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Comment by throwaway290 | Hacker News Reader

If you try going to a dry sauna and then a wet sauna at similar temperatures, you can feel this empirically. I can sit in a dry one for quite a while. Wet, no way...

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Also dry saunas go up to 110°C/230°F. On the other side of the spectrum, steam baths/Turkish saunas are set around 45°C (115°F), which feels very comparable to a 90°C (200°F) dry sauna

Saunas are somehow different, because their effect for health is entirely positive. Dry and wet.

Many Finns sit in wet saunas at 70-100C for 10-30 minutes every week.

100C? Where we boil water? ;)

It's not an issue. The dry air insulates fairly well, so your body heats up slowly and you can last a few minutes.

Also in dry air evaporation cooling is very effective, so sweating gets rid of a lot of the heat before it can build up in your body

If you are talking dry air, then how does this apply to wet saunas at 100 degrees?

afaik there are no humid saunas nearly that hot. You'd have a miserable time in there and even breathing would hurt like hell.

Exactly, so here we are talking about dry 100C saunas in replies to someone claiming that Finns sit in wet 100C saunas every week. I find it hard to believe. Humidity makes a massive difference.

Yes. Actually 100C. The sauna i usually go to goes up to 240F (115C). The reason this doesn’t immediately scald you is that air has a tiny fraction of the specific heat of water, so the energy being transferred to the skin is at a much lower level. You can reject a large portion of this heat by sweating

There used to be a Finnish sauna endurance competition where the temperature was 110℃. It was canceled in 2010 after one contestant died.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Sauna_Championships

This is a big sauna, most of the air is not at that temperature. And I would certainly not attempt endurance in it, but the thermometer on the wall usually is between 235F and 245F

They are not positive for me. Not at all. I feel worse during and after both wet and dry saunas. But then again I have Finnish and Inuit heritage so...

There's nothing magic about saunas. The only thing different is you can choose when you leave.

I agree, saunas are different. People working outside don't have the luxury to do so for only 10-30 minutes a week. And, not all positive: in Finland, a study found that there's around a 1 in 100k death rate per capita where heat exposure was the culprit.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18471223/

Interesting but you can’t really draw any conclusions on the healthiness of proper sauna use. We also don’t have any data on if people in general are living longer/healthier because of the sauna. Some people die from drinking water too

> Overall, 50% of all cases were under the influence of alcohol. The main conclusion is that death in the sauna is a rare event even in Finland where the frequency of sauna bathing is high.

I was responding to the claim "their effect for health is entirely positive." If you want to shift the goalpost from there, I'm not here for that debate. I love saunas myself, wet or dry.

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