What is the difference between sitting in a sauna vs sitting in a car left outside in the summer heat? Why is one regarded as healthy and the other often fatal?
In: Biology
Both can be fatal, dry and wet saunas both have serious health risks due to overheating.
The difference is in a car, typically a young child or a pet does not have the ability to leave. So they’re stuck in a car, while their body temperature rises to fatal levels.
A sauna is a therapeutic environment combining heat and humidity, mostly for adults, and you’re free to leave any time. However, a hot car is just heat. If a small child is locked and forgotten inside, they have no way of getting out, and die of hyperthermia. It’s not negligence as much as an exhausted parent, a miscommunication, and child seats’ being in the back of the car. It could happen to anyone, which is what makes it particularly terrifying.
1) The fatality of cars is normally in reference to young children and pets that cannot get out of the car if they start to overheat. Adults are the ones who generally use saunas and it is rare for them to die in a car from overheating because they can get out.
2) Cars actually get far hotter than saunas in the regions that really warn about the dangers of leaving a child in a car.
Saunas are regulated by the humans who use them, and so they’re kept at a temperature that is endurable for a fixed length of time. So it’s generally not going to be so hot that it’s fatal unless extraordinary events occur, like a person passes out and stays in too long. It CAN be so hot it is fatal, such as in a contest in Finland that involves people enduring saunas designed to be super hot. A guy died after 6 minutes in such a sauna and another was hospitalized. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/08/sauna-championship-russian-dead
Hot cars aren’t designed for human safety. They’re inherently unsafe because under normal summer conditions, they will be fatal fairly quickly.
Because one is usually being referenced when a child or animal is being left in the car against their will. Whereas when going to a sauna you make that decision.
Also, some do believe saunas aren’t truly healthy for you.