Halotherapy and COPD - Home Therapy for Bronchitis & Euphysema
If you are someone or know a friend or family member with COPD, you'll know how seriously this disease can affect day-to-day activities. Clogged airways and a wheezy cough are the least of this serious disease's conditions, but even at their best, these symptoms are enough to make anyone scared and frustrated.
The NHS offers a number of treatments to help sufferers with COPD, but between medicines and operation, you may be looking for a more natural course of treatment to clear your airways. If you want to know more about COPD and the many benefits of Halotherapy, read on.
What is COPD?
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is the name for a group of conditions that affect the lungs. It includes Euphysema and Bronchitis, and primarily affects middle-aged and older adults who smoke.
What Are the Symptoms of COPD?
Though there are many symptoms of COPD, there a number of primary indicators:
- Persistant wheezing and coughing
- Frequent chest infections, often barely lifting
- Persistent chesty cough with lots of phlegm
- Breathlessness, particularly when active
If you think you have COPD, you should immediately contact your Doctor/GP and book an appointment.
What Causes COPD?
COPD occurs when your lungs become inflamed, narrowed and damaged. Though mostly caused by smoking, it can be caused by a number of other lifestyle factors:
- Smoking
- Long-term exposure to dust and chemicals
- Rare congenital diseases that affect the lungs
- In rarer cases, COPD can just seemingly surface out of nowhere.
What's the Future Like for Someone with COPD?
Like many diseases, the outlook for someone with COPD varies from person to person. Unfortunately, COPD cannot be reveresed or go away on its own - but for many people, COPD can be treated and maintained.
What Do the NHS Recommend for People with COPD?
If you think you have COPD, the NHS recommends a number of treatments to reduce both short and long-term effects:
- Stopping smoking - This is the most obvious, and probably most important step you can make to limiting the damage of COPD.
- Pulmonary rehabilitation - A carefully designed exercise programme to make your lungs healthier.
- Medicines and inhalers - These prescriptive treatments will ease the symptoms of COPD.
What Else Can I Do?
If you're worried about your COPD and feel like you've exhausted the scope of alternate treatments, you might want to try Halotherapy, otherwise known as Salt Therapy.
What is Salt Therapy?
Salt has lots of excellent properties, and many of our applications of it have not changed, even after thousands of years. As its a natural anti-septic, we still use salt to cure meats and protect food from spoiling.
Salt Therapy is based on ancient medicinal practices. To look at how Salt Therapy works, we should take a look at the science of Osmosis and how salt works to clean our bodies.
Science and Salt
Osmosis and water solubility work the same way in our body as in a lab test tube. When you introduce very impure water to a solution with pure water, the water seeks equilibrium by moving from the area of greater purity to an area of lesser purity.
For a real-life example, imagine a person soaking in a salt bath:
- They are surrounded by very impure water, because the water is filled with salt.
- Their body is also filled with water, but this water is much purer because there is no salt.
- Therefore, the salt water in the bath will pull fluid from the person’s body in order to create an equilibrium.
- Any swellings caused by a build-up of fluid will be drained, as the water is drawn through the skin and into the tub.
Why is Salt Air Good For Our Bodies?
There's a reason why doctors recommend a trip to the seaside to get fresh air. In the same way salt water draws out bad liquids in the body, breathing in large quantities of salt air can circumvent chest infections and purge large quantities of mucus sitting around your chest and sinus.
How Can This Help My COPD?
To reap the benefits of a salty cleanse, you need something that can safely administer clean salt air into your body. That’s where the Cisca Easy Salt Pipe comes in.
Using the Cisca Easy Salt Pipe is like breathing in fresh sea air at the beach and it’s incredibly easy to use:
- As air flows over the salt crystals in the pipe's filter, it is purified and enriched with microscopic salt particles
- Breathing this back in purges your sinuses of excess mucus and congestion
- This opens up your nasal passages and airways so you can breathe more freely
What is the Cisca Easy Salt Pipe?
The Cisca Easy Salt Pipe is one of the UK’s number one forms of halotherapy (alternative salt medicine). The Easy Salt Pipe is made almost entirely of plastic, while retaining high durability. A single pipe contains 15g of Halite salt. This will last for up to six months of daily use without ever the need of a refill. The pipe’s size and quality make it perfect for those who are constantly travelling as it is incredibly lightweight and easy to fit into most bags.
What is Halite Salt?
Originally created in Hungary, the Cisca Salt Pipe was invented to deliver salt therapy in a portable and accessible form. Each individual pipe filter contains 15 grams of Halite salt crystals. These are incredibly pure, having been formed in Hungarian caves around 20 million years ago!
Cisca Easy Salt Pipe and COPD
Using the Cisca Easy Salt Pipe at least once a day will provide your body with the soothing cleanse it needs to fight off the worst effects of COPD. Not only will the natural salt air open your airways, but it will encourage the expulsion of mucus and bacteria sitting in your chest.
Other Products For Your Health
For more helpful information and products for chest infections, please check out our Nasal and Sinus category.
Have you tried the Cisca Salt Pipe? How did you find it? Let us know in the comments below or get in touch via Twitter or Facebook!