I come from the Southwestern United States. I am currently on a horse ranch in southwestern New Mexico. I also lived for years in and around Palm Springs, California.
Temperatures in the desert southwest can reach incredible levels and we all learn to cope.
In Palm Springs, my other half and I worked on our home with floodlights outside at night to avoid the worst heat of the day. Temperatures differ around the Coachella Valley and can reach 115-118 degrees farenheit at peak temperature hours. This is 46 to nearly 48 on the centegrade scale. On the asphalt highway of interstate 10 in the center of the sand pit area of the Coachella valley temperatures have been measured at 131 degrees again at peak temperature times. (This is 55 degrees centigrade) Night time temperatures can easily remain at 101 (38.3c) to 103 (39.4c) degrees. Again this is common to such cities as Palm Springs, California, Phoenix, Arizona and even Las Vegas, Nevada.
If you have to go out in extreme heat you need to re-educate yourself as to what to do.
Look at how people survive in the middle east in temperatures like this.
The first thing is that you layer clothing and try to first keep the heat off of you and secondarily keep the sweat on you controlling the evaporation rate. Taking off clothing is not always the right thing to do. It speeds up the evaporation rate and causes you to dehydrate a great deal faster making you in fact more miserable than if you coverd over.
In your layering of clothing, your inner layer should be breathable cotton, and your outer layer should be of a very light color to not work as a heat attractor and also to control losses. If you wear a head covering make certain that it allows a great deal of air circulation because a great percentage of heat is lost through the scalp.
Many think the clothing worn in the Middle East has religious meaning. Some does some does not. The main reason for all of the heavy clothing is shielding from both heat and blowing sand and control of body fluid losses.
In high humidity environments you can dehydrate a great deal more quickly and the sweat becomes an insulator because it does not evaporate and this sends mixed signals to the body. They body says I am not cooling so it sweats more to compensate. The main thing is hydration and it must be water that is NOT ice cold. Water consumed under these conditions can be COOL but not cold and insufficient water consumption sends your body into shock. COLD water immediately can send your body into shock and again screws up the thermostat.
Water intake must be in a controlled manner. Too much water too quickly causes you to throw up under these conditions and this places you in real danger of heat exhaustion and can make you a candidate for heat stroke.
I myself did this one back in 1991 and the damage I did to myself and illness I created from making errors on this judgment stuck with me for six months.
I am to this day more sensitive to heat and can feel heat problems coming on far faster than before this happened to me.
I made my error by not understanding the humidity and how humidity factored into the equation. I was rescuing a 1958 Chevrolet Impala from an Irrigated Bean Field near a pump house in the central farming valley near Turlock, California. Outside temperatures were 101 degrees (38.3c) and humidity because of the flowing crop irrigation was nearly 70%. I almost died for that damn Impala.
If you get into a situation where sweating stops you are in real trouble because that means that your bodies cooling mechanism has shut down and you are headed for heat stroke which is often fatal. When this happened to me I realized it and used a crop irrigation canal to simply jump in and try to drop my body core temperature. I did this with my clothing on and fortunatley for me it worked.
Be careful in high temperatures and learn how to combat it. Be careful because improper management can cost you dearly and I found it out the hard way. . . .