Noah Swart

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Heat Stroke Vs Heat Exhaustion

Mr. Moss

You can still experience heat
failures at the beach

  When people think of a nice hot summer day they don’t typically thing deadly. The danger however is there and can be more deadly than one thinks. The body has an amazingly self-sufficient way in cooling itself off. Most people know this as the release of sweat, and although there is a more science behind it the important thing to know is that even your body’s defense system can break down.

  The two most common forms of body cooling failure are heat stroke and heat exhaustion, to most people these are practically the same thing but they actually are very different problems. The typical symptoms of heath stoke are high fever, severe headache, dizziness, red skin, and a dangerous lack of sweating. The typical symptoms of heat exhaustion are confusion, dizziness, fainting, fatigue, muscle cramps and vomiting. If you look through a full symptoms list you’ll notice they both share very similar symptoms but are uniquely divided through the lack of sweating with heath stroke and the cramps with exhaustion. Heat stroke is typically caused by dehydration and overexposure to hot environments, one could think of a desert walk as being potentially heat stroke territory.

  Heat exhaustion

Choose the right day to go on a walk, never on an
excessively hot day

is usually caused by dehydration, overdressing and excessive drinking in hot environments. Now if you look at the causes for both you’ll start to think, so they’re practically the same thing right? Well it’s a lot more complicated than that, heat exhaustion is defined at the bodies’ failure to cool itself. It better words your sweating isn’t doing enough. Meanwhile heat stroke is an overexposure to a hot environment, causing an over-stress on most parts of your body. Why does water solve both these problems? Well the body utilizes water in the most effective ways, using water as an internal coolant and transferring it to sweat to cool off the outsides of the body. With water you’re almost guaranteed to dodge both heat stroke and heat exhaustion. This is important to know if you spend long days out in the sun, or just enjoy an occasional walk through the desert.