Infrared Saunas

Excerpts from Dr. Sherry Rogers, MD
Book Entitled: Detoxify or Die

The secret of sweat.

What if we could have a body that only had the toxins we had accumulated up until 20 years ago, or better yet at age 16? I have followed hundreds of patients who used the oral, non prescription mercury detox cocktail to get rid of mercury, aluminum, cadmium, arsenic, and other heavy metals. For folks who have tougher cases we can use DMPS which is available by prescription. And for folks with high levels of calcifications in their arteries EDTA is an intravenous chelator, but requires sitting hooked up to an intravenous solution in a doctor’s office for four hours three times a week for 20 to 40 sessions, costing thousands of dollars, or using the detoxamin EDTA suppositories for the same results in a more convenient form in the comfort of your own home for less cost. Pet scans prove that the calcifications melted away.

But what about the cancer-causing PCB’s and the multitude of plastics and pesticides with all sorts of chemical configurations that the body has no way of metabolizing? What about all of the newly synthesized dangerous chemicals that firemen, for example, are exposed to when these plastics and pesticides burn, creating new compound that have never before been seen by men? None of these chemicals are removed by chelation or any drug.

In the 1970’s L. Ron Hubbard designed a sauna program that enabled drug addicts to detoxify. He reasoned that folks were never addicted until they had taken drugs. And the more they took, the more they craved. He thought if he could get the drugs out of the body (the unmetabolized residues), the addict would no longer crave. He published his brilliant successful program in his book "Clear Body Clear Mind" in 1990.

Shortly after the results of the program were known, physicians from many specialties realized that this program might also be adapted for getting rid of all sorts of other types of chemicals, thereby restoring health in an endless variety of diseases.

Using Hubbard’s protocol, researchers discovered that the Infrared Saunas were able to restore toxic firemen to normal once they got rid of their tightly stored chemicals contracted during the execution of their jobs. The Infrared Sauna cleared people of PCB’s and pesticides as well as Agent Orange (dioxins). These folks had undiagnosable and un-treatable symptoms, totally resistant to all therapies that medicine could offer. Likewise, residents of Michigan gave a huge amount of scientific information when a PCB-laden cancer-causing fire retardant was accidentally put into animal feed, contaminating their entire dairy industry, mild and cheese, statewide, forever. The Master Planner left one route for us to unload a lifetime of damaging, disease-producing chemicals: SWEAT.

Studies six years later showed that Michigan residents and folks from over 25 other states, who also got the PCB’s hidden in their dairy products, just did not get rid of those nasty PCB’s. The body does not have the chemistry to do so. Even in the soil these chemicals are what we call persistent environmental poisons. But those who used saunas were able to eliminate the PCB’s as well as other stored toxins from their bodies.

We have all accumulated these and hundreds of other similar toxins that are known as some of the most powerful inducers of cancer in existence. Remember, EPA studies show 100% of humans harbor PCB’s, one of the most potent causes of cancer known to man.

There are my hundreds of patients with severe chemical sensitivity, saddled with just about any symptom you can think of, who have traveled the world in search of how to get well.

Dr. William Rea, medical director of the Environmental Health Center, Dallas, receives the most difficult to treat cases in the world, cases for which there is no more hope and many of whom are physicians themselves. By now you are getting the idea that whenever you hear a disease is “hopeless”, it merely means no one has looked for the underlying cause, nor have they been committed to getting rid of it. For this is why Dr. Rea’s program has been so successful, because he does just that. And the Infrared Sauna is an integral part of it.

Dr. Rea had 210 patients with a variety of symptoms did only one or two 40 minute sessions a day for one month. Even a program this short, with people for whom medicine had nothing more to offer, yielded impressive results. Within one month 63% measurably decreased their levels of toxic chemicals and 31% improved their symptoms. Clearly a sauna is the only proven method for depurating a lifetime burden of xenobiotics producing “incurable” SYMPTOMS.

I sprayed herbicides (atrazine) on our farm and my autonomic nervous system became damaged. For decades, whenever I got overheated, I would never sweat, but just remained bone dry and beet red. If I tried to go in a sauna I couldn’t stand it even five minutes, feeling like I would go crazy. Many people experience this because of a damaged autonomic nervous system, especially those with multiple chemical sensitivities, chronic fatigue, MS, and Fibromyalgia.

Thanks to improved technology, the Infrared Sauna is far safer and infinitely more tolerable, because it uses a heat energy that penetrates tissues, triggering mobilization of chemicals from subcutaneous fat storage, directly into the sweat. This activating penetration allows for a much lower overall temperature to be used, one that is enjoyable and not torture.

But more important, you haven’t forced the body to bear very high temperatures (160 degrees and higher), pulling chemicals back into the bloodstream where they can duplicate original symptoms. Instead they slip out the back door, so to speak, from just under the skin storage directly into the sweat. Over weeks and months there is an equilibration, where chemicals that were stored in other organs slowly and safely disseminate throughout the body and eventually empty into subcutaneous fat. It is the chemical load that is stored beneath the skin that is the main area activated by the Infrared Sauna.

I am convinced that the Infrared Sauna is something that everyone should use to restore health, and then continue to use on a less frequent basis to maintain the “cleaned out” state for the rest of their lives. It’s therapeutic as well as prophylactic.

FIRS, the Only Sauna Proven Safe for Elderly, Severe End Stage Heart Patients.

Congestive heart failure is more prevalent and more lethal than cancer, folks know so little about CHF that they do not concern themselves with preventing it the way they do cancer. CHF starts with any heart symptom you can imagine. High blood pressure, high cholesterol, angio-arrhythmias like atrial fibrillation, dyspnea (shortness of breath, beginning with the stairs and inclines), claudication (leg pains when walking, pedal edema (ankle swelling), pericarditis, cardio-myopathy (heavy metal or other poisoning of heart muscle), fluid in the lungs, recurrent pneumonias, bypass surgery or endarterectomy (roto-rooting or reaming out the old plugged arteries) can be the beginning that insidiously leads to congestive heart failure. The most common symptom is shortness of breath, especially on stairs, inclines, or while doing repeated deep knee bends or jogging. An even worse sign is the swelling of ankles at the end of the day, indicating a heart so overloaded that fluid backs-up all the way to the leg vessels.

Anything can poison the heart; mercury from dental amalgams, fish and paints’ cadmium from auto exhaust, cigarette smoke (including secondhand from others), shellfish, incinerator pollution, and industrial pollution in the air, food and water. Yet even though these toxic elements have been a recognized cause of high blood pressure and heart failure for decades, they remain ignored by medicine.

Herbicides and pesticides, which are hidden in our food and water, can silently poison our hearts. Hydrocarbons and other environmental pollutants or toxins, from trichloroethylene in city water supplies, solvent extraction fluids used to decaffeinate coffee, toluene in painted rooms, formaldehyde in carpets, benzene in air fresheners, and vehicle exhaust also poison the heart.

Since the FIRS are not as hot as conventional saunas it is easier for ailing folks to tolerate the heat.

How is the Infrared Sauna Different?

Let’s look at the energy that comes from the sun. It is responsible for photosynthesis, the process by which plants make energy to grow. In essence, solar energy is responsible for all of life.

The spectrum of energy from the sun is classified according to the length of the waves. The shortest ( and most damaging) rays of the solar spectrum are gamma rays. The next longer rays of the sun are x-rays (carcinogenic), then ultraviolet (causes sunburn, corneal and lens damage and skin cancer), and then visible light. After that is the infrared spectrum, then radio waves.

At the far end of the infrared spectrum are the longest and most healing rays, the far infrared (FIR) spectrum, spanning from 1,000 to 4 microns. Between 4-14 microns in the FIR spectrum, fall most of the rays that are the safest and most vital to health and healing. They are responsible for photosynthesis, without which there would be no life on earth.

Even our bodies radiate infrared energy through our skin between 3-50 microns, mostly around 9.4 microns. This is the basis for infrared glasses allowing Special Forces to see the enemy at night. Palm healing and other hands-on therapies are based on the healing properties of natural far infrared rays, with our palms emitting infrared energy between 8-14 microns. Our bodies absorb 93% of the infrared waves presented to us, the basis for similar heaters being used to warm premature infants in nurseries.

Far infrared wavelengths have other beneficial properties. They lower lactic acid ( the acid that accumulates and causes pain in muscles when you have overdone exercising), stimulate endorphins or happy hormones of the brain, and kill organisms like bacteria and parasites. More important, they penetrate tissues, detoxify cells by vibrating ionic bonds, improve lymphatic flow and blood circulation, and attract calcium to cell membranes where it is needed for healing.

In studies published in Circulation and the Journal of Cardiology, both respected cardiology journals, physicians at the famed Mayo Clinic use the worst classification of congestive heart failure patients to demonstrate the safety and therapeutic value of the Infrared Sauna. They study patients who were end-stage heart patients who were maximally medicated and unable to walk across the room without shortness of breath, unable to tolerate warm baths, much less tolerate a sauna.

During the FIRS , no patient had dyspnea (shortness of breath), angina (chest pain) or arrhythmia ( irregular heartbeat), nor complained of excess heat. There were no side effects, something that never happens with drugs and surgery. Diastolic blood pressure ( the low number) decreased but the systolic pressure ( the top number) was unchanged. This means they did not get hypertensive, and in fact the work of the heart was lessened. Furthermore the stroke volume and ejection fraction increased, meaning the heart beat more efficiently with less effort.

Contrast this with warm baths that caused an increase in systemic blood pressure and pulmonary vascular resistance. Warm baths, by raising blood pressure, cause more work for an already failing heart. And in a regular sauna, the arrhythmias increased 20%, whereas in the Infrared Sauna, arrhythmias decrease or disappear entirely. Other cardiovascular improvements unique to the Infrared Sauna that would impress cardiologists include decreased pulmonary arterial and capillary wedge pressure as well as right atrial pressure, and in some cases disappearance of mitral regurgitation.

Because the infrared saunas has so many physiologic benefits that improved cellular detoxification (without making the rest of the body toxic or sick in the process), no side effects were observed with the Infrared Sauna, even at 140F.

In conclusion, the Infrared Sauna was extremely well tolerated and did the impossible. It improved the cardiac status of folks who were at the end of their therapeutic ropes. Even though medicine had nothing more to offer, congestive heart failure was reversed by the Infrared Sauna.