Sunstroke is also called heat stroke. Staying under intense heat for a very long time may cause sunstroke with symptoms like high fever (temperature above 104°F), confused thinking, and lack of awareness of one's surroundings.
Heat stroke occurs because the body cannot lose heat rapidly enough in extreme heat. When the body cannot cool itself, body temperature continues to rise rapidly to dangerously high levels. Heat stroke can temporarily or permanently damage vital organs, such as the heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, and brain. Heat stroke may develop slowly, over hours, days or quickly.
There are two types of sunstroke: Mild and severe.
Sunstroke main symptoms: Headache, dizziness, profuse sweating, inflamed skin, fever, coarse breathing, dry mouth, great thirst, superficial, rapid pulse.
Quick remedies
Heatstroke treatment centers on cooling your body to a normal temperature to prevent or reduce damage to your brain and vital organs. A bath of cold or ice water has been proved to be the most effective way of quickly lowering your core body temperature. The quicker you can receive cold water immersion, the less risk of death and organ damage.
If cold water immersion is unavailable, health care workers may try to lower your body temperature using an evaporation method. Cool water is misted on your body while warm air is fanned over you, causing the water to evaporate and cool your skin.
Another method is to wrap you in a special cooling blanket and apply ice packs to your groin, neck, back and armpits to lower your temperature.
Drink plenty of fluids. Also, because you lose salt through sweating, you can replenish salt and water with some sports drinks. If your doctor has restricted your fluid or salt intake, check with him or her to see how much you should drink and whether you should replace salt.
Don't drink sugary or alcoholic beverages to re-hydrate. These drinks may interfere with your body's ability to control your temperature. Also, very cold drinks can cause stomach cramps.
In this column, I have shown a simple treatment for prevention of sunstroke as per our ancient science of applying colour therapy as shown in the figures.
Apply green dots on the wrist (one on right side and one on left). Also apply the same colour below the nails on left hand (as shown in the figure below).
