Finnish Sauna Bathing and Your Health

By Cindy Williams, RN

Director, Health Ministries

Sauna bathing is ubiquitous in Finland. The country has 3.3 million saunas with a population of roughly 5.5 million. Every person in the country could take a sauna at the same time. More than 99 percent of the population has a sauna bath at least once a week. There are social, mental, and emotional benefits to this long-standing practice. Researchers have discovered that there are also significant physical health benefits.

One prospective study done over a period of six months reported that those who sauna-bathed one to two times per week had half the incidence of colds compared to the control group. Another study followed 2,210 men for 26 years to determine if sauna bathing impacted the incidence of pneumonia. They used as their control group those who sauna-bathed once a week and compared them to those who participated twice a week and also four times a week. They found that the men who sauna-bathed four times a week had a 50 percent reduced risk of being hospitalized for pneumonia during those 26 years.

What about COVID-19? Is there any evidence that this practice has had a positive effect on this pandemic? The data is certainly not all in, no studies have been done, and it isn’t possible with the information we currently have to eliminate all of the confounding factors, but it looks positive. As of October 1, Finland has a total of 10,103 COVID-19 cases. This is a rate of 1,823 cases per million people. They have 344 deaths from COVID – a rate of 62 per million. The United States has a rate of 22,584 per million and a death rate of 641 deaths per million. This is a significant difference in both rate of disease and in deaths. It makes me wonder if there is a connection.

Looking closer at the Finnish practice you discover that the sauna bath is always followed by a brief application of cold. A dipper of cold water from a bucket, a cold shower, or a quick dip into the icy sea or lake completes the sauna bath. Sound familiar? Over and over, we find that heat followed by cold improves innate immunity.

I don’t plan to invest in a Finnish sauna. I am blessed to have a fully functioning shower with hot and cold water, which will accomplish much the same thing. I just need to remember to turn the valve to cold before I get out every morning — especially as we head into cold and flu season! 

References

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/?#countries

https://www.resmedjournal.com/article/S0954-6111(17)30357-8/fulltext

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2248758/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28905164/

This article is part of a continuing series of health during these COVID times. For other articles, please see www.uccsda.org/healthministries.

Image by Gerhard G. from Pixabay.