EP 106: Benefits of Heat Therapy for Lyme with Lauren Dovey

 Mimi MacLean:
Welcome to the Lyme 360 podcast for all things related to Lyme disease and other chronic illnesses. I'm Mimi MacLean, mom of five, founder of Lyme 360 and a fellow Lyme warrior. Tune in each week to hear from doctors, health, practitioners, and experts to learn about their treatments, struggles and triumphs to help you on your healing journey. I'm here to heal with you.

Mimi MacLean:
Welcome back to the Lyme 360 podcast. This is your host Mimi MacLean and today we have on Lauren Dovey and she is the founder of Heat Healer. It's a direct to consumer health and wellness brand focused on developing the world's best heat therapy products. Through her own passion and journey, Lauren became obsessed with the amazing healing benefits you get from the regular sauna use. Everything from detoxing and burning calories to relief from aches and pains and improved sleep and mental health. After almost two years of research, Lauren launched Heat Healer, and it's a business that would allow her to combine her passion for sauna use with her career experience in sales, marketing, and design.

Mimi MacLean:
Thank you for joining in today. Please go to Lyme360.com to sign up for our newsletter so you'll be notified of our next podcast and our weekly newsletter as well. And also if you would like to help support our podcast, I have a shop page there with all the items that I use and suggest that a little bit of the profit goes to helping fund our podcast.

Mimi MacLean:
Lauren, thank you so much for coming on today. I really appreciate it. And I'm excited to talk about your company Heat Healer. I am a huge fan of saunas and infrared saunas having dealt with Lyme. And that has been one of my ways of detoxing that I've really enjoyed. So yeah, let's just dive in and talk to... How did you wind up starting it? Did you have an illness that made you start looking at saunas and the healing benefits?

Lauren:
Yes, I did. I've always loved saunas, just purely for the relaxation benefits, but I did have three kids in two years and the second being twins and that's when things for me with my health went a little bit crazy. So seven weeks after they were born, I got septic stock and I was in hospital for mastitis.

Mimi MacLean:
Oh.

Lauren:
So it got really bad. And basically after that I was sort of on a high after having the twins and adrenaline rush and everything, it was all good. And then that hit me and I had months of vertigo and crazy anxiety and everything. And so we used to go to this sauna at Icebergs, which is at Bondi Beach and it's this beautiful sauna that has this salt water pool in front of it. And I couldn't go anymore, there was no time with twin babies and a two year old that was tantruming all the time. So I actually came across something that was similar on [inaudible 00:03:01] and I was on maternity leave and I decided to make my own. So I found a manufacturer. We had a lab in New Zealand that did all the engineering and I created an infrared sauna blanket so that I could have it in my own home and use it whenever I wanted to.

Mimi MacLean:
Oh, that's great. I never knew about the blankets. I at first had one of those domes that I would... This ugly looking dome that I would sit, just for myself. It's like, I'd stick my head in, stick my head out. I mean my body and I stick my head out, but then when I'm not using it, it just kind of sits in the corner. It's kind of ugly. And then I finally just got... Because we just moved and I have room for one of the wooden things, but they're just such a huge investment. And then when you travel or you can't take it with you. And then I was looking into the blankets because I heard great things about them, but they're all made in China and I'm always afraid, all the ones I was looking at, I didn't know about your company, but when I Googled it, all the ones that came up were these Chinese ones that I'm sure are giving you amazing EMF radiation at the same time as getting the sauna.

Lauren:
Yeah, we got a sample and the EMF ratings were off the scale. So that's one of the things that we put that was really important to me because I wanted it to feel like the most natural experience possible. So we have EMF blocking technology that sits in the blanket. So if you got one of those EMF readers, you would put it on our blanket and effectively it's zero. If you put it near where the actual control unit is, you might pick up a little bit of a reading, but effectively over the blanket where you're laying in it at zero. So that was a huge thing for us. Yeah.

Mimi MacLean:
That's amazing. Because that's a huge thing. I think for people who are listening and thinking about, oh, maybe I'll get a cheaper one on Amazon is the EMF. And then two, the other... Because I did it because I was like curious just to see because somebody else was like, "I can't do it." I'm like, let me just try one out to see before I recommended it to somebody. And then the second thing is it smelled so badly of the plastic. Oh my God, I couldn't even last more than five minutes. I was like, my lungs were on fire and burning, whatever that plastic was. There was probably lead or I don't even know what it was.

Lauren:
It's so funny because you've like... I'm so sensitive. I can smell anything. I'm sensitive to glue, sensitive to paint, all of it. And when I got this first sample that I bought it on Amazon or something like that, it was definitely illegal in Australia to sell because we've got very strict regulations and I had the same experience and I was like, we can't have it made out of this fabric. So our fabric is very different from all the other ones on the market. We use amide fabric, which is what firefighters use and astronauts using their suits. So it basically doesn't smell like anything. That was super important to me.

Mimi MacLean:
Yeah. That's so bad. I mean I'm so sensitive too. And I was like, I can't even do this. This is so bad. I don't even know what it's made out of. Okay so for people who don't know... I think a lot of people in my community know how important saunas are, but I think it's not super attainable for a lot of people because either you might have a sauna place locally, but it's somewhat expensive to do on a regular basis. And too, like what I mentioned before, they're expensive and they're large to have a big thing. So if you could explain to people what the benefits are for saunas and detoxing.

Lauren:
Yeah. Okay. So I mean the main thing, especially with Lyme disease is that it helps support your detoxification pathways, especially through sweating and infrared heat, which is what we use in the blanket versus sort of dry heat, like a Finnish sauna heats you from the inside out. So that is sort of... It's a slower, more gradual heat. It does creep up on you towards the end of your session. You'll start sweating a lot, but it's much more tolerable as well. So personally I'm very sensitive to the Finnish saunas. I walk in sometimes and I get a big head spin because I get dizzy very easily, low blood pressure. So I love that with the blanket that you can keep your head out. The other things that are really good for it, for me, another reason I really wanted to have one in my own home and the way the blanket folds up so small and portable, it makes it easy.

Lauren:
But relaxation is a huge thing, which I think helps everything. It increases your circulation. So cardiovascular health is improved. What else? Inflammation, reduced inflammation. Pain relief is a really big one. Especially with nerve pain. I didn't know a huge amount about Lyme disease because in Australia they don't really... It's definitely here. I'm pretty sure I've had it when I was young, but they don't really recognize it. And I'm not sure if-

Mimi MacLean:
Yeah, hey don't recognize it here either.

Lauren:
Yeah, but you guys have got so much presence, which is great.

Mimi MacLean:
We do but if you go to the hospital, they don't believe you.

Lauren:
It's crazy. I'm sure I had it when I was seven. I'm sure I did.

Mimi MacLean:
Yeah, and I'm sure maybe some of the stuff that you're dealing with now might be leftover from that.

Lauren:
Yeah. Actually before I forget, an interesting thing, I just had my genes tested as well. Have you ever had those genetic tests?

Mimi MacLean:
Yes.

Lauren:
I've got the gene. That means I'm very sensitive to Lyme disease. So the epigenetics coach that was talking me through my results, she was like, "If you do get a tick, just take the antibiotics because you're on the end scale of how you would react to it." So that's interesting as well.

Mimi MacLean:
Talking about epigenetics, I thought you were going to go in this other direction where you can find out if I have a MTHFR mutation, where your body can't detox. And so all these years growing up, like I would run a marathon and I wouldn't even sweat.

Lauren:
Yes.

Mimi MacLean:
I didn't ever sweat. I never sweat. I'm always cold. I never... I'm always freezing. And I'm always like just kind of tight as far as going to the bathroom. And so I just never detox and I think that's one reason why I wasn't getting better from my Lyme is because my detox pathways weren't open. So I feel like sauna is the only thing that really gets me sweating. I don't ever sweat when I work out. It's always just when I'm in the sauna.

Lauren:
I've got exactly the same thing and it's quite ironic because I have a sauna business, but I found little tricks to help me start sweating as well. Even in the sauna, it's like your body... It's like the thing, the mechanism that gets it to switch on to start sweating, it just doesn't click on for me. So I have little tricks now that I use before I get in the sauna to help bring on the sweat. One thing is I have a hot shower which opens up the pores, makes you feel hot, can also have a hot tea, so that warms body inside. So just getting a bit of heat started before you pop in. Pre-heating the blanket for 10 minutes. So it's very hot when you get in and it's not gradual, it's more instant. So your body kind of instantly feels, oh my goodness something's happened. It's got to be kind of an intense change in temperature. The other thing is I jump rope for five minutes or do some sort of cardio for five minutes, get my heart rate up and then get in. And it's like, boom sweating.

Mimi MacLean:
Yeah. That makes sense. It's funny because my... And then this is a total tale. I know we're not doctors or we can't claim that anything does anything, but the person who works on my... Because she was giving me a facial, esthetician, sorry. She wound up having really bad stage four lung cancer.

Lauren:
Oh.

Mimi MacLean:
And she never smoked. And it was probably just from all the chemicals of working with all the stuff that she had. They were like, oh, it's not looking good, my pros... Whatever. And I had gone away for a couple months during the summer and I came back and I was expecting her to be like it's at the end of the road and she's like, "I'm cured." And I said, "What did you do?"

Mimi MacLean:
And she said, "I bought this mat, this sauna mat. And I sit in it every night for an hour. And then I drink this ginger tea with turmeric." And she had this whole concoction of tea that she drinks at night. And she's like, "The doctor's shocked. Whatever I was doing reversed all of my cancer because I guess I just never..." She was just getting all the stuff out of her. It was probably all the chemicals that she had been using all with her profession of working with all those chemicals, she was probably breathing them in or whatever, and just getting the... Detoxing it and getting it all out. So side note doesn't involve Lyme, but that was a kind of an antidote story that I had heard about a blanket.

Lauren:
That's incredible.

Mimi MacLean:
But okay. So what else have we not covered that you think that would be relevant that people would like to learn about your business? How old is it?

Lauren:
It's almost three years old.

Mimi MacLean:
Oh, good.

Lauren:
Not too old yet.

Mimi MacLean:
And you ship internationally?

Lauren:
We do. So our biggest market is the US followed by Canada, the UK, and then Australia. We're a little bit hot here, so it's not the biggest market in Australia.

Mimi MacLean:
Yeah. But so if I order a blanket from you, is it actually shipping from Australia or do you have manufacturing in the United States?

Lauren:
No, we ship from California.

Mimi MacLean:
Oh, okay.

Lauren:
We have warehouses in California, Canada, in the UK and Australia.

Mimi MacLean:
Okay, good.

Lauren:
So we've got four different locations where we ship directly from, so you'll get it pretty quickly actually. If you're in LA you get it within a day or two.

Mimi MacLean:
Oh, that's great. And then have you... I know you said you were talking to some people that have had Lyme, have you had any other feedback from people?

Lauren:
We get so much feedback from people with Lyme. That's why we did a piece recently on our blog. We have this lovely girl called Joanna and she's got sort of an Instagram following and it's a big community of Lyme people that have had Lyme and they talk about Lyme and she's a big advocate for it. And she sort of reached out to me and said that she was really, really interested in trying the product because she was finding it really hard, her closest infrared sauna that she would go to try and get to was 40 minutes drive.

Mimi MacLean:
My gosh.

Lauren:
And it was COVID, lockdown. So she came across the product and was like, "Oh my God, the concept of having a sauna in my house so I don't have to travel for 40 minutes, can use it whenever I want is really great." So she used it and she was obsessed. She said it helped her immensely and the cost as well of her paying, she was traveling 40 minutes paying a certain amount each time that she would go to this infrared sauna. So that cost was low, convenience is high.

Mimi MacLean:
Yeah. I mean, because for the price that you're charging is almost after going to 10 treatments, it's the same. Almost, if you do the math. And so it's also, as you said, a lot more convenient and it's a full hour that you recommend to be in there?

Lauren:
So you can use it for different purposes. So sometimes if I'm just super stressed and want to have a kickstart my morning, I'll do it for like 15 minutes. I'll preheat, do a little cardio session for 10 minutes, jump in there, have a relaxation, do a meditation or a manifestation while I'm in there and then have a cold shower. And then that's my morning started. So that's more relaxation for 15 minutes. But if you want to sort of see therapeutic benefits, longer term benefits, like cardiovascular health, increased metabolism, that sort of thing you'd want to be using it, I think about three times a week, at least. And for six to eight weeks to start seeing those results.

Mimi MacLean:
And for like an hour?

Lauren:
I would say from at least 30 minutes an hour is a long time. I don't think you need to be-

Mimi MacLean:
It is a long time. Yeah.

Lauren:
But sometimes I really enjoy an hour session, sometimes if it's before bed, I sleep like a baby.

Mimi MacLean:
Well they also say it burns almost 500 calories if you do it for-

Lauren:
For an hour.

Mimi MacLean:
An hour. Right. I mean, it's a lot that like a workout.

Lauren:
It is. Well it's because it increases your heart rate. So essentially it's mimicking exercise. That's how it works.

Mimi MacLean:
Yeah.

Lauren:
Yeah.

Mimi MacLean:
Lauren, this has been amazing and I wish you the best of luck. I mean, you've had some great press as well. Has that been hard to get?

Lauren:
I think we've been very fortunate with our timing. Yeah. And having Kourtney Kardashian backing our product has been a really amazing thing for press.

Mimi MacLean:
Oh, wow. How did you get that?

Lauren:
She came across our product and we sent them samples. The Poosh team loved it. And then we got on their site and it's been a great thing since, so that was almost a year ago now.

Mimi MacLean:
Oh, that's great.

Lauren:
Yeah.

Mimi MacLean:
That's amazing. And it also helps, probably COVID is probably one of those your business actually helped because people are home.

Lauren:
It did. Yes. So let's see for the next 12 months how it goes.

Mimi MacLean:
I know, I know.

Lauren:
I still think benefits of having a portable sauna in your own home, I think that's something that's the main reason that I want to keep pushing forward with our business is that I think that the benefits are so great. And you can have one and use it anytime that you want.

Mimi MacLean:
Yeah. I don't even know if you know, I have a whole other podcast you have to come on.

Lauren:
Badass.

Mimi MacLean:
Yeah. The Badass CEO.

Lauren:
Yeah. I would love to.

Mimi MacLean:
I interview female CEOs.

Lauren:
Yeah. I'd love to.

Mimi MacLean:
You'd be perfect for that. But yeah, I mean this is great for anybody who's home and can't get out and it's definitely reasonably priced. And I see that there's... It's a discount now or something right now. I don't know. I see it a $50 something off

Lauren:
If you'd like for your listeners, we can always set up a code as well.

Mimi MacLean:
Okay, great. That would be great to give them a little bit of a discount, but this is great. And you also have a great blog. So for people to learn more about saunas and there's one about collagen and infrared sauna, I see right now, as your article, but thank you very much. I really appreciate it. And it's great that you're doing something to help us all be a little bit healthier right now, especially with COVID and everything else that's been going on. That alone, doing this to help if you've had COVID or just to kind of detox all the spike proteins and whatever from your body.

Lauren:
Yeah. Well I just had it and I actually got in the sauna straight away.

Mimi MacLean:
Yeah. It helps. It just gets everything moving and your blood flowing and not clotting.

Lauren:
Yeah. For sure, it was very helpful.

Mimi MacLean:
Well, thank you. Is there anything else that we haven't covered that you'd like to cover?

Lauren:
No, I think that's everything. I mean, the only thing I wanted to maybe probably talk about is just that we have that the lymphatic system, we have a paddle as well, that I've really pushed with our sauna, basically a large Gua Sha paddle. And I use it before the sauna, so that also can help with lymphatic drainage, which I know is really good for Lyme as well.

Mimi MacLean:
Oh, that's cool. Now that doesn't heat up, it's just kind of like a stone that just, you rub it against your-

Lauren:
Yeah. You put it under hot water to get it warm and then you would put like an oil on and just move everything towards your lymph nodes to help with drainage before or after the sauna.

Mimi MacLean:
I've never seen that. Did you come up with that?

Lauren:
Well, my lymphatic system is really slow as well, so yes I... Yeah.

Mimi MacLean:
Because I've never seen anything like that. That's kind of cool.

Lauren:
Thank you.

Mimi MacLean:
And then you also have it add on, you can do it like a towel liner I assume that you put inside the-

Lauren:
Yep. The insert.

Mimi MacLean:
Yeah. So if you're sharing it or whatever, just so that it stays clean, but awesome. This is great. And I love it. It's just very sleek looking and clean and nice. But thank you so much. I really appreciate your time.

Lauren:
Thank you for having me on.

Mimi MacLean:
Each week I will bring you different voices from the wellness community so that they can share how they help their clients heal. You will come away with tips and strategies to help you get your life back. Thank you so much for coming on and I am so happy you are here. Subscribe now and tune in next week if you want to learn how I detox and you want to check out my detox for Lyme checklist, go to Lyme360.com/detoxchecklist. You can also join our community at Lyme 360 Warriors on Facebook and let's heal together. Thank you.