What is Hydrotherapy?

Spring is here - the season for growth, blooming and cleansing. Help kick-start your wellness journey by learning about hydrotherapy – an invaluable and natural way to stimulate the body’s own healing.Hydrotherapy is an ancient practice that dates back thousands of years; it is an effective and gentle way of releasing tensions in the body and the mind. It can also help to eliminate wastes stored in the body.

Often, we support the body through detox while a person cleanses – for example, hydrotherapy can be a great addition to chelation treatments, weight loss management, and lymphatic drainage. The cycle of hot and cold energizes and restores the body, improving circulation and activating the lymphatic system. The largest emunctory (pathways of elimination) in the body is our skin and lymph, making this treatment a really valuable and safe addition to any treatment regimen.

The Benefits of Hydrotherapy

– Stress reduction– Detox– Improving circulation– Increase lymph flow and drainage– Stimulate weight loss– Increase blood flow to the gastrointestinal tract for chronic bowel issues– Resolve constipation– Resolve painful menses or any pain/stagnation in the body

How Does It Work?

The fundamental purpose of what we call “hydrotherapy” is to increase the body's innate capacity to heal. It is used among athletes and with chronically ill patients in many variations. Using a series of hot and cold, we can manipulate blood and lymph to increase the oxygen and nutrient delivery to all the visceral organs.Blood flow will increase due to reflexive actions in the blood vessels, called vasodilation (widening of the blood vessels) in response to a hot stimulus on the surface of the skin.

We then follow hot with cold and by changing temperatures quickly, we cause vasoconstriction (narrowing of the blood vessels). Strategically causing this change in size, we create a pumping action to flush blood internally through the viscera (internal organs) and ultimately, bring more oxygen and nutrition for the tissues while removing metabolic wastes, acids, and toxins.The same mechanisms by which we get the vessels to dilate and constrict do more than that.

Hydrotherapy also helps with skeletal and smooth muscle relaxation including muscles of the gastrointestinal tract, gallbladder, urinary tract and the bronchial tree (leading to the lungs). In addition, wrapping (essentially swaddling) the patient is an additional way these treatments calm the nervous system.

Wrapping stimulates feelings of support and nourishes the parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous system. Treatments are a one-on-one time where the doctor helps nurture the patient’s nervous system emotionally, whilst forcing them into a relaxed state away from chronic stressors of the external world.

Other variants of hydrotherapy include:

Colon Hydrotherapy

Where one infuses water rectally to retrain the bowel to have “mass movements” and effective stool elimination.

Immersion Hydrotherapy

Heating the body in either a hot bath, sauna or steam room and then quickly immersing oneself into a cold bath then meditating through a neutral phase. Check out Whistler’s Scandinave Spa for this experience, one of my favourite rejuvenating day trips in the Vancouver area.Dr. Jordan Dutton is now taking patients for hydrotherapy sessions, take advantage of this relaxing treatment!