The concept of cold therapy: history and present day

2025-07-14

The most important advantage of cryotherapy is its physiological properties, which are unattainable for other methods. Cold persistently forces our body to independently understand its problems and find ways to eliminate them.

The concept of aerocryotherapy (ACT) – pulsed stimulating surface effects of cryogenic temperatures (below -130 ° C) to obtain a physiological response of the body to cold – originated at the turn of the 70s and 80s of the 20th century in Japan. This physiotherapeutic effect became an addition to the main treatment of diseases of the musculoskeletal system. Japanese experience was transferred to European soil almost simultaneously, and this new branch of medicine began to develop very quickly.

At the 1982 rheumatology congress in Wiesbaden, the Japanese doctor Tosimo Yamauchi made a report on the very effective results of the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis in a special air cryochamber with a temperature of -160 ° C to -180 ° C. Since ancient times, people have known that local cold effects can reduce pain. T. Yamauchi and his colleagues drew attention to this phenomenon and began to actively search for ways to enhance this analgesic effect.

At first glance, the way to increase the effect was obvious – it was necessary to lower the temperature of the cooling bandage. This is exactly the path that Japanese rheumatologists took: acting by trial and error, they affected the joints with increasingly lower temperatures. The result of these searches was ambiguous – the joints did indeed become pain-free, but most often with severe frostbite of the skin.

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