The topic of "inflammation" is widely misunderstood in the health and wellness space. For that reason, I’ll first explore what inflammation is. Then I’ll explain how saunas in general and infrared light specifically influence inflammation levels in your body.
Let’s start with the basics:
What Is Inflammation? Inflammation 101
Before considering the topic of using an infrared sauna for inflammation, let’s first consider what “inflammation” fundamentally is.
“Inflammation” and its role is widely misunderstood. And contrary to what many people in the natural health and wellness industry believe, not all inflammation is fundamentally bad. In fact, inflammation is a natural response whereby “the immune system recognizes and removes harmful and foreign stimuli and begins the healing process” (1; 2).
Inflammation can originate through many different mechanisms. In fact, nutritional deficiencies, stressors, microbes, allergens, and toxins, can all be causes that trigger the immune system and therefore result in inflammation (3).
Inflammation is thus more of a symptom than a direct cause of disease. An example to understand this principle is that your skin becomes red if you’ve got a sunburn - the inflammation didn’t appear spontaneously. Ultraviolet light here is the cause of the resulting inflammation characterised by skin reddening (4).
Or, alternatively, you trained hard in the gym and might get sore and inflamed (5). Here, the inflammation is the response and not the cause. And, the inflammation is very useful too as it’s part of the process that helps you get stronger.
Chronically elevated inflammation levels are problematic though. In case you have chronically elevated inflammation levels, the root cause of the problem needs to be dealt with. You might have irritable bowel syndrome or a nutritional deficiency, for instance, that causes chronic inflammation. Or, you might have been exposed to too many heavy metals such as mercury or cadmium, to which your immune system responds with chronic inflammation.
In such cases, it’s smart to find a way to improve your overall health and lower inflammation. An infrared sauna is a useful tool in that toolbox to improve your overall health - let’s consider the infrared sauna inflammation link within the currently published science: