A short spoken excerpt by Robert Whitfield MD warning that extreme sauna use can cause heavy metals from the sauna "shell" to leach into tissues and trigger a Herxheimer (detox) reaction. He describes resulting flu-like symptoms (headache, fatigue) and advises patients: if you feel bad after a sauna session, do not re-enter.
What she was doing was getting overheated. The shell components, the heavy metals in the shell were leaching out of the shell into her tissues. And she would feel terrible, just like you're talking about afterwards. And Michael said she would do it for an hour, hour and a half at 212 degrees. Oh, my gosh. And I was like, okay, well, that's clearly not good. And what Madison is describing is called a Herxenheimer reaction. And that's when you are detoxing too rapidly for your body to accommodate it. So it can give you viral type symptoms. Or if you want to think of flu, like symptoms, Madison's describing a headache, very common. More fatigue, very common. So it's not made up. I'm not crazy. I'm not trying to scare anybody. And I tell all my patients the same things. If you feel bad after you get out of the sauna, then don't go back into the sauna. Right? Come on. Like, this is not rocket science.
