Cold comfort

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This article was published 01/10/2016 (3297 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A new ice age is here. And it’s making amazing promises of pain-free joints and sculpted abs.

Cryotherapy — a freezing treatment turned piping-hot health trend — is being hyped by spas across the country, many of which sprang up within the last year.

Among them, NYC Cryo in New York promises cryotherapy leads to “quicker surgical recovery time.” Thrive CryoStudio in Rockville, Md., claims it “alleviates symptoms from joint disorders, rheumatoid diseases, fibromyalgia, psoriasis and migraines.” Atlanta’s Cryo Elite Therapy said it “has been proven to improve peak levels of performance.” Omaha’s Ice Out CryoSpa boasts “alleviation of depression, anxiety, fatigue, insomnia.” CryoSF in San Francisco says the treatment “helps increase testosterone in men” and “reduce signs of aging, increases collagen production, improve skin condition and reduce cellulite.”

The problem: there’s no solid scientific evidence to back any of it up. The U.S. Federal Drug Administration is warning spas to stop making such claims.

There’s actually very little research on cryotherapy at all. “The evidence is lacking for me to say yes, it’s effective, or no, it’s not effective,” says Joseph Costello, a lecturer in exercise physiology at the University of Portsmouth, in England, who wrote a much-cited review of all the available research on whole body cryotherapy last year.

That isn’t stopping untold thousands from lining up every week to follow the likes of LeBron James, Tony Robbins and sundry celebrities and “Real Housewives” into cylindrical cryotherapy chambers, where they get blasted from the neck down with abominably cold air.

What does cryotherapy do, exactly? Advocates like to say the cold air forces blood to your core, tricking the body into thinking it’s experiencing hypothermia. From there, the claims get a bit fuzzy. Whole-body cryotherapy believers say it acts as a super-charged ice bath, allowing muscles and tendons to more quickly recover from heavy training or pain, reducing inflammation. Many just claim, in the most unscientific of terms, they feel energized by the treatment.

Following the oversize claims made by some cryotherapy providers — and after the death of one person in a cryotherapy chamber last year — the FDA issued a strongly worded warning against whole-body cryotherapy in July. “(C)onsumers may incorrectly believe that the FDA has cleared or approved (whole-body cryotherapy) devices as safe and effective to treat medical conditions,” Aron Yustein, a medical officer in the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in the FDA release. “That is not the case.”

The FDA recently released letters it sent to two California cryotherapy businesses advising them the health claims they were making about cryotherapy “may be considered false and misleading.” Deborah Kotz, an FDA spokeswoman, said, beyond warning letters and recalls, the FDA can take “further enforcement action to protect public health including conducting and coordinating criminal investigations.”

The allure of cold therapies has been around for a long time. The Greeks promoted cold baths as a healthy tonic; the Romans celebrated in their frigidariums. Charles Darwin swore by a daily cold shower. But whole-body cryotherapy was specifically developed in 1978 by a physician, Toshima Yamauchi, as an experimental way to treat rheumatoid arthritis. By the 1990s, it began to become popular in various European spas as an alternative treatment for chronic pain.

It started drawing public attention in the U.S. in 2011, when U.S. athletes followed the lead of U.K. soccer teams and embraced it as a restorative, post-competition therapy. The Dallas Mavericks regularly frequented cryotherapy chambers during their run to their first NBA championship and — notoriously — U.S. sprinter Justin Gatlin went to the world championships complaining of frostbitten feet caused, he claimed, by a wearing damp socks in a cryotherapy chamber.

Cryotherapy spread to the celebrity set, with Jennifer Aniston, Daniel Craig and Jessica Alba reportedly booking appointments. Tony Robbins told fellow self-help and lifestyle guru Timothy Ferriss on his podcast cryotherapy’s effects on him were “mind-boggling,” gave him “an explosion of endorphins” and said he’d purchased a unit for his home and for his mother-in-law, who suffered from arthritis.

All that Hollywood sizzle slowed last year after 24-year-old Chelsea Ake-Salvacion was found dead in a cryotherapy unit in the Las Vegas area spa where she worked. An autopsy later ruled that she had suffocated. She might have lost consciousness when she ducked her head down into the unit, possibly to retrieve her cellphone, and succumbed to the liquid-nitrogen-cooled air.

“If it lets you drop your head six inches and you die, something is wrong there,” said Richard Harris, a lawyer representing Ake-Salvacion’s family. He said he was “on the verge” of filing a suit against the manufacturer, distributor and spa. Ake-Salvacion had closed the shop and was alone when she died, and Harris believes the units should have safety features preventing them from being operated alone (which some now do).

If that tragedy cooled cryotherapy’s hype, it didn’t last.

One of the major U.S. distributors of cryotherapy units, Impact Cryotherapy in Atlanta, says sales have continued to soar. Impact announced in July it had sales of 200 units since the company launched in June 2014, but “we’ve probably bumped over 250 now,” he said this month. Another major distributor, CryoUSA in Dallas, lists more than 200 places it has sold cryotherapy units in the past five years.

Kenneth Knight, a retired professor of exercise sciences at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City, Utah, says cold is good. Knight studied the impact of cryotherapy for more than 40 years, since he wrote his doctorate on the subject.

His basic belief is when we injure ourselves, our bodies tend to overreact with pain. “My premise is that the cold knocks out pain, and lets a person starts exercising,” he says.

— The Washington Post