SaunaScape

Photo of a traditional sweat lodge by matthewvenn on Flickr

There is no sacrifice—only greater and more magnificent results, wealth, adventure and fulfillment.

James Arthur Ray – On his Spiritual Warrior signup page.

Last week a tragedy ensued in Sedona Arizona leaving two people dead, three in critical condition and 16 more hospitalized after a sweat lodge experience as part of a multi-day “Spiritual Warrior” self-help seminar. Coverage of the incident has ranged from articles in the New York Times to CNN to TechCrunch.

According to the coverage of the event, up to 60 people took a session in a 1450 cubic foot sweat lodge for about 2 hours on Thursday night. Causes of death are still being speculated upon, and unlike your favorite crime show, may not be known for several months. Some things are known:

• There was no temperature monitoring in the sweat lodge, so no-one really knows how hot it may have been.
• The sweat lodge was constructed from plastic tarps and blankets, and does not appear to be well ventilated. 60 people in such a space could have easily brought the oxygen level below safe limits in under 15 minutes.
• A two hour session is quite long for any kind of heat bath. There is a strong possibility that the participants suffered from dehydration and/or heat stroke in this situation.
• The leader of this ceremony, who should by all rights be responsible for the health and well-being of the participants in the sweat lodge ceremony, had other motives, apparently tweeting after the incident, “JamesARay: is still in Spiritual Warrior… for anything new to live something first must die. What needs to die in you so that new life can emerge?”
• The leader of this ceremony was probably not qualified to run this: “You’ll become privy to techniques that I searched out in the mountains of Peru, the jungles of the Amazon (and a few other places I don’t care to recall).”

How can you avoid being part of this same tragedy? Keep a few things in mind:

• Lots of people are willing to say anything to get you to part with your money, and ritualistic experiences are a part of them. Consult the forums at New Age Frauds & Plastic Shamans before signing up for something like this.
• Does the establishment you are going to use to participate in this ceremony have your well-being in mind? If, as Arizona ABC 15 reports, the event is “meant to push people’s personal limits and transcend pain,” but there isn’t a full physical for each participant and a trained medical team standing by, then you can be sure they don’t.
• Heat baths can give real benefits if used with care. However, like most things, if basic common sense is ignored, they can be very dangerous.

Photo posted by Dru! on Flickr

Our news ticker has been lit up recently with the news of the recent settlement of a lawsuit where an Indiana man passed away after collapsing in the sauna of his YMCA. We feel deep sympathy for the man’s friends and relatives, as losing a loved one suddenly is always difficult, especially when you’re not dealing with individuals, but through the American legal / insurance system, as was the case for this man’s poor wife. But that’s a topic for another blog.

This brings the topic to light that heat bathing can be dangerous. According to Wikipedia, raising your core body temperature just 6°F / 2°C can be life threatening. Any additional temperature rise can begin to cause brain damage. For pregnant women, the dangers to their unborn child begin sooner, with a core temperature rise to 102.0°F /38.9°C. Normal body temperature is 98.6°F / 37.0°C.

In 1991, The American Journal of Public Health published a review of “The Health Hazards of Saunas and Spas and How to Minimize Them.” Most of this article is a review of the literature published to date, much of it in the 1998 Annals of Clinical Research special edition on saunas. (We have not been able to find this publication. If you have a copy, we would be grateful if you would share this with us.)

In the study, the author recommends:

Persons with heart disease, hypertension, seizure disorders, diabetes, or significant obesity; persons who have ingested alcohol, narcotic drugs, or medications that can result in drowsiness or interfere with the body’s temperature-regulating mechanism; or persons who are over 65 years of age must limit their stays in saunas or spas to 5 or at the most 10 minutes at a time. Similar precautions should be observed by women in the first trimester of pregnancy.

Even healthy adults would be well advised not to stay in for more than 10 to 15 minutes at a time.

Fainting is the greatest hazard for heat bathers. In a test of 60 otherwise healthy adults, 5% of them fainted after a 20-minute sauna session. The test was repeated with 61 children under 12, and 3% of them fainted after a 10-minute sauna session. The author notes that if you have heart disease, or have used alcohol or drugs your risk of fainting increases.

Falling from fainting while in or exiting the bath can cause injuries by itself, or compounded by the hot stove components. Fainting with loss of consciousness, especially in an unsupervised area,  can cause more severe problems if you are not promptly removed from the heat or water.

Heart arrhythmia can  be caused by sauna bathing. This is especially true if you have heart disease, or arteriosclerosis. What many people don’t realize is that alcohol, cocaine and other drugs that affect the heart, temperature regulating mechanisms, or cause drowsiness, can also increase your risk for cardiac arrhythmia. This carries over into the hangover phase as well.

Sweating out a hangover in a sauna is a bad idea.  Evidence presented in the paper shows that if you are hung over, you are more likely to experience cardiac arrhythmia in the sauna. Even the wild children at Partiers.com admit it is as bad as “Hair of the Dog.”

As part of this study, the author polled US medical examiners about heat bathing related deaths from 1983-1988. Of the 7 sauna-related deaths in that period, 6 were in people who had used alcohol or had heart disease. All were over 12 years old, and 5 of the 7 were over 65 years old.

In that same time period, 47 spa / hot tub deaths were reported.  45% of the fatalities had used either alchohol and/or cocaine. Another 17% of these were people with heart disease.

Other hazards found in the study were:

• Diabetics taking insulin via injection can absorb it more quickly due to dilation of the blood vessels near the body surface.
• Men whose partners are trying to conceive should avoid the sauna: A single 20-minute exposure to a sauna at 176°F / 80°C can decrease sperm count for up to 5 weeks!
• Women who are or may be pregnant should be careful around the sauna: A small temperature rise in your body can damage your unborn baby, especially in the first trimester. In the last trimester, elevated body temperatures can induce labor.

I did a quick study of sauna-related injuries from 2006 and 2007, reported by hospitals to the US Consumer Products Safety Commission. There were a total of 23 injuries in those two years. All injuries were minor enough to allow the patients to be released without admission to the hospital. Most were burns, falls or fainting episodes.  However, their data does not tell the whole story, as a family in Indiana will tell you.