Constitutional Hydrotherapy: A novel treatment for chronic pain and many other health concerns
- Dr. Jason Winkelmann
- May 5
- 4 min read
A treatment so simple, yet so profound, it is worthy of the spotlight!
What is a constitutional hydrotherapy treatment?
Constitutional hydrotherapy is a traditional naturopathic treatment aimed at balancing the autonomic nervous system. It is a form of contrast therapy where we alternate hot and cold temperatures to your chest, abdomen, and back in a specific order to elicit the desired response from your nervous system. Traditionally, this practice just used alternating hot and cold towels and lasted several hours to achieve the desired effect.
Luckily, with modern technologies we have been able to enhance this therapy and greatly reduce its duration with the addition of electrical stimulation devices. These devices can gently stimulate different parts of your autonomic nervous system bringing the total treatment time down to 45 minutes.
What is the autonomic nervous system?
The autoniomic nervous system is a distinct branch of your nervous system that is not under voluntary control. Meaning your central nervous system (your brain and spinal cord) does all the work for you without you having to think about it. While you voluntarily control your muscles, and breathing half the time, there are a lot of bodily processes that happen without you even having to think about them such as: when and how fast your heart beats, digestion, sweating, and the movement of blood around your body.
There are two branches of your autoniomic nervous system: the sympathetic branch and the parasympathetic branch. Respectfully, they are known as your fight or flight response and your rest and digest response.
How does the autonomic nervous system become imbalanced?
When you are in a stressful situation your sympathietic nervous system takes over. Your heart rate increases, your eyes dilate, there is a spike in cortisol, and blood and glucose rush to your muscles. Your body is in survival mode. You are equiped to either flee this life threatening situation or fight back. Except, in most cases, we are not in a life threatening situation and instead are just getting yelled at by a boss or honked at in traffice. Once we are able to assess our situation and realize that we are not in danger, our sympathetics cool down and parasympathetics take over. Or at least they are supposed to.
The stresses of our daily lives are certainly different than they used to be, but they are still very abundant. When stresses, both physical and mental start to compound on themselves, we end up living most of the day in a sympathetic state. When this occurs day after day, week after week, your autonomic nervous system becomes imbalanced and you feel like you can never rest.
Now the opposite can also occur. You can live in a semingly perpetual state of parasympathetic dominance. However, this is very rare.
Why not just drive the other system as hard as you can?
It makes sense, after a long day of constant stress why not just go home and try to relax as hard and fast as possibe? Drive the parasympathetic nervous system to mitigate the damage already done. While this is not a bad idea, it doesn't set you up for any long term success. In reality, we need to train our autonomic nervous systems how to appropriately switch back and forth between sympathetic and parasympathetic states. Both have their value! We just need them to do their jobs appropriately. Once we are out of the stressful situation / realize that we are not in physical danger, we want parasympathetics to take control again.
How constitutional hydrotherapy balances the autonomic nervous system
The best way to retrain the autonomic nervous system is by rapidly putting your body into alternating sympathetic and parasympathetic states. The constitutional hydrotherapy does just this. We start with applying warm towels to your chest and abdomen to elicit a relazing, parasympathetic state. Then we quickly alternate to cool towels with e-stim to your upper back (the location of your sympathetic nervous system chain) to jolt your symathetics. Then a rapid change to a neutral temperature towel with e-stim to your low back and abdomen (the location of your parasympathetic nervous system chain). The procedure is then repeated with you laying face down and treatment applied to your back.
What are the benefits of a constitutional hydrotherapy?
This is such an amazing treatment because it does so much. When you balance your autonomic nervous system a whole bunch of great things happen!
Decreased pain
Increased blood flow
Increased immune system function
Decreased cholesterol and LDL levels
Why constitutional hydrotherapy is so good for chronic pain
There are some lesser talked about, yet general trends that chronic pain conditions share. To start, a decrease in blood flow means there is less oxygen to healing tissues, or tender points of fibromyalgia. Less oxygen means delayed healing. Chronic inflammation exists in all chronic pain sufferers and there are no treatments in conventional medicine that tackle chronic inflammation. A loss of sleep is also rather inflammatory. While stress is also a very inflamamtory event, you cannot be in a state of healing and survival at the same time. If you are stressed, your body is conserves all its resources to help you fight or flee. It would be a waste elsewhere right now.
Who should get constitutional hydrotherapy treatment?
Do you have a pulse? I've yet to meet anyone who couldn't use some more balance to their autonomic nervous system. Stress reduction alone sounds incredible! But here is who would benefit the most:
Dysautonomia
Chronic stress
Chronic pain
Chronic inflammatory conditions
Diabetes
Colds, flu, bronchitis, sinus infections, and other upper respiratory tract infections
Digestive system problems such as bloating, constipation, IBS, Ulcerative Colitis
Female Reproductive problems such as PMS, dysmenorrhea, and infertility
Immune deficiency
It is quite frankly the easiest and most beneficial treatment you could have!
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