By Avigayil Kadesh
In 2007, Connecticut resident Matthew Katz decided to come to Israel and see if the unique sun and minerals at the Dead Sea could heal his skin lesions from psoriasis.
The healing powers of this region – the lowest spot on Earth – have been known since ancient times. But only in modern times have the unusual conditions at what Israelis call the Salt Sea been quantified and analyzed for the purposes of climatotherapy, a medical discipline using a region’s special climate to treat chronic ailments.
Katz discovered Dr. Marco Harari’s
DMZ Medical Center, currently the only facility of its kind at the Dead Sea. Harari’s patients come from many countries for two or three weeks to get relief from symptoms of incurable conditions such as psoriasis, asthma and arthritis.
“My skin was great for six months, and I became an advocate for the Dead Sea through further research,” Katz says.
Now living in Israel, Katz runs
HealthRightUSA, a worldwide educational nonprofit offering a 21-day program of exercise, nutrition and holistic healing classes designed to enhance and complement the effects of Dead Sea climatotherapy so that patients achieve maximum benefits and don’t have to return as often.
Last summer, Katz represented Harari in Paris at an International Psoriasis Convention. “I stood in front of 250 doctors and told my story, wearing shorts and a t-shirt to show how clear my skin is,” he says.
The Dead Sea, he explains, is 27 times denser than Utah’s Great Salt Lake. “Because of the heat there in April to October, the minerals and the vapors from them rise, and that relaxes you and makes your breathing and digestion better. The water actually pulls toxins from every organ.”
The sun here is also a critical element in healing skin. The rim of the Dead Sea filters the sun’s ultraviolet rays, “so you’re getting only ‘good’ UVB, which doesn’t happen anywhere else on the planet,” Katz says.
Pini Shani, head of marketing at the Tourism Ministry’s international department, says that every resort hotel in the Ein Bokek area of the Dead Sea has a gender-segregated tanning roof so that patients can sunbathe in the nude to receive maximum benefits of these rays.
Dr. Harari’s DMZ Medical Center is based at the Lot Spa Hotel Missing out on a miracle?
Climatotherapy at the Dead Sea “is very effective and 100 percent natural, plus it’s relaxing because you are at a beach resort,” Shani says. “Many of those who come have tried other things that didn’t work. A few thousand people return year after year.”
However, the Tourism Ministry would like to see the numbers increase. “People are missing out on a treatment that might be a miracle,” says Shani.
In some European countries, healthcare insurance covers nearly all the costs of a full-month stay at the Dead Sea for qualified patients, but for others the expenses can run up to $10,000 including air fare and food. That is daunting especially when pharmaceutical treatments are heavily subsidized.
However, Harari says that for the common skin conditions psoriasis, atopic dermatitis and vitiligo, “the Dead Sea offers the only serious treatment option without side effects and with long-term improvement.”
This is because of “a unique combination of several climatic factors here that allow what we call natural selective phototherapy, or treatment with natural light. We obtain excellent results when we combine this unique way to receive sun exposure with balneotherapy, or bathing in salt water.”
For patients with rheumatic or joint diseases such as osteoarthritis, arthritis and fibromyalgia, he says, “We add to the protocol a rehabilitation program including sulfur pool baths, black mud applications -- sometimes cold and sometimes warm -- and physiotherapy.”
For patients with respiratory diseases such as asthma, allergic rhinitis and cystic fibrosis, the oxygen-rich and allergen-free Dead Sea air is the critical factor.
“There is increased barometric pressure at the Dead Sea, so partial oxygen pressure is increased and it is like breathing about six percent more oxygen. People with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, like heavy smokers or those with bronchitis, immediately feel the difference,” says Harari. “They experience great improvement, for instance in the number of infections they get afterward.”
Over the past two decades, his studies about the effectiveness of Dead Sea climatotherapy have appeared in major medical journals. He is doing ongoing studies in conjunction with European universities, and lectures at the Hadassah-Hebrew University medical school and internationally. He also hosts last-year medical students at his clinic to show them the methods he uses to harness the healing powers of the rgion.
The Tourism Ministry is working to get more insurers to cover the costs of a visit for treatment, and sponsors an
online ask-the-doctor feature with Harari and another expert from Ben-Gurion University’s Dead Sea & Arava Science Center.