First, md2000, nobody is going to force you to go to the Sauna if you don’t want to, so it’s not necessary to rant against it. Also, a tip on the side: denigrating something if you’ve never tried it and don’t know how it really works makes you look like an idiot.
If you were however interested in the facts themselves, then I suggest next time to leave out the aggressive bitching.
No. Clams are boiled in hot water to cook them, in order to kill them and make the meat tender for eating.
Sauna works with hot 90 C dry 10% air, in order to do something good for your body.
The snow doesn’t have to be -30, that’s not necessary. It just so happens that in the place where the Finns live naturally, it often gets cold in the winter, and the available water is thus frozen into the snow. In order to cool down quickly, you need to roll in the snow. That’s the tradtitional way, but in places where snow doesn’t occur in the winter, a bucket and dunking basin with cold water works also well enough.
If you mean whipping as in ‘beating somebody with a heavy whip to cause pain, like a slave’, then no. In reality, it’s ‘lightly swapping your back with wet birch branches in order to further improve the circulation’. You do it yourself, and it’s optional, just like dousing water on the stones to produce steam is optional (I personally don’t like that).
If you mean ‘it feels good once it stops’ in the sense of ‘hitting myself on the thumb is good once the pain stops’, then no, nobody above said that. Please try reading again. And nobody said that ‘feels good once it stops’ is the main reason or logic for sauna.
I’ll try again to explain the concept in simple words, if that helps you:
1 step: in the sauna: hot air = you sweat (= some poisions might leave the body); your blood vessels widen, and your heart pumps faster, increasing your circulation.
2 step: you cool down with cold water or rubbing with snow: your blood vessels constrict quickly, your body adapts to sudden change of temperature
3 step: laying down: your body takes time to relax again, heart beat slows down, rest.
The sudden change between temps., and the widening/ constriction of blood vessels, is what trains the body and prepares it for the sudden changes you encounter in winter (going from outside to inside). Without training these sudden changes make you more vulnerable to catch the germs that cause cold.
The additional feeling of well-being - well you have to experience for yourself, I would say, if you didn’t have such a hate towards Sauna that I don’t want people with your attitude around when I go Saunaing. Personally, after 2 cycles (enough for me), when I dress, I feel like radiating heat, because my usually sluggish circulation (esp. in winter, with low blood pressure and sitting in the office, standing in the cold) has started moving around, reaching every nook and little toe of my body. I feel fresh and rested at the same time.
Just because you don’t believe it, doesn’t mean that other people don’t experience it.
Nobody said anything about skin cleaning or pore draining. If you want to clean your skin, you use soap and water. In fact, that’s step 0: when you come into the Sauna, you take a warm shower with soap, to clean the dirt and old sweat from your body and to warm your body up to the Sauna. (It’s very important to towel completly dry before entering the hot room, because otherwise your sweating is inhibited).
And the blood vessels aren’t ‘wide open and slammed shut’ - these aren’t doors or something. Blood vessels widen and constrict all the time - whenever you go from a cold room into the hot air outside (summer) or from the cold air into a warm room (winter), whenever your exercise or otherwise raise or lower your temperature, your body adapts. So the Sauna is simply training - exercise. Strenghtening that mechanism so your body is better at the response.
I’m not sure - is sloped-brain an insult towards asians, or are your referring to Neanderthals? Because I’ve never heard of Neanderthals having Saunas, though the Finns claim they have had them for 20 000 years or so.
As for being effective - I was surprised that Cecil found no studies, because in Europe, it’s well known that regular Saunaing (at least once a week, done proper, of course) is better for your health. It’s better at warding of colds, but there is no guarantee, if you mean that. There’s only that people who do it get less colds than others, if you can control all the other factors also influencing suspectability to cold.
While it’s not a full argument in itself, it certainly does suggest something that many different cultures use heat as preventive health measure:
The Finns have the Sauna
The Turks have the Steam bath
The ancient Greeks and Romans had their warm baths
The native Americans had their steam tents
The Japanese have hot baths
(And the Americans love to sit in hot tubs and whirlpools)
I’m not a dermatologist, but that’s not what I’ve heard. The major cause for acne (90% of cases, I think) is the hormonal inbalance and fluctuations in teens, that cause excessive production of fat in the skin, which clogs the pores. When then old skin cells get trapped in the pores, bacteria settle down to digest the skin cells.
It’s not simply a matter of washing the face regularly, as every afflicted teen can tell you. And dermatologists will tell you that acne will clear up on its own in most cases when the hormones settle down, which is at last at age 25. (which is of course no help at all to a 17 year old who wants to date but looks like apizza face (streusel cake)).
There might be a side effect that the widening of the pores due to the sweating helps better than normal washing. I’ve never had the opportunity to test it, either.
