Sunday, September 8, 2013

Sauna Your Way to Health in a Dry Infrared Sauna?


Many of us have stepped into and even enjoyed traditional saunas, which heat the body indirectly via hot air or, less often steam. However, there is a different type of sauna that heats your body a different way - the dry infrared sauna. With the dry infrared sauna, special infrared emitters heat your body directly, rather than via conducing air or moisture, by infrared radiant heat.

Some people have advocated the use of infrared saunas as a health aid. Indeed, far-infrared saunas are approved by the Canadian Standards Association and can be bought by the public. Manufacturers claim the saunas are useful conjunctive treatments for many disorders, but the veracity of these claims remains uncertain at this time, as few controlled studies have been conducted.

For example, a study published in Clinical Rheumatology and indexed in PubMed, a resource of the National Library of Medicine, sought to study the effects of this kind of sauna in patients with rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis. In this pilot study of 17 patients with rheumatoid arthritis and 17 patients with ankylosing spondylitis were studied treated for a 4-week period using eight treatments. No adverse effects or worsening of disease symptoms were observed. Rather, reports of pain and stiffness decreased in a statistically significant manner in both patient groups within an IR session.

Fatigue also lessened as a result of the treatments. Both groups of patients described feeling more comfortable after the procedure. Across the 4-week treatment period, even outside of a a recent exposure to infrared sauna, self-reports of pain, stiffness and fatigue all tended to decrease in both patient groups as well. The authors, a Dutch group based out of the Expertise Center of Health at the Saxion University of Applied Sciences, concluded that an episode of infrared treatment had immediate palliative effects on pain, stiffness and fatigue, and that these clinical improvements tended to be maintained even outside of proximate treatment across a 4-week, biweekly exposure period.

A review of FIR saunas also has been published recently in the Canadian Family Physician journal. In that publication, the author, Dr. Richard Beever, reviewed English literature indexed in the the Web of Science, EBSCO, Ovid MEDLINE, Ovid HealthSTAR, and EMBASE. He identified 9 papers examining the potential health benefits of far-infrared sauna. From this review, it was concluded that congestive heart failure and coronary risk factors may be appropriate indications for FIR sauna with 5 and 4 studies, respectively observing potentially beneficial effects of infrared sauna on these conditions.

Other indications with limited evidence supporting the therapeutic potential of these sauna treatments include chronic pain, chronic fatigue syndrome, obesity, and high cholesterol. Clearly more work is needed to investigate the therapeutic potential and mechanism of action of this intriguing technology.

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