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I found this interesting. People with spinal cord injuries cannot sweat below the level of injury. Anything sounding familiar?

http://apparelyzed.com/temperature.html

I found this confirms my belief that this problem is accessible through the neck. I get relief that allows me to tricycle in the hot sun, from a head-cooler (do-rag soaked in water) under my helmet. and a hydrophilic-crystal-filled neckerchief. This is also soaked in water, but retains it better than the do-rag.

What does this mean? I think it means the blood that's going through these areas is not going fast enough to be cooled by skin sweating, that the processes in the endothelium and in the blood which should expand the veins aren't doing it, so that blood doesn't go fast enough, or that there is a stenosis which doesn't allow the blood to go fast enough, or that autonomic nerves which should control the blood supply be expanding the veins, aren't doing it because there is nerve damage.

I favour the not-autonomic-nerve scenario because this process seems to be automatic regardless of proximity of many nerves (such as in the wrist, which cools when dipped in cold water. I think this has to be quick, and cannot wait for signals to get to the brain and back.

I find that if a solid body part gets too hot (like my skull or my spine) it will take an awfully lonng time to cool, and my spasticity that results will take a long time to go away. So the protoection of cooling the neck prevents the spine from getting too hot, maybe?

Spinal fluid is reabsorbed in the brain back to the venous system. Adding more volume to the blood flow. The more I look at our problems the more interconnected I see our bodies are.

CSF is produced in the brain by modified ependymal cells in the choroid plexus (approx. 50-70%) and the remainder is formed around blood vessels and along ventricular walls. It circulates from the lateral ventricles to the foramen of Monro (Interventricular foramen), third ventricle, aqueduct of Sylvius (Cerebral aqueduct), fourth ventricle, foramen of Magendie (Median aperture) and foramina of Luschka (Lateral apertures), subarachnoid space over brain and spinal cord. It should be noted that the CSF moves in a pulsatile manner throughout the CSF system with nearly zero net flow. CSF is reabsorbed into venous sinus blood via arachnoid granulations.

It had been thought that CSF returns to the vascular system by entering the dural venous sinuses via the arachnoid granulations (or villi). However, some have suggested that CSF flow along the cranial nerves and spinal nerve roots allow it into the lymphatic channels; this flow may play a substantial role in CSF reabsorbtion, in particular in the neonate, in which arachnoid granulations are sparsely distributed. The flow of CSF to the nasal submucosal lymphatic channels through the cribriform plate seems to be especially important.