If you suffer from a chronic skin, joint or muscle condition, you may want to try a spa mud treatment to help you better manage your day-to-day symptoms. However, although mud treatments are popular spa indulgences that are touted to heal bodily disease and promote mental relaxation, there is not enough evidence available to show that these treatments are effective on their own at treating any illness. Therefore, speak with your doctor about how mud wraps or baths can complement, or harm, your already existing conventional medical treatment plan before you book a session at your local day spa.
Identification
A mud treatment is a type of spa service that uses specific types of mud and clays mixed with water to promote mental and physical healing throughout the body. Popular spa mud treatments include mud facials and mud body wraps, wherein mud is painted on your body and allowed to dry completely before being thoroughly rinsed off. Mud baths, another popular type of spa treatment, involve you emerging your body in mud or clay that has been heated to around 96 degrees for approximately 30 minutes to one hour.
Benefits
Medicinal mud treatments can reduce stress and anxiety, alleviate body aches and pains, temporarily improve oily skin by reducing sebum production, and improve skin elasticity, states MassageTherapy.com. Mud baths can also ease rheumatoid arthritis pain when used in conjunction with daily hot sulphur baths, says Dr. Andrew Weil, a medical doctor and founder and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, or AzCIM.
Types
Spa practitioners use various types of mud treatments to achieve different results. For example, spa skin care professionals called estheticians use Dead Sea mud masks to cleanse and moisturize skin; fango, a brownish-grayish mud, to improve circulation; and Moor mud, derived from plant matter, to induce relaxation. Additional types of spa mud treatments include volcanic mud to soothe aching muscles and Great Salt Lake mud to treat chronic skin conditions such as psoriasis and eczema.
Expert Insight
According to the National Institutes of Health, spa mud treatments may be useful for sufferers of fibromyalgia, a disease characterized by widespread muscle pain and weakness. The NIH states that spa mud packs and mud baths can positively influence fibromyalgia muscle tone and pain intensity, and the organization encourages the use of these spa treatments in a multidisciplinary approach to treating the disease. However, the exact reasons why spa mud treatments work in alleviating fibromyalgia symptoms is not known, notes the NIH.
Warning
Although Dr. Weil agrees that spa mud treatments can grant long-lasting benefits, especially for people who have chronically dry skin, he also warns that these treatments do come with risks. If the mud is not changed as often as it should be, you could contract a skin infection through contact with pseudomonas, strains of bacteria that thrive in high temperatures, Weil says.
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