Breathe Easy

Salt therapy provides a natural alternative for people with respiratory and skin issues.

- Cheri Henderson

ASHLEY STEINER WAS desperate to find help for her young son, who remained in an endless cycle of colds and ear infections.

“By the time he was 3, he was always on antibiotics. He got tubes, and after the tubes fell out, he was back to the same routine,” the former third-grade teacher recounts. So she began to research preventive care. Her search led her to salt therapy, a popular treatment in Europe, but virtually unheard of in the United States.

That was 2011, the year she opened The Salt Room, the nation’s second salt therapy center. “My son has not been on antibiotics since I opened,” Steiner says. She herself is asthmatic and is prone to bronchitis with the onset of a cold. No longer needing an emergency inhaler, Steiner gets three salt treatments a week when she feels a cold coming on, and her symptoms “just go away.”