We're all familiar with how you can put ice on an injury to help reduce pain and swelling.

It's one of the simplest pieces of medical advice for dealing with muscular or joint injuries.

Ice works great, so if a little cold from an ice pack can work well, then shouldn't

putting a whole person into an incredibly cold cryosana work even better.

We're going to find out.

Next, Unskeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid.

I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.

Pouring cold water on cryotherapy.

One of our most abundant renewable resources is bogus medical therapies.

About every day someone thinks of a new one.

Sometimes invented from whole cloth, sometimes extrapolated from a real therapy, sometimes

tweaked from an old tradition.

Today we're going to look closely at one such, spin the wheel and create an alternative

therapy.

Don't confuse this with medical cryotherapy, the freezing off of tissue, usually called

cryoablation.

Alternative cryotherapy is a hijack of an actual medical term repurposed to refer to the

use of what they call a cryosana, the opposite of a regular sauna.

Rather than applying ice to a specific body part, a cryosana is used for what they call

whole body cryotherapy.

It's a small room for one or more people, cooled by liquid nitrogen to extreme temperatures.

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