In the Montauk Salt Cave
To hear advocates of salt therapy tell it, regular sessions in a salt room or salt cave can help alleviate symptoms of asthma, Lyme disease, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or emphysema, stave off the flu, and improve skin conditions like eczema.
One thing Shannon Coppola, who opened the Montauk Salt Cave two weeks ago, can say for sure is that after she began taking her 4-year-old son, Oliver, for salt therapy in New Jersey last fall, he was able to sleep through the night for the first time in his life. He has a long list of environmental allergies and had suffered from a chronic cough since infancy.
“We had treated him for everything” in an attempt to help him breathe more easily and sleep in comfort, she said last week, even deciding to have his adenoids removed on the advice of a doctor, but nothing seemed to help. In researching potential cures, she learned about salt therapy, also called halotherapy, and took her son in for a session on a visit to her parents in New Jersey.
In Oliver’s case, it seemed to succeed where all other treatments had failed. He is still sleeping through the night some nine months later, “and he’s not medicated,” she said. Rather than continue trekking to New Jersey, she decided to build a salt cave of her own in Montauk, both for her son’s benefit and because she believed others could find similar relief.
Margaret Smiechowski, a homeopath who lives in Vermont and designs salt caves for clients around the country, helped her plan her cave when the space she had rented behind Finest Kind Wine was just an empty shell. Earlier this summer, three tons of pink Himalayan salt arrived by truck, and Ms. Coppola built the cave with help from Dr. Smiechowski. The pink salt comes from Pakistan by way of a New Jersey shipping company. It is “pure, untouched, untainted by the environment,” Ms. Coppola said.
The term “salt cave” might conjure images of a seaside grotto carved out of a cliff face, maybe an underground haven encrusted with salty crystals. That’s kind of what it feels like inside Ms. Coppola’s salt room. Pink salt blocks line the walls, there’s a salt “fireplace,” and the floor is covered with several inches of small salt crystals. Pharmaceutical-grade aerosol salt is pumped into the climate-controlled room. “You’re inhaling and breathing and ingesting all of the trace minerals found in the salt,” Ms. Coppola said.
“Climate control is key,” she said. “As long as the room maintains the same temperature the salt, because it is antimicrobial and antibacterial, won’t deteriorate.”
The sculpted ceiling is made to look like a cave and tiny fiber-optic lights convince you it must be dark outside even at high noon, but outside the room the airy reception area is anything but cavelike.
During 45-minute sessions offered at the top of each hour customers can lean back in a reclining chair and soak up the atmosphere as calming music plays, breathe in the purified salt air, maybe take a nap. “It’s a soothing room,” and for some, that’s reason enough to spend $40 for a session, health benefits notwithstanding.
Ms. Coppola took her 4-year-old to the cave every day in July, even before it opened to customers. Now, with the goldenrod in flower, normally an especially difficult time for him, he is doing better than ever.
The Montauk Salt Cave will be open year round. “It’s great for relaxing and kind of getting you out of seasonal depression,” Ms. Coppola said, adding that it is also “an alternative way of treating all the things that afflict us in the winter months,” from flu to the common cold to dry skin.
The cave is open Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., and Sunday from 9 to 11. On weekdays at 4 p.m., a kids hour, an adult can accompany children for free. Sessions are 20 percent off for a set of 10, and 15 percent off for 5.