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Miners and others must have known about the beneficial health effects of the microclimate of salt mines well before a Polish physician F.Bochkowsky described them in a book published in 1843. “Since then, the practice of bringing patients with respiratory diseases down into salt mines for cures gradually spread throughout Eastern Europe.”
Speleotherapy (from Greek speleos=cave) or underground climatotherapy is an alternative treatment for asthma, bronchitis, etc., without the negative side effects which many drug therapies of respiratory disorders have.
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An underground chamber.
Thousands of people with respiratoryproblems enter mines yearly. Today at the Austria (Solzbad-Salzeman), Rumania (Sieged), Poland (Wieliczka), Azerbaijan (Nakhichevan), Kirgizia (Chon-Tous), the Ukraine: Solotvino, (Carpathians); Artiomovsk (Donietsk region) and others. |
Salt mines and subterranean sanatoriums the specific microclimate of the underground cavities is used for the treatment of asthma, inflammation of upper and lower respiratory tracts, and some allergies. At Parajd several thousands of “sick people enter the mine yearly, since its salty, disinfectant air is very useful for healing and easing asthma and other respiratory diseases. The ill people are transported by buses into the mine in the morning and are brought back in the afternoon.” At the Ukrainian Allergological Hospital (UAH) the unique microclimate of the salt mines help the successful treatment of patients, with various forms of bronchial asthma and other types of respiratory diseases. In the course of more than 30 years “about 60,000 patients are reported to have been cured. Annually more than 2000 adults and 1000 children attend the clinic.”
Today speleotherapy is more and more recognized as a “highly effective medication-free treatment method”. At the World Paediatric Congress in Jerusalem in July 1997, speleotherapy was presented as a curative method for chronic and allergic diseases of respiratory organs. However because of travel, transport and other associated problems cave therapies are expensive, time-consuming and not readily available.
Halotherapy (HT, from Greek halos=salt) seeks to recreate the conditions of speleotherapy. It is a “mode of treatments in a controlled air medium that simulates a natural salt cave microclimate.” Halotherapy belongs to the category of natural therapies – non-drug treatment of diseases. One of the forms of simulating the salt cave environment is a device, called halochamber. The first halochambers were built by the Russians in the 1980s. It is a special room whose walls and floor are lined with rock salt (halite). Patients stay in the halochamber for a certain time ( about an hour per session ).
Another way of cleansing and revitalizing the respiratory system is through the use of an ingenious, little device, called: Salt Pipe. Salt cave and salt mine “therapies are expensive and time consuming”, say the inventors and manufacturers of the Salt Pipe, Laszlo Budai and Imre Bekefi who both suffered several years long from allergic and asthmatic respiratory problems. It was the effectiveness of cave therapies, which gave them the idea of experimenting with a “portable miniature salt cave”, readily available in several European countries by the name of Saltpipe or Salpipe.
“The Salt Pipe is such a patented device with which anybody anywhere in his free time can get access to all the benefits of the cave therapy. Placed in the ceramic filter are such salt crystals, which are from Europe's most famous curative caves, where according to the medical statistics the therapies improve the health condition of the patients suffering from respiratory diseases up to 90% efficiency. The device contains halite salt crystals which were formed in the Middle Miocene.” Originators of the saltpipe: www.sopipa.hu
A Salt Cave
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Specials
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