Water for the Healer and the Healthy

Southern California is a desert, little rain and not enough water. East of Los Angeles, up against the mountains where I live, it is especially hot in the summer with temperatures frequently in the 90s and reaching into the 100s a couple of weeks a year. With five kids, and a herd of grand kids, you need a pool to keep them from going crazy when schools out. Water is great for swimming and keeping cool in the hot Sun. Water's ability to absorb heat cools us off while its buoyancy allows us to float near the surface easily to breathe but still allows us to dive and glide underwater.

Swimming is recreational and relaxing but also has medicinal properties. It is great exercise and keeps us in shape with limited possibility for injury, as opposed to running or jogging with compression injuries from the repeated pounding of your joints against the road. Hydrotherapy, with it soothing whirlpools and hot tubs, relieves pain and promotes healing of burns and other skin lesions. Back in the day, that is before Advil® and Aleve®, water was also used outside of the pool for pain relief. I can remember using a hot water bottle, filled with hot or ice cold water, to take away the aches of a stiff back or the pounding of a migraine, making sleep almost attainable.

Medically water has other as well. In the old days boiling water was used to sterilize baby bottles, today water or steam can be used to sterilize surgical instruments or canning jars. Water also is used as a blood volume expander, a storage solution for organ transplants (as a saline solution) and as a medication diluent. Many drugs are either dissolved or suspended in water prior to administration. Lotions, creams, and ointments are mixtures of water with increasing amounts of oil, becoming more viscous as the oil percentage increases. I use water in my CPAP machine to deliver moist, pressurized air to my lungs while sleeping to prevent snoring and sleep apnea.

Recreationally, there is more to water than just swimming. The ocean provides opportunities for surfing and scuba diving. Boating can be done on rivers and lakes as well as the ocean. The buoyancy of water, the Archimedes Principle and his bathtub discovery, allows boats to float.

As the story goes, Archimedes was trying to solve a problem for King Hiero II. A gold crown had been made and the king suspected that the goldsmith was dishonest and had substituted silver for some of the gold. Archimedes had to find a way to determine if the crown was pure gold. While taking his bath, Archimedes observed that the water level rose as he got into the tub, and recognized that he could use this effect to determine the volume of the crown. If silver had been substituted the crown would weigh less than a similar volume of solid gold. Archimedes was so excited by this that he took to the streets naked shouting "Eureka!" He tested the crown and proved that silver had indeed been mixed with the gold.

Based on this principle the boat displaces its own volume in water and as long as the volume of boat weighs less than the volume of water it displaced with some boat left above the waterline, it will float. This principle allows massive ships, weighing many tons, to float upon the ocean and submarines to glide at any depth.

Now previously we have examined water chemically, physically, biologically, environmentally and in space. Today we looked at some of its medical and recreational uses. This brings us to the final attribute of water, which we will consider next time, "Spiritual Water."