Multi-Dimensional Healing
Medicinal baths are truly multidimensional healing and rejuvenating experiences. We can treat our heart, mind, body and soul, mixing in some joy and play in the water with ritualistic healing. It takes work to be healthy and very concentrated work to heal ourselves when we have already fallen to chronic illness. So we need time to exercise and we need time to detoxify just to maintain health. We need to practice defensive medicine in the 21st century, which is an age of intense toxicity.
Taking a hot bath is one of the best ways to usher in some recreation and respite in our daily life. In addition to facilitating relaxation and rest, taking hot baths regularly can be used to strengthen our bodies, increasing our stamina and ability to withstand high levels of stress. While soaking in a hot bath is definitely a pleasurable experience and it facilitates in alleviating anxiety, when you add medicines, minerals, salts, herbs and oils to hot water, you head into the stratosphere of medical and health practice. Spas of course work with this kind of medicine and so do the best sports medicine doctors.
My husband observed my crankiness for what it was—temporary. Soon after we got in the tub—you know how the water and jets just grab you and change your mood?—I was fine again.
Soaking in a hot bath for a minimum of 20 minutes following a hectic day is considered to be among the simplest methods to chill out and partake of a safe and effective medical treatment. Just the warmness of the water alleviates anxiety and helps to invigorate the body, calms the mind and enables you to experience a great feeling.
There is nothing stronger, in a medical healing sense, than soaking in a tubful of bicarbonate and magnesium. Throw in some sulfur and a little of your favorite essential oil and get ready to feel better.
There is nothing more gratifying than a magnesium bicarbonate bath at the end of a busy day filled with the common tensions of our times. I take these baths at least three times a week or more often when stress levels are high. I use Ancient Minerals bath flakes, about 3 cups in a tubful of very warm water, and add about 2 cups of sodium bicarbonate. Add in some essential oil and you have one of the most stress-relieving and effective medicinal baths you could possibly find. I am convinced this is as good as a day at one of the mineral springs. These baths provide detoxification, muscle relaxation, stress relief, easing of skin problems, and the absorption of both bicarbonate and minerals.
After strenuous physical activity there is nothing I have found that will ease sore muscles like one of these baths. Within minutes you can feel the effect and the soreness easing. My husband who has restless leg syndrome uses these baths to reduce the symptoms of this and I can tell which night he’s taken a magnesium bath and which night he hasn’t. On nights he bathes in magnesium, I am not awakened in the night by his incessant movement next to me in bed.
When stress or daily upsets get me down, the first thing I turn to is this combination bath and I can feel the tension literally drain out of my body. Since peripheral neuropathy has recently shown its face in my life due to diabetes, a bath in magnesium and bicarbonate provides a welcome relief for the tingling and burning in my feet and hands. I could not live without these baths, which also keep my magnesium levels up where they belong. People with low blood pressure should be careful as the combination of the magnesium and warm water will lower it. Be prepared to rest or retire for the night as it makes you feel so relaxed that sleep comes easily and naturally afterwards.
– Claudia French, R.N. (retired)
Dissolve a half to a full cup of bicarbonate of soda in a tub of warm water for soft, smooth-feeling skin and a relaxing bath. For a medical bath, start with a half-pound of bicarbonate and work up from there to 1-2 pounds; some use even more than two pounds. The standard advice is: Use 2-4 cups of sodium bicarbonate in a hot bath with equal amounts of sea salt. This assists in detoxification from exposure to heavy metals and other toxic chemicals including radiation contamination. In Spain, water is classified as bicarbonate if the water contains more than 250 ppm of free carbon gas. It is easy to take this up dramatically higher for a dramatically increased medical effect.
In the early days of my experience with magnesium I made very low dosage recommendations for magnesium baths. Now I am recommending much higher doses for baths ranging anywhere from 2 to 4 pounds to even 6 pounds of magnesium flakes or a combination of flakes with Dead Sea salt and perhaps even some Epsom salt. I am not talking about a nice hot magnesium bath for simple relaxation but a professional bath intended for a strong therapeutic effect. Under my old recommendations the percent of magnesium in the bath came only to 45-180 mg/l magnesium. When you discover that open seawater has a content of 1,300 mg/l magnesium, we see that our early recommendations were way too low. The driving force behind transdermal intake is the concentration gradient.
When we address several basic foundational aspects of physiology, when we cover all the bases, then we can hope for that long-sought-after cure. Magnesium is essential to good health and responsible for more than 300 biochemical reactions in the body. And magnesium alone addresses over 100 health issues. Numerous research studies that have tested magnesium up against commonly used drugs have frequently found that magnesium comes out on top in terms of both effectiveness as well as lack of side effects.
The concentration of elemental magnesium in the pure magnesium oil is about 100 g/liter and when you apply that directly on the skin, intake rate is high. But in the case of a bath application my new recommendation needs to be brought up to somewhere between 1,500[1] and 5,000 mg/l magnesium (1 to 4 times the sea concentration). The Dead Sea[2] has a concentration of up to 40,000 mg/l magnesium and people bathe every day in these waters. Fick’s Law of Membrane Permeability says that the amount of any solute (magnesium) that will be absorbed is directly dependent upon the area of contact, the concentration of the solution and the time that the solute is in contact with the membrane.[3]
If someone is having a stroke or heart attack you certainly do not want to throw them into a bath with four ounces of magnesium inside.
So we are talking about setting the therapeutic level of magnesium chloride concentrations in baths much higher and I recommend between 1 and 4 pounds in an average bath. Physical therapists and dermatologists, sport therapists, spas and other clinics will want to be using cost-effective bath flakes as compared to magnesium oil to achieve higher concentrations. Shipping costs are less also because the water has been taken out of the oil to make the flakes.
The quality of the flakes are an important factor for excess heavy metal ions will also flow in with the magnesium, thus my recommendation for Ancient Mineral products that come from 250 million-year-old deposits.
[1] Approx 2.65 lb of good quality magnesium flakes will provide approximately 1500 mg/L in a bath. Info from LL’s Magnetic Clay who sell Ancient Minerals Magnesium Oil and Bath Flakes of the purest quality: http://www.magneticclay.com/store/Departments/Ancient-Minerals-Magnesium-Bath-Flakes.aspx
[2] German research have shown Dead Sea salts have ultimately been the reason for reduced amounts of LangerhansA cells in the epidermis, and conversely salts of sodium chloride were void of any effect at all. (al G. S., 1990 December). Magnesium chloride is also discussed when the topic of dermatitis comes into play as an excellent treatment protocol. The anti-inflammatory result of utilizing hypertonic Dead Sea solution on atopic dermatitis by means of magnesium ions is well known. (al., 2002) Further studies also revealed that the magnesium solution greatly reduced inflammation in allergic contact dermatitis. The study involved five patients with an identified nickel allergy, where magnesium chloride (not sodium chloride) stifled nickel-sulfate induced contact dermatitis. (Greiner J, 1990 November)
[3] Diffusion is the mechanism by which components of a mixture are transported around the mixture by means of random molecular (Brownian) motion (cf. permeation: the ability of a diffusant to pass through a body – dependent on both the diffusion coefficient, D, and the solubility coefficient, S, ie, permeability coefficient, P = D.S). Flynn et al. cite Berthalot as postulating, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that the flow of mass by diffusion (ie, the flux), across a plane, was proportional to the concentration gradient of the diffusant across that plane. http://www.initium.demon.co.uk/fick.htm