Allergy, Asthma Sufferers Seek Relief in Salt Room

You’ve heard of sauna rooms and steam rooms, but how about salt rooms? Patients believe the alternative therapy helps clear their sinuses. But skeptics say the claims should be taken with a grain of salt.

A salt room is just what it sounds like: a gray cell made out oversized bricks of sodium chloride. The bricks are imported from Eastern Europe, where salt therapy has been popular since the 1800s. That's when a Polish doctor wrote a book about the healing power of salt caves.

Fast-forward to modern salt rooms. They're kept cool and somewhat humid.

Essentially what we’re going is simulating a salt cave," said Melissa Weeks, the respiratory therapist at Breathing Clear, the new salt room in South Tampa.

"And the salt is dispersed into the atmosphere as microscopic particles. … It has a cleansing and purifying effect on the respiratory system," Weeks said.

Unlike other facilities that spray salt aerosol into the air, Breathing Clear feels like a regular room. Patients just kick back in a leather recliner, flip through a magazine and let the salt do the work.

Twenty-seven-year-old Lindsey Blumenfeld is a believer.

"You have to understand that for my entire life almost, I could never breathe out of both nostrils at the same time," Blumenfeld said. "I can only ever breathe out of one..."

The Tampa woman was diagnosed with asthma when she was 10. She's also allergic to dust and mold. She's tried the gamut of over-the-counter meds, and at 19, she had sinus surgery. She learned about Breathing Clear when someone came into the yoga studio she manages with some fliers.

"I was really skeptical because you’re just sitting in this room, and how do you know what you’re breathing?" Blumenfeld wondered.

She went ahead and signed up anyway. Since she started, she hasn't needed her emergency inhaler for three weeks. She had been using it every night.

For Blumenfeld, relief came just in time. She's getting married later this month.

"If you had clothes-pinned my nose together, that’s what I sounded like. I don’t want to sound that way for my wedding," Blumenfeld said. "I don't want to have a video of my ceremony with me being like (holds nose), 'I do.'"

But not everyone's sold. Dr. Richard Lockey is president of the World Allergy Organization and a University of South Florida professor.

"There's a placebo effect in everything we do," Lockey said.

Instead of treating the symptoms, Lockey said patients should get at the root cause.

"If you want to pay the money and go sit in a salt room, there’s no harm at all," Lockey said. "Do I think insurance should pay for it? Absolutely not."

And right now, insurance doesn’t pay for it, because it's not really been researched in America. The National Institutes of Health has yet to weigh in. So for now, Blumenfeld shells out $45 an hour to sit in the salt room. She said it's worth the money.

"I can’t say that I can close my mind off just because one expert said that this doesn’t work and it’s a placebo effect," Blumenfeld said. "Yeah, he could be right. But he also probably breathes out of his nose really well."

And for kids who can't breathe out of their nose, there's a second salt room with a salt-filled sandbox just for them.