Blood Vessels and Circulation

- Need to Work Optimally for Healing

Your body always tries to maintain homeostasis or a steady state in its various functions. One example is that your hands will get very cold in winter weather as your body withdraws blood from the extremities to maintain the critical core temperature. Another is the increase in rate of respiration to maintain the needed oxygen level during exercise.

There are ways we can manipulate the body's desire for a steady state with various forms of natural treatment. One method involves temporarily elevating the temperature of one area. Your blood vessels and circulation will react to this in a positive way. The blood vessels in the area dilate (expand) so they can hold more blood. The circulation is thus locally increased to carry away the excess heat and maintain homeostasis.

One example of how this works is a simple hydrotherapy technique that can be helpful with some headaches. If the feet are immersed in a warm water bath, the blood vessels in the feet will dilate as circulation there increases. As the blood volume increases in the feet it has to decrease somewhere else to maintain the volume. Some of this will come from the head and, in some cases, it can be enough to reduce the pain of headache. You can also have a nice foot soak at the same time!

There are many conditions where extra blood flow to one area is desirable. Extra blood flow means:

1. more oxygen
2. more nutrients
3. better waste removal
4. faster healing

A good example would be to reduce the pain from an injury such as tendonitis, bursitis, sprains etc. Remember that, in the initial stages, it is often best to use ice and elevation to stop any internal bleeding. Of course, this reduces blood flow which can help to stop bleeding. But as healing progresses good blood flow is vital to repair the injury.

As heat is applied externally, to the body surface, the blood vessels and circulation reacts efficiently to remove any excess and this brings the desired effects in the list above. However, if the problem is more than skin deep, because the circulation so efficiently removes the excess heat near the surface, the benefit might not be significant at the deeper levels. What if there was a way we could produce this same effect two inches and more below skin surface? Remember, we should wait until any initial bleeding has stopped and we want to do it safely without using so much heat that we risk burning the skin.

There is a way to increase the depth to which tissues are warmed to ensure that joints and deeper tissues receive the benefit. Have you noticed even on a cool early March day you can feel the sun's warmth through layers of clothing. Far infrared rays (FIR), produced naturally by the sun, can penetrate two to three inches into the body, where they elevate the temperature and increase blood flow. These rays have a wavelength just past the red end of the visible light spectrum and so are invisible to the naked eye.

Scientific research beginning in the 1960's, mostly in Japan, found that deep heat from FIR thermal technology could enhance the beneficial effects of healing therapy. The list of conditions that have been helped through this technology would considerably lengthen this article. Just think of any condition that could benefit from the waste removal, extra nutrition or better oxygenation that comes with increased circulation. Get the blood vessels and circulation working correctly and good things start to happen!

There are hospitals where cancer is treated with localized hyperthermia that can be produced by FIR. The increased heat is easily dissipated from surrounding healthy tissue by increased circulation. Tumor tissue, however, which is poorly vascularized (less blood supply), cannot dissipate the heat as easily. With the resulting heat build-up but little change in circulation within the tumor, the tumor cells are starved of oxygen and nutrients. Recent investigations have shown that properly-heated cancer cells also form protein structures on their surface which activate the body's natural killer cells.

FIR also explains why, in summer, we can feel comfortable in our house in light clothing at a room air temperature of 20 degrees. But in cold winter weather, we might need a warm sweater to be comfortable at the same room temperature. The difference is that in hot weather the warmer outside of our house is reradiating FIR waves to the interior.