Air-Conditioning and Heating

The clearest evidence Aajonus offered for how completely modern people depend on climate control was the New York City blackout, in which approximately 230 people died in three days from heat prostration alone, not from heart attacks or other causes, simply from the absence of air conditioning during a summer humidity event. He used this as a direct demonstration: if a three-day blackout killed 230 people, a week-long event would have been catastrophic. Massive numbers of people die whenever they lose heating in winter or cooling in summer, and this is not because the temperatures involved are extreme by historical standards but because the human body has lost its capacity to self-regulate.

The body's natural mechanism for heating itself involves the spleen, which holds excess blood and can release it into circulation to raise body temperature when needed. The body's natural cooling involves perspiration and other regulatory systems. Both of these are systematically undermined when a person spends their entire life in a 68 to 72 degree environment that never demands adaptation. Aajonus described this as a profound weakening that a hundred years ago simply did not exist at the population level.

He also described the social consequences of temperature regulation. In an era without central heating, physical closeness was not optional: "the husband and wife sleeping very close together" because cold made separation impossible. Children shared one bed. Families shared heat from a single wood or coal stove. The regulated modern home, where each person has their own temperature zone, eliminated that camaraderie. Aajonus noted wryly that now the only way to get closeness back is to deliberately chill the house or turn off the air conditioning, even when it is 30 degrees outside.

Aajonus frequently addressed air conditioning not just as a systemic civilizational problem but as an immediate physical irritant in enclosed spaces. In workshop settings he repeatedly asked for air conditioning to be turned off, raised in temperature, or supplemented with open doors and windows to allow fresh air circulation. His objection was to the blowing of conditioned, filtered, recirculated air rather than natural ventilation, and he consistently preferred open doors and cross-ventilation over mechanical cooling, describing the air conditioning itself as "the problem" even when the room temperature was uncomfortable without it.

His concern with air conditioning in buildings was also connected to the broader issue of indoor air quality. Modern buildings trap chemical off-gassing from construction materials, paints, adhesives, and synthetic furnishings, and sealed mechanical ventilation recirculates those toxins rather than diluting them. This is distinct from the temperature regulation problem but is inseparable from it in practice, because the same sealing that allows precise temperature control also prevents the natural ventilation that would otherwise carry chemical vapors out.

For houses, apartments, or condos built, remodeled, renovated, or painted within the last five years, Aajonus described a specific protocol to drive out toxic chemical off-gassing from construction materials. The process uses heat deliberately to accelerate what the building materials will do slowly over years.

The protocol begins by removing all electronic equipment and furniture from each room. Then two to three filament space heaters and one infrared generator are placed in each room. One or two windows in each room and hallway are opened slightly. The heaters and infrared generator are turned to their highest heat setting. Rooms are then allowed to cook slowly for three to five days. The exception is water-based paint, which requires only 24 hours; any other paint and construction material requires the full three to five days.

After the rooms and hallways have been cured, fans are placed in every room and hallway, all windows and doors are opened fully, and the space is ventilated for two to three days with fans running on high. Aajonus noted that it is possible to cure one room at a time to avoid having to remove all furniture from the entire home simultaneously, but the door to the room being cured must be kept closed and sealed during the process. After curing, any mild residual off-gassing that may occur can be neutralized by plants.

For new vehicles, the same principle applies. Aajonus recommended opening all windows and doors and allowing the vehicle to bake in the sun for up to 30 days to speed the major off-gassing process of new car materials. During that 30-day period, he recommended keeping all windows down while driving and wearing a gas mask to prevent inhaling exhaust fumes from other vehicles. In areas with inclement weather, an awning should block rain or snow from filling the open car during that period.

NASA and the Associated Landscape Contractors of America conducted research confirming that common indoor plants absorb harmful gases and clean the air in modern sealed buildings. Aajonus incorporated this finding directly into his recommendations. The general guideline is one large plant per 100 square feet for an average home or office, with more heavily polluted environments requiring greater concentrations. Peace lily and chrysanthemum were identified as most efficient at removing trichloroethylene. All plants produce oxygen through photosynthesis and absorb carbon, including English ivy, Chinese evergreen, bamboo palm, snake plant, Dracaena Marginata, corn plant, and Janet Craig varieties. After a room has been chemically cured with the heat protocol, plants can handle any subsequent mild off-gassing that remains.

Aajonus acknowledged that pre-modern heating was not without serious hazard. The greatest fears before modern temperature control were freezing and starvation, and most other cold-season deaths came not from the cold itself but from gradual nightly carbon monoxide and tar poisoning from burning wood or coal in fireplaces, wood stoves, and ovens in houses that were closed, poorly ventilated, or entirely non-ventilated. That indoor pollution created lung toxicity that caused frequent flu and other respiratory diseases. In major cities, additional pollution came from silversmiths and blacksmiths operating every few blocks, and from coal-burning furnaces in factories, homes, and buildings that rarely had tall smokestacks to dilute toxic particles into the upper atmosphere.

So Aajonus's position was not that pre-modern conditions were ideal. The old heating methods were genuinely toxic to the respiratory system. His point was that the solution to that problem, namely the sealed climate-controlled modern building, traded one set of harms for another while simultaneously degrading the constitutional fitness of the population.

Running parallel to the discussion of climate control as a civilizational problem is Aajonus's consistent therapeutic principle that heat, applied correctly, is the primary healing modality for almost any condition involving the body. This is where the air conditioning and heating discussion intersects most directly with clinical practice.

He stated explicitly and repeatedly that any injury, any pain, and any area of the body undergoing healing requires heat, not cold. Cold is only acceptable for one to two minutes maximum, purely to numb acute pain, and should never be the primary treatment. Heat increases circulation of nutrients to an area, promotes detoxification, and relieves, by his estimate, approximately 80% of pain on its own.

For applying heat to the body, the correct tool is a rubber hot water bottle, not an electric heating pad. Heating pads produce electromagnetic fields ranging from 75 to 175 milligauss, and it takes only 3 milligauss to alter the molecular structure of an animal cell. At 3 milligauss, all cellular and molecular structures in animal cells are negatively altered. At the EMF output of a standard heating pad, the damage is profound: cells do not reproduce well afterward and remain weak. The same prohibition applies to electric blankets. If an electric blanket is used at all, it should be turned on before getting into bed to pre-warm the sheets and then turned off immediately upon getting in, never left on while sleeping. Microwave heat packs deliver radiation along with heat and alter molecular structure; they are equally contraindicated. The only safe heating apparatus is a rubber hot water bottle, which produces no electromagnetic field.

When a hot water bottle becomes too hot and risks burning the skin or destroying enzymes in the tissue, it should be wrapped in an extra towel. The risk of getting it too hot is real: temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit destroy enzymes in the skin, so the wrapping serves as a temperature buffer to keep the surface contact below that threshold.

One specific application of the heating principle concerns fever, which Aajonus described as the body's own healing crisis and as something to be ridden out rather than suppressed. He framed fever as the body generating the same heat that causes cellular division to increase, the same hot and steamy internal environment that accelerates regeneration. His exact analogy was "like a hot day when the air conditioning is gone for a couple of days." The advice was to get through it and ride it, because someone who allows a fever to run its course can recover in days, whereas someone who takes aspirin or other fever-reducing medications may spend six weeks returning to normal. For someone on the primal diet, he said, even a flu might resolve in a few days. The air conditioning metaphor here is inverted: the fever is the beneficial heat that the body generates when it needs to heal, and suppressing it is analogous to running air conditioning to kill a productive biological process.

Aajonus returned consistently to the idea that the population has been made constitutionally fragile by climate control, and he made this point not as an abstraction but by contrasting it with specific populations he had observed. Indigenous tribes in arctic conditions, including the people he lived with in Alaska, were able to function in extreme cold without insulation that modern people require. He posed the question directly: would modern people survive naked in an iglu? Would infants survive crawling on an ice floor? His answer was that most would not, and that this represents a biological failure of the contemporary population rather than an environmental deficiency.

One hundred years ago, he stated, this was not the case. Everybody was tough. Nobody had central heating. Nobody had central air conditioning. By contrast, his estimate was that in the present era, approximately 80% of people would die if climate control were removed. That figure captures the scope of constitutional degradation he attributed in significant part to the removal of thermal stress from daily life.

He made a related point about body fat and physical robustness. Before modern temperature regulation, fat was a survival necessity. Women who were "fat and robust" were considered beautiful because they could survive childbirth and winter simultaneously while raising many children. A cold sleeping environment meant close physical contact for warmth, which built emotional bonds and camaraderie. The regulated modern home dissolved all of that by making fat unnecessary for warmth and physical closeness unnecessary for survival.

Beyond the constitutional and social dimensions, Aajonus also flagged the simple physical problem of being in a mechanically air-conditioned room: it blows cool or cold air that inhibits healing in any part of the body already working to repair itself. He noted during a workshop that his own leg, which was undergoing healing, was being bothered by the air conditioning blowing cold air on it, and he stated the general principle: "anything that is healing needs a lot of heat." This is why he preferred open windows, natural ventilation, and warmer ambient temperatures even when a conventional setting would maintain cooler indoor temperatures for comfort.

The blown air of air conditioning also creates a moving air environment that pulls heat away from the skin surface, interfering with the body's attempts to maintain temperature at injured or detoxifying areas. Hot water bottles placed directly on the area of concern are the correct response, providing sustained local heat without electromagnetic interference.

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