the protocols.
Are based on the historical protocols that have been published
and you can actually find his book.
It's called rational hydrotherapy.
It's written by John Harvey Kellogg.
It's about 1000 pages long.
It's a massive book.
I think it's in Google Scholar.
You've got to, sort of, find the book.
But there's a number of resources that people are interested in.
And if you were to talk to me about a year ago, I wouldn't
have known anything about it.
I've researched it.
But the body of information that has kept this alive are really the physiotherapist
or the physical therapists, we call them in the United States, because
of hydrotherapy helping in physical ailments, muscles, things of that nature.
And so they're the ones that have kept this information for a long time.
And so the protocol that I'm going to tell you is based on what they have
seen and what they have done and used.
And typically, what is this is you basically have the
patient lie down on a surface.
And there's various ways of doing it.
But you can use towels that are wet, and you can heat them up
either in a microwave or in a stove.
But that's basically boiling hot water with a towel.
And you basically sandwich that between other towels, you place it on their
back, and you place it on their chest.
So they're basically being sandwiched.
They're the meat, and the bread is two very hot towels.
And you also place a very cold towel on their head and on their neck.
And what you're trying to do there is you're trying to heat up the body as
much as you possibly can, and not heat up the thermostat, which is in the brain,
which is going to sweat and try to get rid of that heat as much as possible.
So what you have here is you've got peripheral vasodilation that
occurs trying to give off the heat.
But actually what's happening is it's picking up the heat, heating
up the core body temperature, and you do this for about 20 minutes.
Now, those towels will not remain hot for 20 minutes.
So sometimes you have to recycle them and have more ready to go.
So you heat them up, you cover them up.
And if they're sweating, then you know that you're doing
what you need to be doing.
At the end of this 20 minutes of heat, something we do that's kind of
paradoxical and it's also probably the most uncomfortable portion of this
treatment is you then basically put a very ice-cold towel and replace the hot with
an ice-cold towel and you do friction rub.
Basically, friction is the best way to explain it.
This is something that's come along for 100 years, they've done this.
When we look at the data and we try to see why they would do this, we believe that
this seems to work because the cold causes vasoconstriction and it locks the heat in.
So after you're done, it's not easy for the heat to dissipate through
those vasodilated vasculature.
But the other thing that it does is, just like we know when you take a cold
shower, that vasoconstriction causes demargination of leukocytes, and that
causes the amount of leukocytes in the solution if you will, or in the
vasculature to go through, find the viral particles and report to their lymph
nodes through that increased circulation.
And that sort of jumpstarts the innate immune system in finding
those epitopes and presenting them to the antigen-presenting cells.
After that's done, the protocol is for them to lie down and to
really not move for the next hour and to just completely rest.
Now, this is a, student population.
So they're young.
I wouldn't expect these patients to need to go to the hospital.
And I don't believe that in any of our cohort they've progressed or gotten worse,
if there's something that has biological plausibility and it has very little risk,
you know, what's the risk of hydrotherapy.
Well, number one, burning yourself.
You have to be very careful.
that you don't burn yourself.
And number two, if you've got a predilection for cardiac arrhythmias,
or tachycardia, or atrial fibrillation, it's probably not a wise thing to be
exposing yourself to temperature extremes.
So barring that, I think this has got pretty low risk and may be beneficial.