Sitting in a sweat bath could be the most vigorous activity you've had all day. The heat produces an artificial "fever" and urges every organ of the body into action. While outwardly relaxed, your inner organs are as active as though you were jogging or mowing the lawn. At the same time, you are being cleansed from inside out by the skin, your body's largest organ and its excretion, sweat.

Sauna Benefits Worldwide
The oldest know medical document, the Ayurveda, appeared in Sanskrit in 568 BC and considered sweating so important to health that it prescribed the sweat bath and thirteen other methods of inducing sweat. Throughout history physicians have extolled the medicinal value of the sweat bath in its various forms such as the Finnish sauna, Russian banai, Islamic hammam, or the American Indian sweatlodge. Today, enthusiasts claim that beyond being relaxing the sauna gives relief from the common cold, arthritis, headaches, hangovers and "just about anything that ails you." Even if these claims are somewhat exaggerated, medical evidence shows that bathing in temperatures of 9O degrees C (192 degrees F) has a profoundly beneficial effect on a healthy body. *

Our Skin, Our Third Kidney
Because it eliminates, the skin is sometimes called the "third kidney." It is far more complex than the kidney or any other organ except the brain. It is composed of blood vessels, nerve endings, vessels for carrying Iymph, pigmentation, oil glands, hair follicles, cells that waterproof and deny entry to bacteria and, of course, the tubular, coiled sweat glands. It is so important that death by accumulated poisons occurs in a matter of hours if the skin, and its sweat passages, are smothered.

Sweating out Toxins
Sweating is as essential to our health as eating and breathing. It accomplishes three important things: rids the body of wastes, regulates the critical temperature of the body at 37 degrees C (98.6 degrees F), and helps keep the skin clean and pliant.

Many people, in this sedentary age, simply don't sweat enough, making sweat bathing particularly desirable during these times. Antiperspirants, artificial environments, smog, synthetic clothing, and a physically idle lifestyle all conspire to clog skin pores and inhibit the healthy flow of sweat. These detrimental effects are reversed in a sweat bath. (see Steam Sauna)

When you lounge in a sweat bath, heat sensitive nerve endings produce acetylcholine, a chemical which alerts the 2.3 million sweat glands embedded in the skin. But not all of them respond. The aprocine sweat glands, located in the pubic and arm pit areas, are activated only by emotional stimuli. They carry a faint scent whose purpose is believed to arouse the sex drive.

Nevertheless, the eccrine sweat glands, by far the most abundant, respond to heat. During a 15-minute sauna, about one liter of sweat is excreted, depending upon the individual. (Normal daily rate ranges from .5 to 1.5 liters.) Eccrine sweat is clear and odorless; any odor is only created by the presence of bacteria. One of its chief functions is to cool the body by evaporation, although there are also eccrine glands on the palms of your hands and soles of your feet which react to emotional stimuli. Like the baseball batter who wets his hands for a better grip, it is believed these sweat glands were intended to provide us with a good grip on clubs, rocks or vines when our survival often depended upon them. Sweat glands on the feet provided greater traction when it came time to run.

A third kind of sweat, called insensible perspiration, originates inside and works its way through blood and other cells to the surface of the skin. Even without a sweat bath, approximately a liter of insensible perspiration evaporates each day.

Does A Steam Bath encourage the production of Milk in New Mothers? A modified type of sweat gland is the milk-producing mammary gland. Some mothers in Finland believe the sauna encourages the breast's ability to produce milk, although this hasn't been established scientifically.

Sweating Out Heavy Metals
Sweat also has the function of being a judicious garbage collector. During a 15-minute sauna, sweating can perform the heavy metal excretion that would take the kidneys 24 working hours. Ninety-nine percent of what sweat brings to the surface of the skin is water, but the remaining one percent is mostly undesirable wastes. Excessive salt carried by sweat is generally believed to be beneficial for cases of mild hypertension. Some mental hospitals use saunas in their rehabilitation programs to pacify patients.

Getting Rid of Headaches
A metabolic by-product, urea, if not disposed of regularly, can cause headaches, nausea and, in extreme cases, vomiting, coma and even death. Sweating is such an effective de-toxifier that some physicians recommend home saunas to supplement kidney machines. Sweat also draws out lactic acid which causes stiff muscles and contributes to general fatigue. Sweat flushes out toxic metals such as copper, lead, zinc and mercury which the body absorbs in polluted environments.

If you spend too much time in a sauna with the temperature too high, fainting may occur. For that reason, be reasonable when deciding how long you will stay in a sauna. Give yourself time to cool down, and the experience will be a positive one.