Hot Flashes? No Sweat!

by Sydney Ross Singer and Soma Grismaijer

If you or a loved one are suffering from menopausal discomforts such as mood swings, hot flashes and spontaneous sweating, we have a Self Study for you to try that may end your problems within a few weeks. Self Studies are your way of testing a lifestyle change on yourself to see if your problem is related to your lifestyle. The Menopause Self Study is cost-free, and is also risk-free for any healthy woman.

First, let us explain the science behind the study.

Modern medicine does not understand the cause of menopausal mood swings, hot flashes or sweating, but interprets these discomforts as symptoms of imbalance or disease. Since menopause involves changes in the ovaries with the termination of fertility and a reduction of sex hormone levels, particularly of estrogen, doctors have defined menopause as a form of ovarian dysfunction. Hot flashes and sweating are thought to result from some derangement of the brain’s temperature control mechanism. The treatment of choice has been a regimen of estrogen replacement. However, this hormone therapy has been shown to increase the risk of stroke, heart disease and invasive breast cancer, and can significantly increase the risk of cancer in the female reproductive tract. Some doctors will suggest a hysterectomy, removing the reproductive tract, reasoning that it is no longer needed anyway.

As medical anthropologists, our approach to a problem is to examine the possible lifestyle causes of disease. We believe that the body is designed to operate properly, provided that our culturally defined lifestyles and habits don’t get in the way. Once we identify a practice that may cause health problems, we then suggest altering those practices, to see if this eliminates the problem. We believe that the body has an internal wisdom that tries to return itself to health, counteracting the damage we have done to ourselves through our lifestyles.

We consider menopause to be a normal process of life, not a disease condition. The fact that many women have no problems at all during menopause suggests that it is not the stage of life or lack of hormones that is the problem, but rather something certain woman are doing, or not doing.

We started to think of menopausal sweating as the body’s way of recovering from a problem, rather than as the problem itself. We asked ourselves why people sweat. One medically known reason for sweating is to remove waste products and toxins from the body. Is there any reason why menopausal women would have a greater need to remove waste products?

Indeed, there is. The normally recognized forms of toxin elimination are urination, defecation, respiration and perspiration. However, women in their reproductive years have an additional form of elimination available to them. They have a monthly cleansing, called menstruation. Menstrual flow includes toxins, which are thereby eliminated from the body. The toxins consist of our own waste products, as well as other poisons, including those from our petrochemically polluted environment.

When a woman stops menstruating, there is a loss of this form of elimination and toxin removal. One way for the body to compensate for this loss of an eliminatory function is to use the other forms of elimination, one of which is to sweat. You would expect, then, that menopausal women might sweat more than pre-menopausal women. But here our culture gets in the way, since sweating is an undesirable activity for women in western civilizations. Most western women use antiperspirants, which inhibit this form of elimination. Menopause increases the need to sweat out toxins, but antiperspirants inhibit the body’s ability to sweat. The result is a build-up of toxins within the body, leading to toxemia.

This toxemia can lead to irritability and mood swings, as the toxins in the bloodstream irritate the entire body. The body needs to eliminate these toxins; and if it can’t, eventually a hot flash and spontaneous sweating occurs, any time of day or night.

This means that women suffering from menopausal discomfort might be able to end their suffering by controlled sweating.

For those wanting to try this Self Study, all you need to do is raise your body temperature and sweat for about 10-20 minutes daily. This can be done in a hot bath if a sauna or steam room is not available. While making yourself sweat is safe for healthy individuals, those with heart disease, a history of stroke and some other health problems may not want to try this without consulting a health care provider. You also need to drink fluids with electrolytes before, during and after sweating. Diluted fruit juice is ideal, but there are many other fluid replacement choices available. Incidentally, sweating during exercise is not enough for this toxin elimination. Exercise increases the need for sweating, since many toxins are produced or released from the body with exercise. The sweating you need for menopausal relief is in addition to exercise sweating.

Interestingly, when we were in Fiji for a follow-up study to our bra and breast cancer research, we took the opportunity to ask women in villages how they experienced menopause. Their response was instructive. “What is that?” they asked. We soon realized that there was no word for “menopause” in Fijian, and that menopause was not an issue for these women. Once they stopped having periods, they went to the doctor to see if they were pregnant. When they were told that they were past being pregnant, they heaved a sigh of relief, and that was that. They don’t seem to experience hot flashes or night sweats. Of course, they also don’t use anti-perspirants, and they sweat freely.

For further information, visit our website, www.selfstudycenter.org, or see our book, Get It Out! Eliminating the Cause of Diverticulitis, Kidney Stones, Bladder Infections, Prostate Enlargement, Menopausal Discomfort, Cervical Dysplasia, PMS, and More… (ISCD Press, HI 2001).