Extreme Heat: How Your Body Responds and How to Stay Safe

Each summer, the human body wages a quiet battle against forces older than civilization itself — and sometimes, it loses. When heat becomes extreme and humidity seals the air like a lid, the body's ancient cooling systems, refined over millennia, can be overwhelmed in hours. Deaths from extreme heat have risen 74%, a number that carries within it the faces of the elderly, the very young, and those already carrying the weight of chronic illness. Understanding how the body fails in heat is not merely medical knowledge — it is a form of care we owe one another.