The microclimate of both underground salt mines and artificial salt caves can help people with post-COVID syndrome. More and more doctors are suggesting to their patients who have recovered from coronavirus to spend time at places with salty air, such as one of Europe’s biggest salt mines located in Eastern Transylvania in Parajd (Praid).
According to experts, spending time at places with salty air has especially positive effects on those who previously had coronavirus, and this is why they recommend visiting natural salt mines or artificial salt caves — not only for those who had heavy symptoms but also for those who recovered smoothly.
Because of the pandemic, the number of visitors has dropped to one-third. The mine’s director, Zoltán Seprődi, told kronikaonline.ro that most of their visitors these days arrive with a medical referral, meaning that doctors are encouraging their patients to visit the mine even during the pandemic because of the positive effects of its salty air.
“Many people who have recovered from the coronavirus have visited our mine in the past few months, and the feedback we have received from them suggest that the mine’s microclimate had an especially good effect on them.”
– explained Seprődi.
The salty environment is recommended also for healthy people because inhaling salty air has an anti-inflammatory effect and the inhaled salt crystals assist with the self-purification of the respiratory tracts.
During the therapy, sodium, which can be found in the salty air, can get to areas where bacteria and tiny dust molecules settle down. It is not possible to remove them from the body, but the salty air combines with them so that, together with coughed-up phlegm, they can leave the body.
Special respiratory diseases, like bronchitis, the flu, sore throat, and sinus infections can be well cured in the special salty microclimate. But it is also recommended for allergic symptoms and skin problems, and it is well-known as a stress release too.
The salt therapy even has a preventive effect, such as for hay fever, respiratory allergies, croup seizures, colds, flu and other respiratory diseases.
“There is no need to be afraid of the salt caves because in such a microclimate neither the microbes nor the viruses can survive,” confirmed the mine’s director, Nelu Ştefan Roman, who is from Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mureș) and built Romania’s first metropolitan salt cave in the beginning of the 2000s.
His innovation, the “Surface artificial micro saline,” was chosen out of 324 innovations from 20 countries to win the Genius Medal at the GENIUS – EUROPE International Inventions Fair in Budapest in 2009; since then, several salt chambers and caves have been built in different towns based on his patent.
Title image: Visitors going down to the Parajd salt mine. (Arhive photo: Ákos Barabás/liget.ro)
