HISTORY
Fibromyalgia
Persevering Through Pain Is Not the Answer
The lively woman is in her early sixties. Her gray hair—styled into a short bob—is dyed pink. She’s one to keep her chin up, even though she’s faced many challenges over the course of her life. During the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or Communist East Germany, she was sent to prison for political reasons. Years later, in Western Germany, she worked as a waitress and set up her own ice cream parlor. But at some point she found she was no longer able to walk more than fifty meters or climb a flight of stairs. Her arms refused to work. She could hardly carry anything, let alone heavy serving trays. She lost her ice cream parlor and found herself a victim of old-age poverty. Eventually, she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia.
We still don’t understand what causes the mysterious pains that occur all over the body with fibromyalgia. Back in the day, the disease was called “soft-tissue rheumatism,” but since no physical markers can be detected with blood tests, there are still many doctors who believe psychological problems are the actual cause. Patients with fibromyalgia often feel misunderstood and can develop depression.
Today we know that fibromyalgia is most likely a result of a complex interplay of dysfunctional pain processing in the nerve cells, an overload due to stress and trauma, as well as subtle disturbances of hormone regulation. There is no conventional medical treatment with drugs, except for certain antidepressants that
lower pain sensitivity but that are also fraught with side effects.
In naturopathy, there have been some successful treatment options for fibromyalgia. One option is cold or warm therapy, depending on which is more pleasant for the patient. Cold or warm therapy blocks the transmission of pain signals. Another option is meditative exercises like yoga or tai chi. Yet another option is fasting, which intervenes in the body’s neurotransmitter environment that plays an important role in the transmission of pain.
The patient started doing tai chi and qigong. These exercises have a meditative element that calms the nerves, and the movement of the exercises strengthens the muscles. After two stays in our clinic the patient was by and large free of pain. But a mugging on a holiday, which also burdened the patient financially, came as a severe shock—and the fibromyalgia returned. Luckily by then the patient knew how to manage her disease. She fasted once more, performed her exercises regularly, and has been able to reestablish a strong reduction in pain.
THE PRINCIPLE OF CAUSE AND EFFECT IN HORMESIS RESEARCH
“All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.” Paracelsus made this observation in the sixteenth century, and modern biology is now in the process of exploring this concept through research into hormesis.
A medicinal substance is often only beneficial in a very specific dosage—too much of that substance can lead to the opposite of the desired effect and turn the medicine into a poison. Conversely, and this is at the core of hormesis research, small doses of poisonous substances can have healing effects on the body.22
Seeing good and bad as two parts of the same thing is something the Western-Christian tradition is unfamiliar with. This duality is more familiar within Eastern philosophy, as seen in the concept of yin and yang being intertwined. Allicin in garlic, curcumin in turmeric, polyphenols and flavone in blueberries—they strengthen the immune system, are anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, and help fight cancer. But in larger quantities they also might be poisonous to the human body.23
Hormesis is at the core of the stimulus-response principle of naturopathy. For example, radiation damages cells, but small doses (low-level radiation) activate our repair mechanisms to such an extent that it can be used to treat rheumatism and arthritis.24 And the right dose of dirt and bacteria, like you might experience living on a farm, doesn’t make children sick but protects them from allergies—because their immune systems are kept on their toes.25
The Principle of Hormesis, Using Stress as an Example
Our bodies are masters of adaptability (bioregulation). We can thus experience low doses of stress as stimulating and even invigorating (i.e., positive stress—eustress). But when stress is unrelenting and there is no period of relaxation, our bodies become overwhelmed and bioregulation is thrown off balance. That’s when stress has a weakening and sickening effect (i.e., negative stress—distress).
WHY MORE HEALTHY THINGS DON’T LEAD TO BETTER HEALTH
There is nothing that is “nothing but healthy.” Linearity is not a principle of life. What that means is that more “healthy” things don’t necessarily lead to better health. For example, hyperthermia, a naturopathic therapy that is used to treat cancer as well as fibromyalgia, causes the body to reach high temperatures. This high temperature induces a stress response within the body, causing cells to produce heat shock proteins, which have a protective effect. Similarly, when you apply capsaicin, an alkaloid contained in chili peppers, to the skin, the slight stress leads to the creation of free radicals, which are aggressive oxygen molecules, in the tissue. The body then produces antioxidants to counteract these free radicals, and it’s these antioxidants that have a healing effect.
So it’s not when there’s nothing wrong with us that we are healthy. Stagnation is not the principle of life. Homeodynamics, the ability to adapt, is the most important criterion of well-being. This process of reciprocating motion is what naturopathy is trying to initiate with its stimulus-reaction therapies. This can happen with the use of cold or heat, water therapies, physical stimuli such as massage or acupuncture, chemical influences like medicinal plants or specific foods, as well as with food deprivation (fasting) and spiritual-mental processes such as meditation.
Research in chaos theory has taught us how the smallest forces can overthrow complex systems and force them to reorganize.26 This can be positive or negative. The body’s repair mechanisms can be stimulated in such a way that they don’t respond to a specific stimulus with a single reaction, but rather create a healing effect in other areas in their abundance. This creates some paradoxical effects: Radon radiation in low doses seems to offer protection from lung cancer. This effect could explain why there are rare cases in which remote metastases shrink after localized radiation therapy as part of cancer treatment—this is called an abscopal (untargeted) effect.27
A dose of a stimulus can cause completely different reactions in different tissues. This can be observed with exercise: Exertion leads to physical stress, body temperature increases, and some tissues experience a lack of oxygen which leads to the formation of toxic molecules. But processes of protection, repair, and construction are also set in motion. That’s why endurance training heightens the body’s adaptability and strengthens its health, and why exercise is an effective therapy for almost all illnesses.
THE BODY’S ABILITY TO HEAL ITSELF
“The physician dresses your wounds. Your inner physician, though, will restore your health.” This famous quote by Paracelsus refers to what is behind the stimulus-reaction principle described above: our body’s extraordinary ability to heal itself.
Most physicians have witnessed the fantastic regenerative capacity of the body—if they know how to allow it to unfold. One of the most important traits a good internist or general practitioner should possess is not treating every symptom but cooperating with the patient to find out what is really going on within the body and whether medical assistance is even necessary.
Months ago, I was planning on seeing an orthopedic specialist because of a persistent pain in my left knee. But I lacked the time and motivation to actually make an appointment. After about twelve weeks I noticed that the pain was beginning to recede. And after five months the pain was gone. A similar thing happened with a mild case of psoriasis, which runs in my family.
In our hospital, it sometimes happens that outpatients have to wait somewhere between three and six months for an inpatient placement due to the long waitlist. For some of these patients, their problems disappear during that waiting period.
Self-healing powers—the expression sounds slightly dubious, almost “esoteric” in the ears of some of my colleagues. And yet, there is something profoundly scientific behind this phenomenon—our body’s adaptability to the complex challenges of evolution. After all, we are exposed to a multitude of potentially harmful bacteria, viruses, terrestrial radiation, UV radiation, fine particulate matter, and chemicals on a daily basis. Our genetic material is constantly activated or muted; during each cell regeneration, our DNA, the carrier of our genetic information, is split into two strands and is replicated. Every second, thousands of reactions taking place within our bodies could potentially go wrong and make us sick. And yet we remain healthy in most cases. Therefore, medical practitioners should maybe ask themselves: What is it, then, that actually prevents us from becoming ill?
A SENSE OF COHERENCE
The American medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky emigrated to Israel in the 1960s, where he came across a study on women in menopause: 29 percent of the participants indicated that they were mentally stable and healthy—even though they had lived through the horrors of the war.28 What, Antonovsky asked himself, had given these women their strength? He began to conduct research into the origins of health.
After extensive interviews with patients, he developed a kind of matrix as the basis of health. The criterion of “comprehensibility” emerged as a cent
ral condition. The question here is: Can I understand what has happened in a bigger context? Do I have any explanation for what is happening? Knowing the answer to these questions brings relief even when the insight doesn’t necessarily lead to a solution. As a second criterion, Antonovsky came up with “manageability”—the conviction that crises can lead to positive developments, or the experience of having already overcome worse. Trust is a very important factor: having faith in another person, one’s family, a group, or faith in a higher being. Praying has a calming effect on the body—that’s why mantras, i.e., the repetition of religiously or spiritually charged words, are a part of the art of healing in Eastern traditions. Most Indian Ayurvedic clinics have a built-in temple, and patients go there to pray in the evenings, when temperatures are cooling down.
Something that is returning to medicine with increasing vigor as “spirituality” was the third constant in Antonovsky’s matrix: “meaningfulness.” Nelson Mandela is a good example of this: Twenty-five years of political imprisonment couldn’t break him. During that time, he completed a law degree by correspondence course and became politically active immediately following his release. He had a meaningful goal—the end of apartheid and the independence of South Africa—and lived, singing and dancing, to the age of ninety-five. This is about the conviction that there are connections that can neither be planned nor calculated, but that require respect and humility in the face of the unknown.
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