Isak Dinesen, the Danish author, wrote, “The cure for anything is salt…” Okay, her whole quote really is “The cure for anything is salt water: either sweat, tears or sea.” But let’s take it a step further with alternative-healing halotherapy, or salt therapy. Today, pink Himalayan salt rooms are peppering the wellness world, supposedly curing ailments and conditions from asthma and allergies to inflammation and even the common cold.
(Check with your healthcare practitioner, though; not everyone agrees on the benefits of the therapy. Most seem to say, “Could help, couldn’t hurt.”)
Treatments usually run 25 to 45 minutes; you sit quietly in your street clothes (sans shoes), breathing deeply in a room lined with salt blocks and dusted with fine salt crystal on the floors as a halogenerator grinds sodium chloride (yep, salt) into the air.
At the East Village Montauk Salt Cave, twinkle lights and anti-gravity chairs make the experience even more heady. Meditate while breathing in salt’s 84 trace elements and minerals — calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, copper, selenium, iron, bromine and the like. Once in your bloodstream, salt supposedly acts as a natural anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial, anti-viral, anti-fungal and anti-microbial.
More than 300 of these chambers with halogenerators are operating nationwide. Could you be ready to shake some more salt into your life?
–Kimberly Cihlar
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