While infrared saunas have had a huge number of visible benefits on things like the quality of our skin, some of the greatest health benefits are actually invisible and lurk beneath the skin.
Today, we’re going to be focusing on some of these invisible health benefits that have been noted in peer-reviewed medical papers examining the link between saunas assisting our bodies as they detoxify things like drugs, viruses and toxins in our bodies.
In the process of finding out how, we’re going to answer the questions of whether a sauna helps for detoxifying our bodies, whether they help to detox things like drugs, and whether or not you can actually sweat out a cold or a virus.
Do Infrared Saunas Really Detoxify Your Body?
Infrared saunas are one of the most effective ways to detoxify your body and do far more than their traditional steam room equivalent when it comes to removing toxins from your body.
Typically in a steam room, your body reacts to the higher ambient temperature by triggering its sweat response.
One of the popular misconceptions about this process, though, is that the body’s sweat response isn’t necessarily a means of detoxification.
In an infrared sauna, however, the health benefits are far larger, and there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that infrared saunas really do help detoxify your body.
This is due to the way in which infrared saunas can help fortify our lymphatic system, which is part of our immune and circulatory systems and its sole function is to fight waste and toxins in our body.
Specific to the body’s ability to detox drugs with a sauna, a 2012 study found improved “post-treatment scores in symptomatic policemen exposed to employment-related drugs and toxicants compared to pretreatment scores across all subscales after 4-6 weeks of infrared sauna sessions.”
How Do Saunas Help Remove Toxins From the Body?
Does a sauna help detox drugs?
Well, traditional saunas are actually limited when it comes to their ability to remove toxins from the body.
This is because of the fact that the process of detoxification comes down to far more than simply sweating out toxins.
With an infrared sauna, though, your body’s lymphatic system can get to work maintaining a healthy balance - homeostasis - with extra vigour.
While using an infrared sauna, your lymphatic system receives an extra dose of nutrients and energy from the infrared sauna, which can help in the process of fighting toxins and detoxifying your body.
This means that your body can more effectively get to work sweating out drugs and toxins that might be stored in fat cells, which have been suddenly broken down by the infrared light energy and are in turn processed by the lymphatic system.
The question of whether or not you can simply sweat out drugs is largely dependent on whether or not the chemicals have been broken down by infrared light energy, or something like a toxin binder.