Michigan Camp Meeting 2024: As For Me and My House

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

The Science and Ministry of Hydrotherapy

John Kelly

Susan Pellandini

Melanie Quion

Sharon Szynkowski

01 The Science and Ministry of Hydrotherapy

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2024 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

Lord thanks for this opportunity to be at Michigan Camp Meeting and to learn and to gain skills, to gain tools for our families and to help others.

And we just want you to be here in this place, be with each person who is attending as they think and cogitate about how they would use these tools in their own setting.

Okay, so let's talk about Christ's method of how he reached out to people.

And if you were to guess the ratio of healing to teaching and preaching in Jesus' life ministry here on earth, what would you say that that would be?

Wow, we've got quite the dichotomy there.

Well, if we go to Matthew 4.23 and read through Matthew 9.35, we're not gonna do all that right now, but you can do this on your own time, the ratio of Jesus' healing to preaching is 3 to 1, So 75%.

He spent a lot of time touching people and meeting their needs.

What's the ratio in our church worldwide?

So here's a breakdown of Christ's method of healing.

And this is taken from Ministry of Healing.

Pastor Shane Anderson kind of succinctly put these in the 5 Cs.

And many of us may know this quote, but Jesus made contact with people.

He didn't care about caste, prejudice, anything like that.

He cared to their needs and this is where hydrotherapy treatments come in handy, meeting the need of the individual.

He developed a trust relationship with people.

And we can do the same with evangelistic crusades and other health services that we may do in our communities.

So Ministry of Healing says that Jesus spent more time healing than preaching during his earthly ministry.

If you give somebody something, you get their attention.

Ah, if you heal someone's physical needs, it opens the door for a spiritual need.

He made each work of healing an occasion for implanting divine principles in the mind and the soul.

So did the Pharisees have these divine principles of healing?

It's like Jesus was walking a fine line of not getting into any of those groups, but he had a different way of communicating what his government was all about.

The healing was for a purpose, to break down prejudice and cause the hearer to be ready to receive the message of hope and salvation that he offered.

Relieving physical suffering gives us an opportunity to minister to the spiritual need.

You're spending time with somebody, you're meeting their need, and sometimes they just open up and share what's really going on, the deeper issue.

Sometimes the issue is not the issue, Right?

Okay, so we are engineered for health and healing, focusing on hydrotherapy.

This requires knowledge, skill, and common sense, okay, just as any other intervention.

Just like allopathic medicine, It does require care and attention to detail.

Natural methods are less dramatic than drug therapy, yet can be just as effective with fewer side effects.

Hydro is usually connected with other lifestyle principles.

However, if you're giving a treatment to somebody and they're dehydrated, you may not have as therapeutic of a reaction, right?

Or if the circulation doesn't have the nutrition to get where it needs to, then the nutrition aspect needs to be there as well.

It's a result of obedience to natural law.

1 cannot defy the law of gravity simply because the choice is not made to obey it.

Oh, I'm just gonna defy gravity because I want to.

You jump off a building and you're gonna go splat and that's the end of you.

But sometimes we think we can just, you know, not obey any other natural law and hope we can get away with it.

But Christ, the creator, wants us all to trust that from the foundation of time, every provision has been given at our disposal.

God is a God of love and provision and care.

This is what Agatha Thrash said, and this is actually in your handout.

Should dis-ease come as a result of transgression of natural law, a way of healing was already provided in the body and in the things of nature, just as the remedy for sin was prepared in advance for the breaking of moral law." So we understand that, you know, before sin was on this planet, Christ already decided he was going to be the Savior.

And he already put things in our bodies and in the things of nature in case that we decided to do our own thing, those healing mechanisms were there.

And so now hydrotherapy is what awakens those healing mechanisms.

So the body is equipped to Fight dis-ease.

So right now as you're sitting there, your body is a war zone, right?

To maintain what it's trying to maintain.

With dis-ease, the body is fighting to heal itself.

Symptoms occur that give clues to dis-ease.

And sometimes those symptoms need to be there like pain and fever.

Many times we're just trying to kill that off before we've realized what the real issue is, right?

We treat pain but then we don't know what the cause of the disease is.

Treatments should be simple, reasonable, effective without negative side effects on the individual.

So just because hydrotherapy is natural does not mean we negate careful collection and documentation of medical and health data.

Water treatments need to be skillfully applied for expected optimal results.

Recognizing cautions and contraindications is important for safety.

Many should seek to obtain the education that will enable them to combat disease in its various forms by the most simple methods, water treatments wisely and skillfully given.

And that's again what caught my attention, wisely and skillfully given.

Sometimes we think that oh this is just natural, nothing bad can happen, but we still need to take precaution and know what we're doing with the therapeutic temperature that we are applying.

Obviously the origin has been around since antiquity in many different countries and cultures.

We don't need to go into the history of all of that, but let's get a working definition of what hydrotherapy is.

So the therapeutic use of water in any of its 3 forms, so liquid, steam, or ice to maintain or restore health.

02 The Science and Ministry of Hydrotherapy

Heavenly Father, We thank you for the teaching and healing ministry of Jesus.

We thank you for this opportunity to consider how you have made us, how our bodies and minds work, and also to consider how you are working to help us.

So Lord, we ask that you'll be with us today, give us understanding, and we pray that it would not be just a mental understanding, but also an understanding of the heart and a infilling of your Holy Spirit that will help us to be what you have made us to be.

We pray these things in Jesus' name, amen.

All right, so today we're gonna talk about how choice happens, and we all experience making choices, and often we experience those decisions in different ways at different times.

And so what we're going to talk about is kind of a general overview of the process, at least 1 way of looking at it.

There's multiple different ways that people try to diagram this or make sense of it.

There are, believe it or not, there are some people who do not believe that we actually make choices.

We all experience making decisions on a daily basis, and that is first and foremost a function of how God created us.

So our topic today is, why do you do what you do?

And if you ask people that, you get all sorts of answers.

Did you ever have a child that did something that didn't make sense and you asked, why did you do that?

Did you get a good, logical, reasonable answer?

You're like, well, because he hit me first.

So, our ability to make choices, I believe, is rooted in the way that God made us.

And we first read about that in Genesis chapter 1 and we'll read just verse 27 right now it says, so God created man in his own image in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them." So we are created in the image of God.

So we're not God, we're not exactly like God, but in some way, we're a reflection of God.

Something about the characteristics of God is built into us as well.

And I believe 1 of those things is the power to make decisions, to choose right or wrong, good or bad, left or right.

As we read into the next chapter, chapter 2 of Genesis in verse 7, we read that the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul.

So here we have a fairly simple description of creation, but the implications really are profound.

Some of our friends, even Christian friends, believe that somehow in the cosmic dust there was a soul that was looking for a body, and there happened to be a body that was born or conceived or something and so the soul came down and lives in this body until the body is done away with and then the soul is set free to go on to the next stage of existence.

Well, that's not what the Bible teaches, and it also doesn't fit with our experience of life, because we all know intuitively that our body and our mind and our spirit are intimately connected.

When you're really sick, you don't really feel like praising God and worshiping.

You feel like, you know, and so there's this complex interplay between what we call our body and our mind and our spirit.

And we sometimes talk about them as if they're separate things, but in reality they're not actually separate.

They're all different parts of the same thing, which is us, created in the image of God.

And so when we start to talk about making decisions, we can consider the different parts of us for the sake of understanding or discussion and most people when I ask them about their decision-making process they'll refer to either their thoughts or their feelings.

So when you have a decision to make, you think about it, you have some thoughts, you kind of reason through what's the best decision to make, or you might just do what you feel like doing at the moment.

They gave me the after lunch slot, which is the worst possible 1.

I don't know if that's a punishment or if they thought I was just good enough to keep you awake.

So we have thoughts and feelings, and as a result of our thoughts and feelings, then that plays into our decision-making process.

So let's talk a little bit about our thoughts, and we typically think of this as sort of the cognitive or the mental part of our mind, that part of us where we have beliefs about all sorts of things.

We have memories about the past and we have plans for the future and all of these things are part of our, the realm of our thoughts.

Then we have feelings and there's all sorts of feelings that we have and in fact Here I have a list of emotions and sometimes the language is a little bit fuzzy, right?

Feelings can be emotions and feelings can also be physical feelings.

And sometimes you can't really tell the difference.

Some sorts of feelings you can't quite tell if it's your body or your mind, and that's because it's probably both.

So we have things like love, anger, and fear.

You know, any type of emotion you could list there, joy, sadness, and on and on it goes.

Now, if we take our thoughts and feelings and we think about extending this continuum, we would, in the direction farther toward thoughts, what would we normally put up there?

I know you haven't seen this presentation before, so you don't know.

But typically that would be what we would think of as spirit.

And then what if we go the other way on this continuum?

So the Bible often uses the term flesh, and so that's the physical part of us that we can touch and feel and that we experience bodily sensations.

So then, what is the spiritual part of us, if we're gonna define it a little bit more?

Well, We could have a whole seminar just on that, trying to define what is spiritual.

And it's interesting that there's a lot of research in the last 25 years or so on the connection between health and spirituality, and a lot of the researchers struggle to define spirituality, because if you're going to research something and put numbers to it, you have to define it.

But for our purposes this week, we're going to talk about our spirit, the spiritual part of us.

At least it includes our conscience, the part of us that informs us about right and wrong, and I like to put in this category also reason.

Now some people would argue and say, well that's not really spiritual, It's part of your thinking brain, but it's not spiritual.

Okay, I'm not gonna quibble really about the details because remember I already said these are artificial distinctions after all, but it does help us a little bit.

Yes, it involves our body and our emotions and our our thoughts, but ultimately it's a spiritual thing that's taking place when we worship.

And then if we go to the other end, back to the flesh side of the equation, we have feelings, and these are like bodily feelings, sensations, things like that.

Now let me ask you, is pain physical, mental?

Yeah, you've all experienced sometimes spiritual, sometimes it's all of the above, right?

But there's definitely physical pain that we experience.

Yeah, I mean, just an hour ago, I was feeling physically hungry.

Like this part of me was talking to the other part of me saying, hey move over to your campsite and fill out this time.

So there's that physical component, but there's also a mental component to it.

So again, the distinction is somewhat artificial, but you sort of get the drift of where we're going here.

And then I would put in here lust as sort of a broad category for all of our physical desires.

Okay, so that could include food, water, it could include sexuality, it could include other physical things that we desire.

You might even think of the desire to breathe.

You know, most of us don't think about breathing that much, but you know, if you have an asthma attack, all of a sudden you have a lust for air.

I don't know if anybody's ever experienced that, but that becomes very very important when it's challenged in some way.

So, all of these things so far, they're not necessarily good or bad, they're just things that are.

So, anger is an emotion, and what makes it good or bad is not just having it, it's what do you do with it, what prompted it, and how do you respond to it.

Okay, well We'll talk about some examples in a little bit.

Then we have this thing that's called the power of choice.

A lot of people don't even think about that.

They don't realize that they have the power of choice because they just make decisions automatically sometimes.

03 The Science and Ministry of Hydrotherapy

Heavenly Father, you gave us good gifts at creation.

You created our bodies in a way that works in concert with your good gifts.

And now I just ask that you give us wisdom as we explore those 2 things together today and help us to learn to apply your good gifts in a way that will bless and minister to others.

So my name is Sharon Schinkowski and I do really appreciate natural remedies in various forms, including hydrotherapy.

My professional background is a physical therapist.

We learn these principles as physical therapists in school, but we don't use hydrotherapy very much in our clinical practice.

Hydrotherapy is low-tech but high-touch, And that's not really cost-effective in traditional healthcare.

In traditional healthcare you get reimbursed more for high-tech and low-touch.

So use of technology and limited hands-on because people with hands-on cost money.

But people with hands-on are also what blesses others.

People with hands-on interacting in the lives of the others are what gives a picture of Jesus Christ to the world.

And so I'm excited that I'm able to use these hydrotherapy techniques in unpaid settings much more than in paid settings.

A couple of the ways that I've used it in ministry are community seminars on natural remedies.

Unfortunately, more popular with your community members oftentimes than with your church members, which is a sad reality and I'd like to see that change that we have more church members interested in hydrotherapy as well.

But that's 1 way that ministry with hydrotherapy has happened.

My background, other than physical therapy, in hydrotherapy is I have worked some in a lifestyle program.

And currently I am working as a lab instructor for Hydrotherapy Hub.

And we've talked about that a little bit at the previous seminars this week.

It's an online training with guided practice via Zoom that teaches hydrotherapy skills.

So I've also used hydrotherapy with my family, church members, and community friends, Bible study interests.

It's a great way for connecting with people and pointing them to Jesus and showing the love of Jesus to them.

So our title today is treating our most common ailments with our most abundant resource, our most abundant resource, water.

Something inexpensive, something available to most, and it can treat many of our common ailments.

And today I'm going to be sharing my favorite hydrotherapy treatment as a physical therapist.

It is my own personal go-to if I have to treat something on myself that I would use.

And the fact that we can do this kind of treatment, this kind of Healing that comes from something that's so readily available and so inexpensive is, to me, a picture of God's grace.

His gifts that are available to all, simple treatments but very profound.

So hydrotherapy, as has been already mentioned this week, has a profound effect on many body systems.

And today we're going to focus on the hydrotherapy's effect on the circulatory system.

So we actually use hydrotherapy to elicit a specific response in the body.

And so, if we have this basic understanding of the circulatory system, it helps us to make intelligent use and intelligent decisions when we're using hydrotherapy treatments as we're learning them and as we're using them.

So the circulatory system is made up of the blood, the blood vessels, and the heart.

And the heart functions as the pump that pumps the blood through this network of blood vessels.

So we have arteries that carry oxygenated blood away from the heart to the entire body, and then we have veins that carry the deoxygenated blood back to the heart.

The heart then sends the blood to the lungs to get reoxygenated before it pumps it back to the rest of the body again.

Moment by moment by moment, without us thinking about it, our bodies are really marvelously designed and made.

Now the fun part for me about the circulatory system is that this is the transport system of the body.

It is the part of the body that does all the deliveries and the pickups.

And the things that it delivers, the blood vessels deliver oxygen, which is necessary for every cell, for every body function.

And that oxygen is carried by the red blood cells.

Okay, so everything that we take in gets eventually after digestion gets picked up by the blood and carried throughout the body.

It delivers hormones, any other chemicals that are needed for functions in the body.

It delivers all the immune cells, the white blood cells are the primary immune cells.

Also the antibodies that are created by the white blood cells.

And then it also delivers platelets which are for clotting.

When bleeding occurs and you need something to stop that bleeding.

So the bloodstream delivers everything that our cells and our organs need for life.

They deliver everything that we need for maintaining health.

And they deliver everything that we need for healing when our health has been compromised in some way, either through disease or toxicity or injury.

So when there is a threat like that to the body, the circulation is increased in the threatened area.

So wherever the damage has occurred, wherever the illness is, the blood supply is increased in that area.

And it delivers everything that the tissues, the organs need for healing, to repair the damage and to limit the damage.

So the threat, like we said, could be a foreign object like a bacteria, a virus, toxins, or even a foreign object like a splinter.

Or the threat may be a disease process, or it may be damage to the tissue like a cut, a sprain or a fractured bone.

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