There are portable vaporiser machines currently being marketed for use when sick to breathe in a salt solution – would this be bad for your lungs? I have used these type of devices for asthma when I’m sick with a prescribed medication solution, however, I’m interested if anyone has tried this with just water (and does it work?) Or with the salt solution (and does it work?) Or is salt a very bad idea as can the salt crystallise on your lungs?
In: Biology
In large enough amounts it could cause some problems but it is not that bad in relatively small amounts. After all, salt is water soluble. So you will just absorb it and you can tolerate having some salt in your body. You even need to have some salt in your body.
Even in larger amounts it would not be doing much damage to your lungs because you would be absorbing it into your bloodstream pretty quickly. But at that point it could cause the problems associated with high levels of salt.
Nebulized saline is frequently used as a treatment for some lung conditions. Obviously it should be a product made for that purpose, not random salt water.
Intentionally breathing in anything other than air is a bad idea, as a general guideline to follow for…everything.
With the exception, of course, of a prescription under medical supervision, as you mentioned.
Breathing in nebulized saline is safe & often prescribed.
When you’re sick, water vapor can help relieve some irritation & congestion in the lungs by hydrating them (if they’re particularly dry) & by breaking up some of that mucous that might be built up & giving you trouble breathing.
Adding salt to the solution will actually help with hydrating the tissue as well as breaking up mucus. This is because, as a natural property of water, water follows salt down a gradient from low concentration to high concentration. In other words, water will go where high amounts of salt go, thus increasing the amount of contact water makes with the membrane in your lungs.
What a wonderful question. I didn’t even know this genre of products existed, and the question opened my eyes to this.
1. I went through the products and tried to find if there’s any science behind it, and I couldn’t find any.
2. Salt has the property of absorbing water, or more specifically in this case, the body can’t tolerate salt on the membranes, so it’ll actively absorb the salt and excess water on the membrane to get to isotonicity.
3. Salt, even in small concentrations, has the excellent ability to kill or inhibit microbes. This is very helpful with sinus infections.
4. Salt has the unfortunate tendency to increase blood pressure.
5. Asthmatics do feel better when breathing salty sea air. This is not equivalent to aerosolized salt particles. For once, the concentration isn’t guaranteed to be similar.
6. Since there’s no science backing it, I don’t think anyone has bothered to validate the short term and long term effects of this salt aerosolizers
7. All this salt in air will also wreck havoc on your walls, electrical devices, etc.
Overall, it will probably alleviate symptoms asthma and sinus infections, but nobody knows the true health impacts of these. Until science catches up, I don’t recommend using these. Just stick to your daily asthma management inhalers.
The saline use is isotonic saline. The same one that get infused into your body.
It barely tastes salty.
The lungs are perfectly capable of absorbing those minute quantities of saline (10 ml NS is the common volume used for adults, even less for children to apply asthma drugs).
You inhale more water walking through dense fog.
Your lungs can deal with a surprising volume of water without any problem.
The minute amount of salt is just in there because it irritates the lungs less than pure water would, because it matches the salinity of the regular lung fluids.
Additionally salt helps reduce viscosity of mucus making it easier to cough it out.
People with cystic fibrosis have a gene defect which prevents their bodies from naturally putting salt into any mucus they make, meaning the inside of their lungs is covered in much thicker mucus. They will inhale 6% multiple times daily to correct that specific issue of their disease.
Been to the beach? Congrats, you’ve breathed in salty air. Probably made your lungs feel better too, I know mine always do
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