While oral consumption of Epsom salt is safe in very small doses, there is no credible evidence that consuming it has any detoxifying effects. Anyone considering drinking or eating Epsom salt should consult a doctor first. Many medications, including acetaminophen, can interact with Epsom salt. The packaging should have ingredient and drug fact information printed on it. Epsom salt can be purchased at a health food store, some pharmacies, or online. To take an Epsom salt bath, add 2 cups of Epsom salt when running a bath in a standard size bathtub.
The salt will quickly dissolve if put under running water. The water should be warm but not too hot. A person can then soak in the bath for 12 to 20 minutes, or longer if desired, and they should avoid using soap. People should rest for at least 1 hour after a detox bath or take a bath at bedtime so that they can go to sleep afterward.
Olive oil contains antioxidants and can also help soften the skin when added to a bath. Using olive oil in a bath is not recommended for children or older adults who are prone to falling. Essential oil needs to be diluted before being applied to skin, and so it is best to dilute it with a carrier oil before bathing. Carrier oils can be sweet almond oil, coconut oil , or even olive oil. A little essential oil goes a long way, so it is important to add only a few drops of the diluted oil into a full bath.
Baking soda has been shown to have antifungal properties and may help reduce irritating germs. It may also soften the skin and reduce itchiness.
Epsom salt baths are normally safe, even for children. However, oral consumption of Epsom salt may be dangerous for pregnant women, children, and people with kidney conditions.
More research is needed to prove the benefits and detoxifying effects of Epsom salt baths. However, people who use Epsom salt baths for detoxification believe in their benefits, such as relaxation, pain relief, and softening the skin.
Warm baths can help to reduce stress and promote better sleep. Some infections, such as staph infection , worsen from hot water or salt mixes. For foot or toenail fungal infections , soak your feet twice a day for about 20 minutes. Consider adding tea tree oil or other essential diluted oils known to promote healing. Epsom salt can be used as an exfoliant to soften rough, cracked feet.
Along with soaking your feet, massage a handful of Epsom salt into your skin for an added boost. Epsom salt taken orally removes toxins from the body that can cause irritation, inflammation, and body pain.
If you have sore feet or corns , soak your feet regularly to reduce pain. An Epsom salt foot soak can also help to remove splinters. The mineral compounds in the salt help to reduce inflammation around the affected region. It will then soften your skin to allow for easy removal of the debris or hangnail. For minor aches and pains, Epsom salt soaks can be a safe complementary home alternative to medication. However, discuss your options with a doctor before using this remedy to treat infections and other health conditions.
People with diabetes, kidney disease, or heart problems, or who are pregnant should talk to their doctor before using Epsom salt. Epsom salt soaks are usually a safe home treatment to help manage foot ailments.
Epsom salt can help you relax, de-stress, or avoid constipation, but it's not effective for weight loss. Learn why and how to use Epsom salt. Epsom salt has been used as a natural remedy for hundreds of years. Learn more about its uses, benefits and side effects. Ionic foot detoxes are said to rid the body of harmful toxins, but is this really possible? Here's what the research has to say.
Which matters. Their key findings:. Magnesium ions diffusing through the stratum corneum. The brighter the warm-toned pixels here, the more magnesium. Not even an extremely educated guess. There are just too many ways the messy details of biology might surprise us. This quote from a book by Dr. Kenneth B. Regularly bathing in hot water to which Epsom salts have been added can help draw out toxins from the skin.
That anyone would mistake it for authoritative is rather depressing. Fortunately, not all my mail is so depressingly gullible. Hat tip to reader Bryan B. I love it when readers do that. This lotion had rather a lot of magnesium in it. And soldiers were not poisoned by the magnesium.
But it is pretty noteworthy evidence that absorption is minimal or nil when putting high concentrations of Mg on the skin. That information is not necessarily correct, but it is certainly more authoritative and worth bearing in mind, than the opinion of Dr. In , Rosemary Waring, a British biochemist at the University of Birmingham, did a nice science experiment with Epsom salts. She found them to be higher after the baths! No therapeutic effects of Epsom salt were studied or claimed — she just studied absorption, and did not try to make any more of it, showing the restraint of a pro.
What could be simpler? I was so interested in these results although still a bit skeptical that I contacted Dr. Waring by email. Every member of this widely distributed angry mob read this article only just far enough to get angry enough about my skepticism to send an email. Many of them claimed to have read the whole thing, but apparently they missed Dr.
And, shocker, none of them seemed to be aware of the potential problems with Dr. That pun was simply unavoidable. Also, Dr. She assumed, like most people, that the heat of a bath probably increases the permeability of the skin. Enough of it sure does. But probably not bath heat. Speaking of studies that get thrown in my face, someone haughtily hurled this one at me as if it was the last word, absolute proof that a hot bath boosts magnesium absorption. A experiment showed that brief, intense heating of the skin can dramatically increase its permeability.
With more heat, dramatically more molecules could cross the duration of exposure had less effect. Skin permeability was increased by a few multiples in the low end of the range, all the way up to three orders of magnitude at the most extreme temperatures. The mechanism is fascinating: enough heat can basically burn microscopic holes in the surface of the skin, creating artificial pores. At lower temperatures, the increased permeability is due to messing with the stratum corneum lipid and keratin structures, making them a less effective barrier.
The effect studied mostly depends on actually damaging the skin. It is conceivable that permeability starts increasing at lower temperatures with longer exposures … but sixty degrees lower? For the duration of a bath? Probably not for most substances. Also, not all substances will respond the same way to heat. How else could magnesium sulfate possibly get into the bloodstream? If it does, as Dr. Reader Adrian J. Is it possible that the salt diffuses across the epithelium in the anus if the rectum relaxes to some degree in the warm water?
Live a little: click that footnote! But I find myself uncomfortably wondering … just how much do I relax in a hot bath? That much? And how much salt could diffuse across that more permeable but much smaller membrane? A fair question, but this has the same problem as anal absorption: too small and too tight.
And you thought an article about salt baths would be boring! No wonder this is the most popular Epsom salts analysis on the internet! And that plausibility is super low. Maybe salt can be inhaled with steam. Human olfaction, despite being shabby by animal kingdom standards, can still get a nice rich scent from a mind-bogglingly small number of molecules. Water from a soup is still remarkably pure despite the odour, and definitely has no salt in it.
Another related possibility is that we might inhale tiny droplets of water aerosols of salt water that float over the surface of a bath. Such droplets would contain dissolved salts at the same concentration as the bath, but these are nearly microscopic tiny water droplets. Again, not really a plausible source of medicinal absorption. Christine Northrup to support the point, without so much as a link to substantiate that this is in fact her opinion.
But it probably is: Dr. Northrup is not stingy with her beliefs. And so on. We will have to live with the mystery. Meanwhile, it is obviously reasonable to be skeptical, as many experts are. There are many reasons to suspect that absorption is trivial. A thorough scientific review of both the evidence and rationale for transdermal absorption of magnesium makes a critical point: although there may now be adequate evidence to suggest that some transdermal absorption is possible in the right conditions, that evidence is not nearly strong enough to support claims that it is superior to oral supplementation.
And that finally brings us to the second major part of the article …. If Epsom salts do get across the skin, so what? Is it any good to have some extra ions of magnesium and sulfate kicking around your bloodstream? Why did the ions cross the skin anyway? Magnesium deficiency hypomagnesemia may be a real problem, and it may also be related to pain, supplementation might make sense, and soaking in the stuff could be a way of getting some magnesium… but probably not as good as just eating it.
Sulphate deficiency could also be thing, but to a much lesser degree, and much less clearly. There is little doubt that magnesium sulfate probably has some effects on physiology in some contexts. Several of those effects are well known, including a few common medical applications mentioned earlier. There are also unpleasant effects , like diarrhea. It was a study of the acute effects of injected magnesium sulfate, which is presumably very similar to absorbing it, just faster.
Not exactly encouraging! We can really only speculate. And speculating about basic biology is really difficult. Magnesium is a mainstream electrolyte, a famous molecule, and many people are supplementing magnesium, for better or worse. But sulfate is obscure, and sulfate supplementation is quite rare. The magnesium information below is resting on fairly firm foundations, plenty of science; sulfate is an information desert by comparison.
You can find a few popular articles about sulfate deficiency… most of which actually have very little to say about sulfate and quickly veer off into magnesium. I asked Dr. Interestingly, fixing a deficiency is actually sedating! It literally calms your nerves, and that could certainly be relevant to chronic pain. So, despite its biological importance, deficiencies may be both common and related to pain. The other big idea about magnesium is that it prevents cramps. This idea is mostly inspired by the myth that cramps are caused by dehydration and a shortage of electrolytes like Mg.
Christopher Labos. In peripheral nerves, low magnesium causes spasms in the muscles, but when it happens in the central nervous system, it can cause seizures. There are issues with both infection and oral. Despite this, Mg deficiency is common even in wealthy places because grains and meat are poor sources, and the good sources are not nearly as popular salad, basically — leafy greens and nuts are especially good.
Bathing in the stuff is like going a half hour out of your way to buy stale bread from a corner store when you live next to a good bakery. To embrace Epsom salts baths as a helpful method of supplementing magnesium, at least three things need to be established:. None of these things has actually been established, and the absence of any one of them is a deal-breaker for bathing in magnesium.
The increased levels of magnesium ions shown by Dr. This is a classic problem with all kinds of supposedly amazing pain cures: pain has too many different causes for one medicine to be really effective. There are many types of body pain that have little or nothing at all in common with each other physiologically. To name just a few examples of pain causes that are biologically distinctive from each other:. All of these work in different ways, and so no one thing can possibly treat them all effectively, or even a few of them.
For instance, an anti-inflammatory medication would fail with almost all of them except the acute inflammation of a recent injury. Even the subtle, low-grade inflammation of repetitive strain injury seems to be too different from acute inflammation for those medications to work.
Those goals might even be mutually exclusive. For instance, the primary source of injury pain is inflammation — a complex and painful physiological process intended to … wait for it … speed healing. Indeed, the only known mechanism by which you can in principle recover faster from an injury would be to increase inflammation. If bathing in Epsom salts did that , it would make you hurt more , not less. The point here is just that the conventional wisdom about epsom salts is pretty murky and non-specific about exactly what and how and it is supposed to help.
Salt has been used for well, just about everything. Like these effervescent brain salts. Unsurprisingly, this is another misleading oversimplification. Calcium channels are itsy bitsy holes — molecular scale holes 54 — in cell walls that let calcium in and out as a trigger for a bunch of biochemical business.
They exist primarily in muscle tissue, blood vessels, and neurons.
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