Rafa's story gets framed as a business origin story, but there's something more important underneath it. This is about a community that didn't have access to recovery tools that other cities take for granted — and one person who decided to fix that. El Paso isn't Manhattan. It isn't Austin. The contrast therapy market hadn't arrived yet. Rafa saw the gap and stepped into it. That matters, both as a business story and as a wellness story.
The core claim is simple: cold plunges, infrared saunas, compression therapy, and IV drips can meaningfully improve recovery and mood. And when these tools are genuinely new to a community, the first person to bring them in doesn't just build a business. They shift what people think is possible for their health.
The dopamine figure Rafa mentions — two to three times baseline within the first minute of cold immersion — is not marketing language. That's from peer-reviewed research. What's less often discussed is the durability of that response. Unlike the dopamine spike from, say, caffeine or social media, the increase from cold exposure is sustained. It doesn't spike and crash. It builds gradually and stays elevated for several hours afterward. That's a meaningfully different neurochemical pattern.
The IV therapy claim is where I'd introduce some nuance. For generally healthy people with adequate nutrition, the "100% absorption" argument is technically true but practically overstated — your gut does an excellent job absorbing nutrients from whole foods when your digestion is functioning well. IV therapy shines in specific contexts: post-illness recovery, serious athletic demands, documented deficiencies. As a complement to the contrast protocol? Potentially useful. As a standalone optimization for the average person? The evidence is thinner than the marketing suggests.
There's a pattern I keep seeing across the knowledge base. Andrew Sheridan's work on ice baths and the nervous system points to the same mechanism Rafa is describing — cold exposure as a tool for recalibrating stress response, not just a recovery modality. When you sit in a cold plunge uncomfortable and breathe through it, you are literally training your nervous system to handle discomfort without catastrophizing. That's not a metaphor. That's neurological adaptation. The sympathetic response activates, norepinephrine floods the system, and over time your threshold for triggering that panic response rises.
For someone coming out of 17 years of active duty — where stress inoculation was literally part of the job — this probably felt familiar. The discipline translates. Cold exposure rewards the same psychological qualities that military training develops: the ability to commit to something uncomfortable and stay present through it.
If you're new to contrast therapy, don't try to stack everything at once. Pick one modality and do it consistently for three weeks before adding another. Cold plunge three times a week is enough to start noticing the neurochemical and anti-inflammatory effects. Get comfortable with the discomfort first. Then layer in heat. The contrast between the two is where the real adaptation happens — but only if your nervous system has already learned to handle each stimulus independently.
The Othership story — scaling from a garage in Toronto to the largest sauna and ice bath studio in New York City — and Rafa's story in El Paso are the same story at different stages. One person sees the gap, builds something from nothing, and a community changes around it. That's how contrast therapy spreads. Not through advertising. Through proximity and word of mouth and the moment someone says, "I've never felt like this before. You should try it." The science gets people in the door. The experience brings them back.