Hazan
Continued from p.74 local Israeli expert Baruch Bekker (who opened the first Israeli salt room in Haifa in 2000) opened the first Breathewell clinic at the Jerusalem Bio Park at Hadassah Ein Kerem, in February. It’s the first and only salt room facility in the world with both speleotherapy and halotherapy rooms. The former is a room constructed with large blocks of salt that naturally emit salt particles into the air; the latter, a more aggressive form of salt therapy, features salt-coated walls and a machine, called a salt generator, that crushes the salt and blows the particles into the air. The clinic has helped hundreds of people, from those with allergies, chronic ear or sinus infections, to sufferers of severe asthma, bronchitis, and even lung disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Kestenbaum tells the story of one particular 18-year-old patient with cystic fibrosis for whom the salt treatments provide significant relief. “He was undergoing two to three hours of hospital treatment a day, all geared to loosening up the mucus in his lungs to enable him to breathe,” claims Kestenbaum. After the first 14 treatments, he signed up for a 6-month package. “I tried to get his doctor to report to us on his condition, but the patient pushed off his regular appointment with his doctor since he started the salt therapy, because he is feeling better. “We have asthma sufferers who have come in, in the throws of an asthma attack, and after 20 minutes in the therapy room, they are breathing steadily,” he says. “That’s unbelievable to see.” Each treatment runs about an hour, twice a week, ideally with a 48hour break between them. The salt used for the treatments is imported from a mine in Ukraine. It has a much higher concentration of sodium chloride than Israel’s local sea salt (90+% compared to 16%). It is ingested at a rate of about five milligrams per session, the same amount as in a serving of potato chips. Kestenbaum opened the second Breathewell clinic, a mixed chiropractic and Chinese medicine facility in an office park in Modi’in, and a third in an alternative medicine shop on Hillel Street in the center of Jerusalem. On February 1, another Breathewell clinic opened in Beitar, with others in Talpiot, Ramot, and Beit Shemesh slated for 2010. “We decided that in order to bring the business to the U.S. we would first get an education in Israel, and test different models and locations to see what works best,” explains Kestenbaum. Although salt therapy is popular in Russia and Eastern Europe, where there is a long history of using salt caves and mines
Friday, March 5, 2010
for therapeutic purposes, there are salt rooms in Canada, Australia and Asia, but the U.S. remains virtually salt therapy free. “It just doesn’t exist there,” says Kestenbaum. He says this is due primarily to a lack of clinical trials on salt therapy, although some have taken place in Russia and Eastern Europe, and both the Journal of Aerosol Medicine and the New England Journal of Medicine published positive reports on salt therapy in 1995 and 2006, respectively. “Western doctors tend to be more skeptical and less willing to embrace [alternative therapies],” he says. Still, Kestenbaum is confident that the therapy, which in Israel boasts a success rate of 80 percent among children and elderly with respiratory problems, will have legs in the U.S. market. He expects the first American Breathewell center to open in New York in the next year, and hopes to build it as a nationwide franchisebased business, thereafter. (Israel21c.org)
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