Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Hydrotherapy

Episode Date: September 9, 2019

Water: There's plenty of it, it's not obviously poisonous and it's cheap as all get out. Maybe THAT'S the answer to all our species' medical woes? ... It's not, but if you've ever listened to Sawbones before you see where this episode (recorded live in beautiful Atlanta) is going. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Saubones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. We came across a pharmacy with a toy and that's lost it out. We were shot through the broken glass and had ourselves a look around.

Some medicines, some medicines that escalate my cop for the mouth Hello everybody welcome to saw booms a mayor of two of misguided medicine. I'm your close just in Macroi And I'm Sydney Macroi I turned my chair around because I thought we'd connect more and you'd cheer for me louder Thank you. I turned my chair around because I thought we'd connect more and you'd cheer for me louder. Didn't work out that time. Hi, everyone. Hello, and welcome to Atlanta. Unless you already live here then, you know.

We've spent a lot of time here in Atlanta and Georgia. Of course, we've done this our third, I think, show here. I hope you have a close. And just here, specifically the Cobb and. We love coming to Atlanta, not just because it is one of the few direct flights we can get from West Virginia. That's huge, that's huge though. But that's, I mean, that's big. But we also just love coming here.

It's the home of the CDC. So, I mean... Yeah. And... Big fan. And I'm going to just go ahead and say at the best aquarium in the country. That is very true. Sorry.

Sorry. Now they're making it bigger, which is great. Yeah. I mean, sorry the best. So, sorry about every other query. Just give up and stop trying. Were you going somewhere with this or? No, I didn't, you were talking about the query. I'm getting bigger. I didn't know where you, yeah. I don't know what they're going to put there.

I'm not talking about this. I tried to get Cindy to talk to me about what she thought was going to go there. And she said, probably fish. She said,'d be weird for them to put land stuff there. And I tried to engage her about what the relative size of the fish that will go there was good. Shark is what they're saying. Yeah, are you the aquarium? The people are saying sharks.

I hope it sharks, too, person there. I hope it is sharks as well, the rat. They're capitalizing on the baby sharks. Yeah, we're going to some baby sharks. Yeah. But we've done all your sightseeing at this point. Yes, whenever we go somewhere on the road, we like to try to do a topic that is somehow relevant to the area where we are.

And it gets harder when we keep coming back to the same place to find new interesting things to talk about. So I reached out to a friend of mine who's from Atlanta and I was like, hey, Carolyn, you got any thoughts? Like and and she had some ideas her parents actually gave her some ideas which is where our topic came from this time. But I'm not I was a little nervous because Carolyn also suggested that my 18-month-old and my five-year-old, who are not allowed to drink soda, would very much like the world of coke. And we did that today and it was super cool. We liked it. Yes. But it's really hard to take your kids to what Charlie kept calling a soda park. And then say, but you can't drink that.

You can't. It's just for mommy and daddy. Yeah, on the plus side, my 18-month-old is now addicted to a Honduran grape soda. And I was like, well, I didn't want to be that person while you're ugly. Does this have caffeine? Excuse me. Is that one? Excuse me.

Does the Japanese fan-toe with the cucumber in it have caffeine? It was great though. It was great. We love coke. But that's not what we're going to talk. We already did that show here. Yeah. We're going to talk about hydrotherapy, which it's weird we've never talked about this before because it's a it's like a huge chunk of medicine for a long time was like I don't know water

But it's especially relevant because of warm springs Georgia, which is not too far away Which was a big I was gonna say hotspot and that feels like I love that. That's so good, very funny. I don't know about that. Which was a popular attraction if you needed to take the waters for healing purposes, for medicinal purposes. So popular, of course, that FDR was a fan. And we'll get to that, but I wanted to start with the beginnings of why did we start thinking that like a bath,

which is great. Don't get me wrong. I'm going to preface with that. I love baths. I love hot tubs. But why did we think that they were good for medicine? And that probably starts with the fact that humans figured out I would assume pretty early that water was important to drink to live.

Like for living purposes. We know that. And I love reading articles about this stuff because everybody's like, we know that because humans tended to cluster around rivers and lakes and oceans to build their towns. And it's like, well, also, we had to drink it to live. Right.

We know that because there are still humans. So we piece this together. Water good. So we figured that out pretty early on that water was important. And because it was so important, it began to take on this kind of mystical, supernatural, super important quality that obviously became connected with life itself. And so you can see where that would be a natural root for it to become a medicine of sorts. In Mesopotamia, the doctor was called Azu, which translates to roughly the water connoisseur.

Ooh. It's just kind of cool. You think somebody being a water connoisseur is a cool kind of a cool thing? cool. You think water somebody being a water connoisseur is cool. Well kind of a cool thing. I mean nobody calls me a connoisseur of anything. That's not true. You're a connoisseur of soup. I get a vise on what soup to have or like what soup is best. I go to you hands down every time. Um, Hippocrates was the first one. I'm just not going to comment on that.

Yeah, you kind of, everybody I think in the room kind of thought you would name something that I know about. I think that's what we're all kind of waiting for. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, don't do it now. This ship is sailed. Please go on with your lecture, Dr. Matlow. Serial.

Well, that's serious. Suggamy, Sidney Nair. I mean, I think Irvaine knows that. Right, it apocrystis is a serial. It's a podcast about it, and it's a serial. It apocrystis about it, Sid. Even before, though. Yeah, that's fair.

Always. Even from when we were younger. I always knew you knew everything about serial. Well, thank you, Sidney. I appreciate that. I don't know what Hippocrates knew about cereal, but I know that he loved water. And he wrote extensively about all of the uses for water. Like you can get in it.

You can't get in it. You can put it in you. You can put it in you. You can dump it on it. You can put it in you. You can put it in you. You can dump it on you. You can wipe it on you. You can wrap yourself in rag soaked in it. Put it in a bucket above a door jam. That's an afternoon of hilarity for you and your friends. He wrote a book. One of his works was called on heirs, waters, and places. Which I just love is a connection. Like, what are you gonna title this? I don't know.

I wrote about some air, and I wrote about some water, and some places. Sounds like the title of an in-ya album. So he talks a lot there about like, what is water good for. And some of it seems really obvious. Like, they knew that water washed stuff off, because you can see that, so that was easy.

And so the thought was, well, it's really good for washing off impurities or toxins or whatever the thought was, whatever's making you sick, we could just douse you in water and maybe we can make it go away. And that kind of makes sense. And especially for cleaning wounds, we figured just douse you in water and maybe we can make it go away. And that kind of makes sense. And especially for cleaning wounds, we figured that out pretty early. That cut looks pretty dirty. Wash it.

Then it's clean. Excellent. Which is pretty good for medicine. But he took it a step further, I mean at that point, we're at any point sometimes. But he took it a step further and he said there are different temperatures of water, of course, and they can be used for different purposes. So really hot water would be good for like your muscles or your joints, you would want a sitting tub of super hot water if your muscles were sore. Which again, none of this sounds like, oh, okay, yeah, that sounds nice. If the problem

was your stomach, if you have some constipation or some indigestion or anything like that, then you want to sit in a tub of warm water. Don't go for the hot. That's too much. Then you want to stay with the warm. If you have a fever or some kind of inflammation, you could sit in a tub of cool water. And then there was the cold water plunge, which was reserved for, like, if you just need a little pep in your step, you know, like some vim and vigor. And it was very specific. Like, you gotta be, don't like kids do this. It will make them, they'll have too much energy.

It's, don't let your kids get in cold water, don't take them over all of Coke. The two things. And there were, and beyond, beyond this, and so it was kind of like a nerve tonic or something to stimulate you, a cold water plunge. But beyond the temperature changes, they also, the hypocrite is read about all different kinds of baths that you could take. So you could take a whole body bath, which would just be like a bath, you know. We call that a bath, these days.

We call that a bath. It's troubling that they had to come up with a name for that, a separate name for that kind of bath. It's just like a bath. Or you could take like a foot bath, you could probably figure that one out. Or like a sits bath, which is not because you just sits in it, which is how I always would explain it to people like patients.

Like you want to take a sits bath. You just sit in it. It's like a bath. It's for the down down there. Okay, but why is it called sits then? It's like name for somebody. So you're telling me that the person who came up with the sitting in the bath was not stoked. Like, oh, I got the name.

Oh, I hear it. This is so good. I've been sitting in this bath for two days. God, I hope this works. This is going to be so funny. This works. Not really. It's just like a, I mean, I guess, you know what's funny?

It's like a whole body, a whole bath, like a, like a bath, is also kind of a sitz bath. Yeah, sit. Like the fan diagram of sitz baths is like in sought, you know? We're basically talking about death, right? Every, well no, every sitz bath, I know every whole bath is a sitz bath anyway. But now every sitz bath is a sit-bath. Anyway, but now how do every sit-bath is a whole bath? You could also have the compressive bath, which is when you like, you've got a soap towels in the water too, and wrap them around whatever parts of your body

you happen to be concerned about. And then you can also sit in the tub, but like you've got to have compression as part of it. And then there was something called a foment, which really just meant like a medicinal bath, which all of them were, but it was just another word for if you used really warm waters on a specific part of the body that was like wounded or had like something that an abscess that needed to open and drain, that could be called a foamant. Or this could also be like warmed lotions.

Mm. Nice. We don't really do that anymore. I feel the size. Yeah. No. I mean, that all sounds really, I mean, you can imagine why this was easy to like sell people on.

Like, no, OK. I don't think about it. Well, at this point in time, we were so dumb about medicine, like just having something we knew didn't actively kill us made it medicinal in a sense. And the general idea is bathing was part of the Hippocratic Regimen for balancing your humors. So you have four humors, we don't, but he we thought you did it for a long time. And you got to keep them all balanced in order to maintain health and along with like, I mean most of the Hiritic stuff was just like eat a good diet, get plenty of exercise, get a good night's sleep, and bathe regularly.

Good rules to live with. Yeah. And you'll keep your humors in balance. But it was also good for when you were sick. And it was recommended for everything. If you have a nose bleed, we got a bath for that. If you have a fever, we got a bath for that. If you have a fever, we got a bath for that. If you have a one of the indications was worn out body.

Hear that. We got a bad grade. But you had to be careful just like with any medicine, there are side effects. So if you have a fever and you take a warm bath, you're going to make it worse. and you take a warm bath, you're gonna make it worse. You can actually induce something like constipation or indigestion if you take a cold bath. So you have to be careful, baths are very powerful. Do you ever get worried about people like editing these out for clips on Facebook or something like that?

Pominent physician, Cindy McRoy says, that taking a bath can give you concentration. Then it's just that quote. Please don't do that. Hopefully somebody would Google more than they're like, when did she say, oh, she doesn't know that? That sounds like 2019. That sounds about right.

Sounds like what happy people would do it. Nobody's gonna show that. That doesn't sound right. I'm going to look into it more to find out the truth of it. Yeah, that sounds right. I have judgment, I'm gonna use it. Unlikely. And these were all different, by the way, like, I'm talking about hydrotherapy, which was

just like water, water is therapy, water for medicinal purposes. But then there was like specifically bioneotherapy, which was bathing for medical purposes. But then there was like specifically bountyotherapy, which was bathing for medical purposes. And there was like different, depending on what kind of water you use, like you could call it, thalasotherapy if it was for sea water. Taking a bath in the ocean, you could just call it that,

but you're just in the ocean. And these were all different too, like Hippocrates wrote about, now if you're in, River, here's what that's good for. And if it's freshwater, as opposed to, if you're in sea water, that's different. And if the water comes up from like a natural spring,

that was a whole other medicinal value as well. Okay. I don't believe it. I don't buy shamiya. No, I'm just saying like this is. I think they were showing off because they were so excited to find one thing that wasn't open like poisonous. Like just all kinds of different cool ways to take baths.

Like. Well, and when they got into the specific like the when they started talking about thermal springs, natural springs, water arising from the earth, that it's nice and has minerals and feels good. When they started to get into that stuff, that's where our old buddy, Plenty the Elder, really shine. Yes. In this story, because everybody was recommending, like, you know, for this specific illness,

you might want to go check out one of these springs, and he was like, well, listen, you know, for this specific illness, you might wanna go check out one of these springs. And he was like, well, listen, I'm gonna write this book called Natural History, in which I document all things on earth that exist. All, all plants, all animals, all rocks, all rivers, all things I'm gonna write about, and I'm gonna include in there a list of every spring I know about and what it's good for or what it's bad for. And so you could go to book two chapter 106 called The Wonders of Fountains and Rivers.

And he has just listed all these and it's so specific because he's like, now this one has frogs That's bad Don't go to the one that has frogs This one's really good for wounds. This one isn't but it tastes like wine all year round Why did we even make yelp after this we have all we need we have Why did we even make Yelp after this? We have all we need. We have what God is creating. He had one, he was like, now there are three over here that will inevitably produce death.

But without pain. Oh, that's nice to know. That's convenient. And then there was another one that he said, now this one, if you bathe in this one, you will utter wonderful oracles. But it will also shorten your life. Okay, okay, I will shoot. Read to the end. Yeah, put that up front next time, planning.

So, that's like, you would think like that chapter would be outside of natural, like everybody would be like, did you see the list of springs? That's wild. Has anybody else like that? You see that weird old man made a whole list of all the different springs that can kill you? And now he's selling it to people, for real. So throughout the ancient world, I mean, I focused a lot on Greece and Rome.

And the Romans were famous for their baths. I don't think it is shocking. We've talked a lot about the Roman baths. And also, they were kind of dirty. Because they were all the dead skin floating in them. And people would eat in them. Anyway, they were kind of dirty. But.

That's why people started peeling grapes. Because they're like, ugh, no, thank you. I'm not eating the outside of this grape. I don't think they were also floating in the back. Come on. No, I wasn't there. Imagine how opulent that would look. You just saw a bunch of purple boys coming your way.

Tell me you wouldn't be stoked. The fest is past the carrots on down this way. You just float a bunch down there. Here they come. So I'm out to get them. The medicines, the medicines, that escalate my car before the mouth. Now, so really throughout a lot of the ancient world,

it was very common like baths were an important part of not just for medicinal uses, for relaxation and leisure, and for doing business and commerce, and the baths were a big part of your life. And then the middle ages happened. And long story short, everybody just stopped bathing, and the whole hydrotherapy idea was kind of lost for a while. That's the Middle Ages folks, the age we got nasty.

Everything not only stopped and went backwards for a little bit. They're like, eh, we'll pick it back up later. That's really as I was looking through this, I was like, I can't find a lot for hydrotherapy and the Middle Ages, like what happened? Because there are all these texts written about it. This is what bass are good for and the different Bass and all this, and then like nobody's doing it,

and it's because nobody was taking a bath. For years at a time, sometimes, people weren't bathing. So, it's just like that. The Middle Ages was like humanity's spring break. We're like, we're just gonna take off for a little while, or not gonna put too much pressure on ourselves. We'll come back to it in a few centuries. So I'm trying to move things forward again.

And eventually we did. Eventually in the Renaissance people started to kind of uncover some of these other, these old texts and like read about bathing and there begin to be some ideas that like, maybe we should, maybe we should bathe. Did you read this? Did you read this? Look at this. On this dusty little book.

It says we're nasty. That's weird. There is a book, The Thermos, published by Batchi. I prefer to was coming. Yeah. So that's two things you're a connoisseur of. You? Me.

I'm a connoisseur of Justin Macaroyis and I can tell you this one's the best. One of them is a very competent reporter at Vancouver though. He's a good actor. So it contained 78 different conditions that might benefit from bats, which was like a great way of bringing bats back into fashion, because it's like, hey, nobody's bathing, but did you know if you have any one of these 78 illnesses, a bats might help you out. And then that also introduced beyond just bathing, like we should also have drinking cures, which means drink water. Which is, I mean, that's never bad advice. But this, this book, this specific like view of it took us further and was like, now listen though, for all of these drinking and bathing cures, you need to do it for 15 days straight once a year.

And you have to pair it with a quiet orderly life in pleasant surroundings with good food and wine and maximum of comfort. Hmm. Oh, which like, yeah, great if you can get it. I mean, yeah. Yeah, it sounds excellent for sure. I don't know who is like, no, I won't, hmm. I don't want any of that.

And so as this interest sprung up in bathing and a lot of this was also like, it wasn't okay to be naked even with yourself for a while You know from like a moral standpoint Then we were all like oh, it's good to be naked again We're okay with the nudity once again and as people got more comfortable with like I can be nude and bath It's fine. And maybe it's medicinal. That's cool, too.

And I like the way I smell a little more now. Then you started seeing some bathing centers spring up around Europe. And you could go. And it was prescribed by a doctor, like, hit the bathing center. Take a bath. Relax.

Enjoy yourself. But take a bath. But it was all very serious. It was like a very... That is flippantly take a bath. Well, it was a very like scientific approach to it. This is very important. This is something we have neglected,

and we're going to welcome back into our medical practice is bathing. And this, because this kind of changes as we move into the 1800s when things really take off, because like just taking a bath isn't very sexy, but then if you can pair taking a bath with like, we'll go to the baths. And it will be a luxurious spa-like experience where like we hang out in the mineral waters and we get like massages and like inhale like you know water vapor that is scented and there are herbal things and then we'll have like dances also and good food and good drinks. So like you start to see that in the 1800s it starts to move past this like purely it's for medical purposes and into like fun times.

Ah yeah. I got you now. And it's funny because if you look at like the people who were like, who were spearheading this movement, the first guy who kind of started the, what we think about as like the modern hydrotherapy movement, which really started in the 1800s, Vincent Price-Nitz, his perspective was not this. His idea was what we can do is

throw people in a really cold bath and it's going to put their body into something called a crisis. And this is a good crisis. Yeah, oh, it's a good crisis. It's a good crisis. OK. Because the water is going to get down in all those little cracks and crevices all over your body or all the secret dirt's hiding. OK. All the secret impurities.

It's a crisis for dirt. It's a crisis for all the, yeah, not just dirt, but like all those secret things that we don't know what they're named yet, their germs. But we're gonna get the water down in there, and then it's all gonna come bubbling out. He thought his pus was the plan. Yeah. And then once we have produced this crisis, then you are cl- you're cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- cl- And so that was the initial, like that's what he tried to introduce. And his ideas were based on his own experiences.

He saw when he was younger, this wounded deer in the woods that kept going to this, this is the story. I don't know. They kept going to this pond and like dipping its little wounded hoof or leg or whatever into the pond. And it got better. The deer got better. The deer lives in this story. Don't worry.

And he saw that and so when he was a little older he got run over by a cart because that kind of thing. Wait, the deer? No, the human. Vincent. I didn't see that coming. That's the kind of thing that happened in the 1800s. Sometimes you got run over by a cart. Hard accidents. And then he had a bunch of ribs crushed and the doctors were like, that will never heal. And he was like, no, I saw this deer. You don't understand. So he soaked bandages in water and just kept wrapping

his chest with these bandages soaked in water. And he got better. And he was like, I'm opening a clinic. And he opened this clinic to do his water crisis on people. And it was so popular, but it was not, I mean, it wasn't, this was not the luxurious spa like thing yet. This was like, here are my clinics, you come, you get in the cold water, you drink water, you do exercise, you eat beef jerky,

and you'll get better. Nice. Sounds bracing. I know. Is that like what, like P90X or like P90Xs? That's it, that's it, that's what P90Xs. Mystery solved. But like, so this was the, this is what he created.

And at this point, you could, he was like the first hydropathist. There was this whole movement of like, we are hydropathists. We practice hydrotherapy. Come get narco bats and eat beef jerky and you'll be strong again. And this, his protege, Sebastian Neb was like, I love it. This is so cool. I love everything you're doing., except let's make it fun. And this is probably, it's noted repeatedly,

he had no medical background. But this guy had no medical training. He was not a doctor. He didn't go to any kind of whatever was passing for medical school at the moment. He didn't do that. He was just like, I love the water thing. But let's make it more like massages and

erby, you know, just kind of like a chill time. And let's forget about all the jogging and the beef jerky is not going over so well. Let's forget about that. And it was this movement of this was the hydrotherapy that made its way to the US. I mean, this made sense because like this was the tradition that was happening in Europe that went from like this cold water plunge to these wonderful hot bath massage experiences. And especially if you could find one around a thermal spring, because then you already you have these natural spring waters, you don't have to create a bath, you just go build a whole resort around it and create a luxury experience. And that's where we see, as it moved into the US, especially by the 1850s, the concept

of taking the waters, which was very much something that like the elite mainly were doing. If you had the money, you would go to one of these mineral springs, one of these spas, and you would get like mud wraps and massages. And I mean, it was all a very luxury experience, which was sort of based in medicine, because doctors were still prescribing this. Doctors were still saying, listen, there is a mineral spring out there for every disease on earth. We just don't know which one matches whatever you have.

And we also don't really know what you have yet. But if you just go around and get in springs, one of them is going to do it. Yeah, you'll find the right spring for you. And if you had the money and the time, I guess, and you have to, like, you have to have to have a boat if you're gonna leave. Sorry.

But anyway. You mean transport. And you call it transport. Okay, got it. Yeah, there's lots of things you have to do. Child care, sometimes to watch the dogs. Like, why are we planning this for them? Well, I'm just thinking about the logistics.

But anyway, you could travel around until you found the thermal spring of your dreams that would cure the disease that nobody could diagnose or did or got wrong. Was the idea, was it kind of the appeal to ancient wisdom thing of like, we know people used to do this a very long time ago, so it must be good. Yes, yes. These are the treatments of the ancients. Hypocrities wrote about these treatments. These very real, so confusing when that argument happens in medicine, it's so wild. They knew nothing.

You have to understand. If someone says something worked 2,000 years ago, it doesn't. It just doesn't categorically. You can just ignore it. They didn't know anything. So as these ancient ideas took root in the US, we saw that all of these.

There were over like 200 different places in the US that were thermal spring type places that were doing this and like advertising come, please give us your money and we'll give you a massage and you can hang out in the mineral waters. Posture design also loved a lot of the desired back then. Obviously a very famous one was John Harvey Kellogg's Battle Creek Sanatorium where he was doing lots of other stuff. We're not fans of here.

No. There was the serial two, but there's- The serial part is fun. The other stuff isn't. But also in Georgia in Warm Springs, which was initially named Bullockville, which was not as attractive, I think, if you're trying to sell the springs. Right, you name the town after the springs. But it had... That's what we're currently doing in the show in Cokes City.

That gotcha, huh? You got your funny bow. That, uh, I don't know if you know that means, that could mean something else. I didn't know if you realized that when you saw that. Oh man, Coca-Cola is going to be so upset when they find out. What a shock that will be to them. There's a guy said, I just noticed that, there's a guy said at the doors we were walking into the world of coach today who was asking his four Pepsi spots. True. True story.

I just really appreciated that. Yeah, I like that. Get into the experience. I love it. I'm not a Pepsi spy. No. I won't drink Brad's drink. That's what it used to be called. Hot Brad I won't drink Brad's drink. That's what it used to be called.

It's called Brad's drink. No, Brad's drink. But obviously Bullockville had all these warm springs and they were just missing a great opportunity to change their name. And so long before, obviously, the 1850s and eventually as we move into the 1900s and with the polio epidemic and FDR making

this location famous. Long before that, there were all kinds of people going to these naturally occurring springs and enjoying them and touting their medicinal benefits. So like this was already well established. There was already a big resort there since like the 1830s. And then the 1890s bigger places had been built. And so this was well established as like,

we have these great mineral springs, and you should all come check them out. And so in the 1920s, that's when FDR first came to warm springs and in hopes that it would help him with, and I don't want to get into this, we have a whole episode on polio, but it's been debated,

did FDR actually have polio? Did he have a polio like illness? Either way, he was suffering from symptoms that seemed a lot like polio, and he was hoping that the warm waters of the natural springs would help him. And he felt like he got such great results from bathing in these warm springs, that that's when we see that the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation was eventually opened, and they, you know, Warmsprings became famous.

They changed their name in this time period too, which made sense. And they became famous for having these therapeutic springs, which I guess you can still, you can't go bathing the springs now, but you can still go like, check out the place and look at everything. You look at some springs.

Well, you should get a hobby. This is that's your afternoon. you'll go check out the place and look at everything. You look at some springs? Well. You should get a hobby. Because if that's your afternoon, I think going to look at the springs. You should. From all the websites I've looked at about warm springs, it looks like a lovely place though. It keeps saying it has a warm heart and warm springs.

That you can't get in because they poison. No, they don't, no, they're not poison. I just don't think they're like for public use. The rich, you mean the idle rich? Yeah. You're so. They become playground for the idle rich. Just say it.

No, I don't think that. No, I think they're still used for therapeutic purposes. All right. Yeah. Anyway, I'll give it a little later. Don't worry. Because of FDR and the warm springs, it took a while for this interest in hydrotherapy and it's our hope about its benefits to kind of die out.

As we move, especially after the Second World War, there were so many more medical advances made in different ways of treating things that it kind of started to fall out of favor. And it just wasn't, it was kind of like, yeah, if you want to do this thing that would be kind of fun if you got the money and this is how it's like, it became more like a spa idea. Like, this is a cool fun thing to do, but we have real medicine now, so you don't have to do that for all your illnesses. Doctors weren't prescribing it. But it does like, I think it's,

it makes sense, the fact that we still do it today without most of us at least without illusions of its medicinal benefit. I think it kind of shows you how we got to that point, right? Because we knew so little that there's something felt good and rejuvenating and like we had to assume it was medicinal, right? Like, oh that something felt good and rejuvenating and like we had to assume it was medicinal, right?

Like, oh, that felt good. That's probably medicine, right? Well, and if that, your options were that or like, can I cut you open and bleed you? Right, I will take the bath, thank you. I'll have the bath. Or here's this medicine that will make you puke. Do you want that? We're very good at that. Or laxatives. Yeah. The bath still wins.

Bath still wins. Unless it's the bath that kills you. Unless you're really constipated, you might choose the laxative. Is there, I wondered is there evidence for this? Because we've been doing it since, I mean, almost since there were humans, we've been prescribing baths. And I started to look for studies. There was one that I really enjoyed that was done about a decade ago that looked at like the Roman baths in Bath in England. And they supposedly were really successful at treating lead poisoning there, and the symptoms that arose

from lead poisoning. And so they were kind of looking into these cases as to like, did they really cure people with bathing in these baths? And so what they would do is that they would come and they'd get them in the baths. You would definitely spend a lot of time in the bath. They'd give them a really good diet.

And then some other medical treatments of the day, like I said, kind of stuff to make you throw up, and you would stay there until you got better. And they said that 45% were cured, and 93% improved, as they were staying at the baths for their lead poisoning. Justin, can you guess why I think they probably actually got better? I'm gonna, I'm gonna throw a little bit of spaghetti at the wall

and use kind of make facial expressions and then I'll edit it later. Uh-huh. They were drinking a lot of water and they peed out the lid. No, I should, I should note now, these people didn't necessarily live in bath. They like came from their homes where they got lead poisoning and went to bath and got better. The lead was at their house. So and the, King King ding, you got it.

And the author's noted that like... Right, the rest easy knowing you're the only 3000 people that will ever hear the first part. And the author's noted that like, you know, they also remove them from the source of poisoning, which is very important when one is being poisoned. Stop poisoning them. That's step one.

That's step one. But I don't know. We also went to bath and we drank the water and then I got pregnant. So. But, but, but. Same day, also went to Stonehenge. Say you tell me. I don't know.

Otherwise, there have been some small studies that have suggested that a therapeutic bath, especially like warm water baths, and it doesn't necessarily have to be a mineral spring, it could just be a warm bath. It can be helpful for things like osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis and enclosed and spondylitis. Other conditions that can have a lot of pain, and that it can be helpful with managing the pain.

They're small studies, it's not conclusive, but I would say that when we're talking about things like pain management, that makes sense, and certainly you're not going to hurt anybody by telling them to take some bats, and if it decreases the need for other treatments, then you know, it can be helpful. But at this point, I would say that if you look at a hot tub website, I went, I looked at somebody who's trying to sell me a hot tub. I looked at their website, just had a curiosity like, are people using this to try to sell hot tubs? Cause you could. And it is, there's so many websites for hot tubs where you find like a whole section on hydrotherapy and like telling you that like it increases the blood flow

in your body and it will relieve your joint stiffness and all your aches and pains, it will ease your cold symptoms. It will assist with hypertension. It won't, right? And it will get rid of your headaches. And I just thought it was wild that it's a hot tub website. Who's taking medical advice from a hot tub website? I, listen, I'm not saying that it's hot.

Can soul your physician or your hot tub salesman about whether hot tub is right for you. So, I know. But hey, listen, if you don't want your hot tub, send it away. You can still use water for cleaning out wounds. It's still good for that. It's good for irrigating things and for burns sometimes. There's some other places for water.

Yeah, the water's cool. We're all in the right place. Drink more of it. Yeah, drink more water. We on the moron. You can take baths. But hey. Thanks for having us, Atlanta. Yeah, drink more water. We all need more and you can take baths. But thanks for having us Atlanta. We appreciate it being here.

That's going to do it for us. So until next time, my name is Justin McArroy. I'm Sydney McArroy. And it's always don't you all in your head. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Alright!