Her hands and feet became swollen and warm to the touch and she became quite irritable. In the West, when we have bladder infections, because we find a bacterial count to be high, we naturally consider that to be the cause and immediately enter into a course or two of antibiotics. Germs proliferate where there is warmth and stagnation. Damp heat meets these two requirements and so we become a breeding ground for germs, and we try to label the germs as the causitive factor. But in Chinese medicine we know that it is not the germ that is the problem, but the imbalance of energy which enables the germ to thrive.
Damp heat is an energetic condition of the body that is just what it sounds like.
Most of the time it starts out as dampness in the body that after stagnating or lying still for awhile, which turns to heat. Dampness by itself is quite common in North America as it is endemic in our diet, or may be due to an over-abundance of wet environmental conditions. Dampness in the body tends to settle in lower regions like the lower abdominal regions, which we call the lower warmer, but it will begin to change the workings of the body as a whole. Dampness by itself causes a fair amount of stagnation, just as a pond in a stream will slow or stop the rush of water moving into it. For the most part dampness attracts coldness and so a person who is more damp will feel chilled through and through.