She had a headache that made her feel feverish and flushed, though with no real temperature. The headache felt like a tight band around the head accompanied by a stabbing pain. Her mouth was very dry and she wanted cold drinks but not more that a mouthful. 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.