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I Was Frozen To Improve My Health
Category: Cold Therapy
Nov 14, 2006
It's minus 120 degrees and all I'm wearing is a hat and socks. Cryotherapy is the latest treatment for a range of illnesses including arthritis, osteoporosis, and even MS. New Age madness or a genuine medical breakthrough?
The airlock door to the cryo-chamber slides open before me. A powerful whoosh of cold air escapes and a few curls of frozen smoke snake out around my legs.
It’s like standing in front of a giant refrigerator, but instead of taking out a pint of cold milk I’m about to step inside.
The temperature is minus 120 degrees and all I’m wearing is a pair of skimpy shorts, knee-high socks, gloves, and a sweatband. Plus a pair of white leather clogs.
I look like a cross between a sparsely clad John McEnroe and a laboratory technician. Indeed it all sounds like someone’s nightmare. In fact I’m actually at a health spa in Battersea, about to experience the latest alternative health fad: ‘whole body cryotherapy’.
This rather bizarre sounding treatment involves exposing yourself to extremely cold, dry air in a sealed room for up to three minutes at a time.
In Poland cryotherapy has become a popular treatment for rejuvenating and revitalising the body. It is also widely used by eastern European athletes as an alternative to the ‘ice bath’ to aid post-training recovery.
But it seems there could be also serious medical uses for the treatment. Some experts claim it can alleviate the painful symptoms of everything from rheumatism and osteoporosis to multiple sclerosis, chronic fatigue syndrome and depression, and even suggest it as an anti-cellulite and skin-firming treatment.
Cryotherapy apparently shrinks the molecules in the body and then, when you emerge from the cold, the molecules then expand, increasing the blood flow which then helps ease pain and swelling, as well as fighting inflammation.
Previously devotees - among them British sportsmen - have had to travel to eastern Europe for treatment. Now entrepreneur and former racehorse trainer Charlie Brookes has brought cryotherapy to the UK, and I am one of the first people to try it.
When I arrive at the London Kriotherapy Centre in Battersea I am first interviewed by Renata Sinicka, the cheerful ‘specialist cryotherapy nurse’ from Poland, and Irvind Simota, the clinic’s physiotherapist.
I have to complete a disclaimer stating I do not suffer from high blood pressure, epilepsy, diabetes, excessive sweating and claustrophobia, and have my blood pressure and pulse checked just to make sure.
Then it’s a quick change into the shorts, socks, gloves and clogs - all made from 100 per natural fibres, because any synthetics will instantly freeze and become completely solid in the chamber.
"The point is to wear as little as possible so you’ll get really cold," explains Irvind. "But obviously we don’t want your fingers, toes, or, er,anything else dropping off, so it’s best to keep those bits warm."
The face mask is to protect the lips and nasal lining, and I’m told to blot myself down with a paper towel before entering so there’s no chance of my sweat causing freezer burn. Liquid nitrogen or oxygen has been used to chill the air to minus 120C.
To give you an idea of just how cold that is, the lowest natural temperature ever recorded is minus 89.2C, at the Vostok research station, Antarctica.
Minus 120C won’t kill you immediately because air is a poor conductor of cold — if you stay inside for two minutes it will only chill the outside layers of your body, not your internal organs.
But stand in the chamber for longer than eight minutes and you’ll be dead. Seasoned cryo-chamber users have the temperature set ten degrees colder, at minus 130C. As I’m a first-timer I’ll be in for just two minutes rather than the usual three.
It still all seems quite dangerous but I’m assured I’ll be out of the chamber long before the cold can do me any harm. Irvind, who is wearing the same outfit as me, will be with me the whole way through: "We always go in with first timers so they don’t panic," he says reassuringly.
Even so, as I step into the first of the chamber’s two rooms, which measures 6m by 3m by 2.5m and is cooled to minus 90C, I feel a bit like Captain Oates leaving his tent for certain death in the inhospitable Antarctic.
I wonder if I should tell the cryo-chamber staff I may be some time. It is, as you’d expect, absolutely freezing. The cold air stings and my first instinct is to hug myself, but Irvind tells me off.
"You have to let the cold get to your body," he says. Instead he tells me to stamp my feet and shake my arms. After ten seconds, they open the vacuum-sealed door to the main, minus 120C chamber.
We step through and Irvind closes the door behind us with an ominous thud. Copying him, I stomp around in circles, shaking my arms and flexing my hands - a sort of frozen ‘funky chicken’ dance.
It’s a bizarre experience and I know I look mad but if I stop moving for even a moment I begin to shiver uncontrollably. The temperature is like nothing I’ve ever felt before and there is a needle-like stinging in my legs and arms.
Irvind keeps asking me how I’m feeling (‘b****y cold’), telling me this is all normal, and that he feels the same. Today, because of a ‘slight technical hitch’ the fog in the chamber is so thick it’s hard to see more than a foot in front (on a ‘normal day’ it’s far lighter).
I’m not scared of confined spaces but it’s so ridiculously uncomfortable, the stinging in my limbs has quickly intensified into a burning, and then a peculiar, almost numb sensation after what must be a minute in the chamber.
I’m seriously tempted to grab the large handle on the exit door and make a run for it. As it happens, I barely have to time to process the rush of strange sensations when the time is up, the door is pulled open and I clatter out on my clogs.
I’m not sure about the ‘refreshed, energised and exhilarated’ I’d been promised, the main thing I feel is a huge sense of relief to be out of the cold.
In the cold, my peripheral blood vessels will have contracted to try to maintain my body’s temperature.
On leaving the chamber, they will have expanded to around four times their normal size, and the fact that my face is bright red is proof that my blood is pumping faster, delivering more nutrients and oxygen to the organs.
After the session I take a ten-minute ride on an exercise bike to boost this effect. Pedalling feels the same as it would normally although I’m warmer.
Katherine Kowalska, a 24-year-old architecture graduate from South West London, claims the treatment, which she first tried three years ago while living in Poland, has vastly reduced the rheumatic pain she’s suffered in her knees and arms since childhood. She has a series of ten sessions, twice a year.
"I didn’t notice a difference after the first session but within four sessions the pain in my legs and arms was almost gone. I felt lighter, more flexible and energetic. I got used to the cold, too, and actually began to quite enjoy it, says Katherine.
"For months after I didn’t feel any pain at all, for the first time in my life. The effect seems to wear off gradually. I travel back to Poland for treatment every six months. Many of friends use it, too, just for general wellbeing."
One of the few Britons who have tried whole body cryotherapy is rugby international star Will Green, now with Irish team Leinster. He first experienced the cryo-chamber during trips to the Olympic training camp in Spala, Poland, with his former team the London Wasps, two years ago.
"We used it twice a day, every day," he says. "Normally you need a day of rest between training specific muscle groups. The cryo-chamber meant we recovered faster so we could train every day and just keep going and going.
"It really gave us the edge. I put a lot of our successes down to those sessions."
The Battersea clinic’s medical advisor is Dr Richard Freeman, who specialised in muscular-skeletal medicine in Lancashire before becoming club physician to football team Bolton Wanderers (he took the players to Eastern Europe for cryotherapy).
He says that people must commit to ten or more sessions at a time, each taken a day apart, in order to experience real benefits. While this works for sports injuries, he says it could also help people suffering from conditions such as arthritis and even multiple sclerosis.
"We’re not sure exactly why it happens yet, but there is a cumulative pain killing effect." Some experts thinks cryotherapy helps stimulate the natural production of the hormone ‘cortisol’, which regulates blood pressure, and blood-sugar levels, as well as being linked to the immune system and mood.
Sportsmen who have used the cryo-chamber have been shown to have much lower levels of ‘creatinine kinase’, an enzyme released from damaged muscle membrane.
However, despite the fact that thousands of people have used cryo-chambers in Poland, there is very little scientific evidence to support its benefits.