We get questions from people with Raynaud’s asking if it’s possible to train for cold tolerance – can your body acclimate to better accept cold temperatures? While it’s challenging, it appears there’s some promise on cold therapy for people with Raynaud’s.
Dr. Murray Hamlet at the Army’s Research Institute of Environmental Medicine developed a method of training the way the body responds to cold exposure. Interviewed by the New York Times in 1988, Dr. Hamlet reports it builds on a procedure first explored by an army doctor in the 1970’s at a lab in Alaska. Here’s what’s involved: 3 to 6 times a day, immerse the hands in warm water indoors. He suggests using an ice chest for the warm water because it’s needed for the second step – go outside in cold weather and expose the body to the cold, except for the hands, which are submerged in the ice chest full of warm water. After about 50 rounds of this process (nobody said it was an instant solution!), you’ve trained the blood vessels not to constrict when presented with cold temperatures. Dr. Hamlet ran a test with this design using 150 Raynaud’s sufferers and labeled it a success. There’s one caveat: It won’t likely work for those with secondary Raynaud’s associated with more serious autoimmune diseases or other direct causes, but it is promising for those with the primary form, which covers the large majority of Raynaud’s sufferers (90%).
In 2010, Dr. Fredrick Wigley, one of the world’s leading experts on Raynaud’s, reported the results of a similar study in the