Halotherapy

In a controlled trial of 73 workers with mild-to-moderate occupational chronic obstructive lung disease, adding 10 sessions of controlled dry-salt-aerosol halotherapy to standard medical therapy was associated with clinical improvement in a majority of cases versus standard therapy alone, by the study authors' own composite clinical/functional/laboratory efficiency criteria.

Members with occupational or chronic lung disease considering halotherapy should be told the strongest available direct trial evidence is a small, non-blinded occupational-medicine study, not a rigorous double-blind RCT, and that halotherapy should complement rather than replace pulmonology-directed care and prescribed medication.

The occupational-lung-disease trial reporting halotherapy benefit used a course of 10 sessions of controlled dry-salt-aerosol exposure, a dosing pattern distinct from the single 45-minute 'wellness' visit format most US retail salt rooms sell.

A Russian multi-condition trial reported improved clinical manifestations and reduced skin damage area in atopic dermatitis and psoriasis patients receiving sylvinite (mined potassium/sodium salt) halotherapy-adjacent exposure alongside standard treatment, but this used mined sylvinite salt rather than the pharmaceutical-grade dry NaCl aerosol used in commercial halotherapy salt rooms, and methodology quality cannot be confirmed from the available abstract.

Members sometimes turn to halotherapy hoping it will help them catch fewer colds or respiratory infections. The available evidence does not settle the question. The one systematic review looked only at respiratory function, quality of life, and medication use, and the school-based work in children that did report benefit was a 2012 Russian-language clinical trial whose abstract describes no randomization and no control group. Read together, infection frequency remains an open question rather than a demonstrated immune benefit.

Neither the occupational-lung-disease trial nor the sylvinite dermatology trial identified in this review round were randomized double-blind designs with confirmed allocation concealment, so they add supportive signal without changing halotherapy's overall 'limited, low-quality evidence' grade already established by the Cochrane and COPD systematic reviews on file.

A 2014 systematic review of halotherapy located only one randomized controlled trial worldwide and had to fall back on three lower-quality case-control studies, four studies and 1,041 participants in total, concluding that halotherapy cannot be recommended as a therapy and that high-quality studies are needed. Its three outcome themes were respiratory function, quality of life, and medication use, so it assessed no immune or infection-frequency outcome at all.