VIDEO: When you visit most fire stations, you’ll find a weight room where firefighters can stay fit, but in five Minneapolis fire stations, you’ll also find saunas. The idea is that if firefighters spend time in a sauna after they respond to a fire call, they will sweat out some of the cancer-causing toxins that could have entered their bodies from the smoke. Steve Shapira is the founder of the Minneapolis Fire Foundation, which helped raise the money to buy the saunas. He’s also a cancer survivor who is trying to protect firefighters like himself.
“Hopefully prevent someone from walking down that same road that I’ve had to go down through,” Shapira said. But does it actually work? Dr. Zeke McKinney is a physician at HealthPartners and has spent a few years collecting data from Saint Paul firefighters who started using saunas a few years ago. “I don’t think it’s conclusive, but the data is starting to be suggestive at best,” McKinney said. McKinney says he plans to publish his study later this year, and he believes more research is needed to investigate if saunas can truly prevent cancer in firefighters.
“In general, are there health benefits of saunas? Yes. Are those health benefits to detoxify you from some type of carcinogen, such that it would decrease your cancer risk? It’s unclear,” McKinney said. This idea that saunas could potentially remove carcinogens from a firefighter’s body through sweat and urination came from anecdotal reports from firefighters who claim spending time in a sauna removes the smoky smell from their skin after they respond to a fire call.
Some firefighters, researchers and doctors have taken this idea a step further, that if a sauna can remove the smoky smell, perhaps a sauna can also remove harmful toxins and carcinogens from a firefighter’s body. Shapira says, regardless of whether saunas can protect firefighters from cancer or not, he believes in the many other health benefits that could improve a firefighter’s quality of life. “I purchased my own and Iโve used it ever since, multiple times a week,” Shapira says. “I think I rest better. I feel better. It has cardiovascular benefits. For me, there’s also some mental health benefits where I can go in there and kind of unplug from life.”
