The Herbal Medicine-Maker's Handbook_ A Home Manual - James Green [136]
Water, by its accessibility, its convenience in use, its abundance, and its high specific heat, more readily lends itself to human beings in producing restorative and permanent tonic effects than any other agent.
However, it must be pointed out that it is essential to the efficacy and safety of a cold bath that a body’s stock of vitality must be sufficient to create, immediately after its immersion in the water, those general sensations of warmth and invigoration pictured above. In other words, cold baths are always contraindicated when, from debility, the system is too weak to produce a reactive glow. In all seasons, baths at a lower temperature than 50° F. are considered unsafe for children and for old persons who are not in good health. Extremely feeble persons are in the greatest need of tonic treatment, and yet have the least tolerance for cold water. These folks must be attended to by an experienced hydrotherapist who knows how to employ the gentlest measures for administering tonic applications, such as cold wet-hand rubs, cold friction (rubbing the body with coarse material dipped in cool water), the salt glow (rubbing the skin with moist salt and sprayed with cool water which produces a circulatory reaction), and alternate hot and cold applications to the spine.
When there is any serious infirmity of the heart, lungs, or kidneys, or illness of any organ essential to life, the temperature of a bath should not be lower than 75° F. (a cool bath). If local applications of cold water cause any chilliness at all they should be discontinued.
It is important to mention the necessity of avoiding the use of the general cold bath in cases of extreme exhaustion from violent exercise, or when, with or without exhaustion, a sensation of chilliness exists. A cold application should never be used when the surface of the skin is covered with cold perspiration, or immediately after a meal.
Some techniques and physical conditions that aid the energies of the body so that it can develop a prompt and vigorous reaction, making the toning energy of a cold bath most efficient:
Before the bath
• Wear warm clothing or expose oneself to the air of a warm room.
• Take a short hot bath or shower of some sort. If preferred, begin with a shower at about the temperature of the skin, and gradually increase it. A very high temperature may be borne this way without pain. Raising the temperature of the skin has great value as a preparation for the application of cold. The skin is not only rendered more susceptible to the influence of cold, but is prepared to react after a cold application because of the increased nervous and vascular activity, and the large amount of heat stored up. When there is rheumatism with painful joints, or the skin is cold, fatigue, neuralgia, anemia, or lack of energy, this preliminary heating of the skin is of the greatest importance and value.
• Drink hot water or some other hot beverage.
• Exercise more or less vigorously according to one’s strength, but not so much as to bring on perspiration or fatigue. Vigorous exercise or a hot bath taken just prior to a cold bath increases the initial rise of temperature because muscular activity increases heat production to such a marked degree that the cold application finds the heat-producing process already in full play. Hence, it is more able to produce a strong thermic reaction.
• Friction of the skin until warm and well reddened.
• Having warm, dry, or slightly moist skin.
• Being in a state of general health and vigor.
Pertaining to the bath itself
• The water should be a low temperature (the lower the temperature the more prompt the reaction).
• Wet the head before the rest of the body.
• Immersion should be short and sudden.
After the bath to encourage reaction
• Employ heat in the form of warm clothing, or hot, dry air, and/or by drinking a hot beverage