SR Therapies

Normal Sweating

Sweating is an important process, which helps to maintain our body temperature. Sweating helps to remove waste products and toxins from our body, but sometimes the smell becomes unbearable, certain individuals perspire more than the required amount to cool the body, the reason for this is that each of our feet has more than 250'000 sweat glands. Your skin has two types of sweat glands, eccrine glands and apocrine glands, Eccrine glands occur over most of your body and open directly onto the surface of your skin. (Thompson 1978)

Apocrine glands develop in areas abundant in hair follicles, such as your scalp, under arms and genitals each person has between 2 million and 5 million eccrine sweat glands, when your body temperature rises, your autonomic nervous system stimulates these glands to secrete fluid onto the surface of your skin, here it cools your body as it evaporates. This fluid (perspiration) is composed mainly of water and salt (sodium chloride) and contains trace amounts of other electrolytes, substances that help to regulate the balance of fluids in your body, usually it's the bacterial breakdown of the apcorine sweat that causes the strong odours. (Thompson 1978)  

Foot odour begins from the sweat and the lingering of moisture on one's feet. Sweaty feet are usually caused by the improper function of what is called the ''sympathetic nervous system'' which controls sweating of the feet. Many adolescents seem to think that they may have a strange disorder, this is an error, sweating is a part of puberty, when your body starts to change, the 3 million sweat glands become more active, at the same time, glands in your armpits, groin and on the palms of your hands and soles of the feet produce oilier sweat.

Every square cm of the sole of the foot (and the palm of the hand) has about 600 sweat glands, more than any other part of the body, an average male foot exudes a quarter of a liter of sweat a day, and because we wear shoes, the sweat from our feet cannot evaporate normally, the accumulated sweat becomes warm, and encourages the growth of bacteria.

Reference:(Thompson 1978)