Figure one is a molecular model of magnesium sulfate. Well the inconvenient truth is that there is little to no research on the effects of bathing in an Epsom salt bath. There are endless blogs out there with endless claims about the health benefits of Epsom with nothing to back it up. After searching for articles for magnesium sulfate, bath salts, Epsom salts, I have found not a single article that even investigates Epsom salt baths. The closest thing I found was a patent for methods of different bath soaks, which just boil down to saying put salt in warm water and soak for 15 minutes.
Other bloggers seem to have the same problem when trying to find the proof, in the references below is a link to another similar article. I did however find articles about other medical uses for magnesium sulfate. In the study from Maternal-Fetal Medicine Units Network, they wanted to test if magnesium sulfate could help prevent cerebral palsy in preterm babies. Each group receive magnesium sulfate, administered intravenously as a 6-g bolus followed by a constant infusion of 2 g per hour, or matching placebo.
After a follow up analysis, the rate of the primary outcome was not significantly different in the magnesium sulfate group and the placebo group. However, in a secondary analysis, moderate or severe cerebral palsy occurred significantly less frequently in the magnesium sulfate group. The risk of death did not differ significantly between the groups.
In my references, there is also another article about using magnesium sulfate to treat polymorphic ventricular tachycardia. Long story short is there is no evidence to support the claims people make about Epsom salt baths. We can only go by What other people say. I can see some merit to the muscle relaxation benefit because magnesium sulfate can be used as a laxative and magnesium chloride is a common ingredient in rescue inhalers, in both cases it relaxes muscles.
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Where do Epsom Salts come from? Magnesium sulfate is an inorganic salt chemical compound containing magnesium, sulfur, and oxygen. It is often encountered as the heptahydrate sulfate mineral epsomite, more commonly referred to as Epsom salt. Epsom is a market town in Surrey, England about 13 miles 21 km southwest of London.
Mike on 25 January at A Green Beauty Blog - […] Epsom salts have been used for hundreds of years for their therapeutic and cosmetic benefits, they are named after….
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Strictly Necessary Cookies Strictly Necessary Cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. Enable or Disable Cookies. Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences! The mechanism is fascinating: enough heat can basically burn microscopic holes in the surface of the skin, creating artificial pores. At lower temperatures, the increased permeability is due to messing with the stratum corneum lipid and keratin structures, making them a less effective barrier.
The effect studied mostly depends on actually damaging the skin. It is conceivable that permeability starts increasing at lower temperatures with longer exposures … but sixty degrees lower? For the duration of a bath? Probably not for most substances. Also, not all substances will respond the same way to heat. How else could magnesium sulfate possibly get into the bloodstream?
If it does, as Dr. Reader Adrian J. Is it possible that the salt diffuses across the epithelium in the anus if the rectum relaxes to some degree in the warm water? Live a little: click that footnote!
But I find myself uncomfortably wondering … just how much do I relax in a hot bath? That much? And how much salt could diffuse across that more permeable but much smaller membrane? A fair question, but this has the same problem as anal absorption: too small and too tight. And you thought an article about salt baths would be boring! No wonder this is the most popular Epsom salts analysis on the internet! And that plausibility is super low. Maybe salt can be inhaled with steam.
Human olfaction, despite being shabby by animal kingdom standards, can still get a nice rich scent from a mind-bogglingly small number of molecules. Water from a soup is still remarkably pure despite the odour, and definitely has no salt in it. Another related possibility is that we might inhale tiny droplets of water aerosols of salt water that float over the surface of a bath. Such droplets would contain dissolved salts at the same concentration as the bath, but these are nearly microscopic tiny water droplets.
Again, not really a plausible source of medicinal absorption. Christine Northrup to support the point, without so much as a link to substantiate that this is in fact her opinion. But it probably is: Dr. Northrup is not stingy with her beliefs. And so on. We will have to live with the mystery. Meanwhile, it is obviously reasonable to be skeptical, as many experts are.
There are many reasons to suspect that absorption is trivial. A thorough scientific review of both the evidence and rationale for transdermal absorption of magnesium makes a critical point: although there may now be adequate evidence to suggest that some transdermal absorption is possible in the right conditions, that evidence is not nearly strong enough to support claims that it is superior to oral supplementation.
And that finally brings us to the second major part of the article …. If Epsom salts do get across the skin, so what? Is it any good to have some extra ions of magnesium and sulfate kicking around your bloodstream? Why did the ions cross the skin anyway?
Magnesium deficiency hypomagnesemia may be a real problem, and it may also be related to pain, supplementation might make sense, and soaking in the stuff could be a way of getting some magnesium… but probably not as good as just eating it.
Sulphate deficiency could also be thing, but to a much lesser degree, and much less clearly. There is little doubt that magnesium sulfate probably has some effects on physiology in some contexts. Several of those effects are well known, including a few common medical applications mentioned earlier. There are also unpleasant effects , like diarrhea.
It was a study of the acute effects of injected magnesium sulfate, which is presumably very similar to absorbing it, just faster.
Not exactly encouraging! We can really only speculate. And speculating about basic biology is really difficult. Magnesium is a mainstream electrolyte, a famous molecule, and many people are supplementing magnesium, for better or worse. But sulfate is obscure, and sulfate supplementation is quite rare.
The magnesium information below is resting on fairly firm foundations, plenty of science; sulfate is an information desert by comparison. You can find a few popular articles about sulfate deficiency… most of which actually have very little to say about sulfate and quickly veer off into magnesium. I asked Dr. Interestingly, fixing a deficiency is actually sedating! It literally calms your nerves, and that could certainly be relevant to chronic pain.
So, despite its biological importance, deficiencies may be both common and related to pain. The other big idea about magnesium is that it prevents cramps. This idea is mostly inspired by the myth that cramps are caused by dehydration and a shortage of electrolytes like Mg.
Christopher Labos. In peripheral nerves, low magnesium causes spasms in the muscles, but when it happens in the central nervous system, it can cause seizures. There are issues with both infection and oral. Despite this, Mg deficiency is common even in wealthy places because grains and meat are poor sources, and the good sources are not nearly as popular salad, basically — leafy greens and nuts are especially good.
Bathing in the stuff is like going a half hour out of your way to buy stale bread from a corner store when you live next to a good bakery. To embrace Epsom salts baths as a helpful method of supplementing magnesium, at least three things need to be established:.
None of these things has actually been established, and the absence of any one of them is a deal-breaker for bathing in magnesium. The increased levels of magnesium ions shown by Dr. This is a classic problem with all kinds of supposedly amazing pain cures: pain has too many different causes for one medicine to be really effective.
There are many types of body pain that have little or nothing at all in common with each other physiologically. To name just a few examples of pain causes that are biologically distinctive from each other:. All of these work in different ways, and so no one thing can possibly treat them all effectively, or even a few of them.
For instance, an anti-inflammatory medication would fail with almost all of them except the acute inflammation of a recent injury. Even the subtle, low-grade inflammation of repetitive strain injury seems to be too different from acute inflammation for those medications to work.
Those goals might even be mutually exclusive. For instance, the primary source of injury pain is inflammation — a complex and painful physiological process intended to … wait for it … speed healing. Indeed, the only known mechanism by which you can in principle recover faster from an injury would be to increase inflammation.
If bathing in Epsom salts did that , it would make you hurt more , not less. The point here is just that the conventional wisdom about epsom salts is pretty murky and non-specific about exactly what and how and it is supposed to help. Salt has been used for well, just about everything. Like these effervescent brain salts. Unsurprisingly, this is another misleading oversimplification.
Calcium channels are itsy bitsy holes — molecular scale holes 54 — in cell walls that let calcium in and out as a trigger for a bunch of biochemical business. They exist primarily in muscle tissue, blood vessels, and neurons. There are a number of druggy ways to interfere with them, including magnesium.
Calcium channel blocking is fairly well understood physiology, and the main clinical application is to decrease blood pressure which it does by reducing the strength of muscle contraction in the heart and blood vessels. Although other effects undoubtedly exist, there is no particular reason to believe that they have any potent effect on any flavour of pain. Yes, it is possible that magnesium absorbed through the skin does something different, something good, for certain kinds of pain.
After all, different calcium blocker drugs have different effects! So it really boggles the mind that anyone would toss this idea around with any confidence. Most of these were reviewed in 56 four showed a minor but technically positive effect, seven showed no effect greater than a placebo, and in one experiment the subjects actually experienced more pain ouch.
These conclusions were basically repeated in a review, 57 despite the inclusion of some positive studies like the one cited above. Despite the discouraging state of the evidence, this mystery is not solved yet, and there actually is a plausible mechanism for magnesium ions reducing pain. While it is clearly neither well understood nor reliable, it does exist, and it might shine in the right circumstances. But I doubt those circumstances are an Epsom salt bath.
Could magnesium fail to relieve pain in all those ideal testing situations, and yet somehow succeed when absorbed from Epsom salts baths? Reader Dorrie B. It can suck them dry, like the potato in the classic osmosis demonstration. Yes, my email inbox has anal fissures in it. An Epsom salt bath definitely cannot disinfect a puncture wound as one of my readers was told. A strong salt solution is anti-bacterial, but the problem with rusty nails is the risk of deep injection of Clostridium tetani — far beyond the reach of any soak.
Do people who bathe or swim in salt water regularly suffer any ill effects? Are they more susceptible to new infections? Obviously non-salty baths have some benefits of their own. Is there any other reason to put Epsom salts in your bath? Well, Epsom salts dissolved in your bath does make the water feel nice. Most people agree that the water feels smoother, slicker, silkier. Salt makes you floatier! Infinitesimally floatier.
The concentrations of salt required for flotation therapy are much higher than Epsom salt packaging recommends, by the way. Most people don't bathe in high concentration of Epsom salts for long periods — probably You can also pay to bathe in much, much higher concentrations. Although the floating industry is not new — sensory deprivation tanks have been around for decades — it has definitely been surging.
There are several new float spas here in Vancouver in the late s. In some places, the flotation industry is selling frequent and long salt baths, up to two hours of soaking and floating at a time. That much time is a luxury very few people can afford!
Shorter floats are much more common. The main purpose of flotation therapy is to reap the benefits of deep relaxation, which are noteworthy. For more detailed discussion of flotation and immersion therapies, see Get in the Pool for Pain: Aquatic therapy, aquajogging, water yoga, floating and other water-based treatment and injury rehab options.
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