Excessive sweating is defined by the Merck Manual Online Medical Library as profuse or constant sweating outside of the circumstances of fever or a very warm environment. Sweating is conventionally controlled by antiperspirants, but stronger oral drugs can be prescribed, and more recently botox injections have been used. Belonging to the mint family, sage is a culinary herb that has many beneficial health properties, notes Michael Murray, N.D., in the Encyclopedia of Healing Foods, which identifies one of these properties as "anhidrotic" or a perspiration preventive.
Hyperhidrosis
Excessive sweating, known clinically as hyperhidrosis, generally affects the palms of the hands, soles of the feet, armpits or genital areas. Although no specific cause is known, hyperhidrosis occurs as a symptom in many conditions. Some conditions listed on the Merck website include an overactive thyroid gland, low blood sugar and certain pituitary disorders. The review article Current Therapeutic Strategies for Hyperhidrosis, published in the European Journal of Dermatology, notes that sage tea in a dose of at least 1 liter per day or in the form of the commercially available sage tablets Sweatosan, can be occasionally helpful for both localized and generalized forms of hyperhydrosis.
Fever
According to Murray, sage tea is great for inducing a sweat during a fever. This property is known as diaphoresis. A diaphoretic is an agent that has the power to increase sweating, which is a control mechanism in the body invoked to reduce the effects of an increasing internal body temperature. The pores open up, similar to an air-conditioning vent, and the heat is condensed into the water, recognized as sweat. The fever is a normal immune response initiated by the presence of certain bacteria, viruses and other pathogens. The purpose of a fever is to destroy organisms sensitive to changes in temperature, and therefore suppression of a fever is not ideal. In medical herbalism, the use of diaphoretics helps to counter the high temperatures of a fever by cooling off the body through sweat.
Menopause
One of the most common symptoms of menopause is hot flashes, and when they occur at night, they are called night sweats. The higher range of the body's thermoregulatory center is thought to be lower in menopausal women than in women of reproductive age, according to a 2003 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. This effect is thought to be related to the decreasing levels of estrogen occurring during menopause. A lowered thermostat, or set-point, in menopause allows small changes in temperature that are tolerable in most people to induce a cooling state mediated through the sweating response. A Huntington College of Health Sciences article on hormone replacement therapy suggests sage leaf extract for night sweats, with 2.5 percent rosmarinic acid and 3.0 to 3.5 percent essential oil content, recommended at a dosage of 500mg daily. Even the German E Commission, the authoritative context of herbal medicines, has approved sage as an anhydrotic in the cases of excessive perspiration.
References
- Merck Manual Online Medical Library: Excessive Sweating
- European Journal of Dermatology: Current Therapeutic Strategies for Hyperhydrosis: A Review
- The Encyclopedia of Healing Foods: Micheal Murray, N.D., and Joseph Pizzorno, N.D.; 2005
- The Journal of the American Medical Association: Paroxetine Controlled Release in the Treatment of Menopausal Hot Flashes
- Huntington College of Health Sciences: Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT): Risks and Dietary Supplement Alternatives
