Cryotherapy uses extreme cold to treat a wide range of conditions, from skin cancer and warts to arthritis pain, post-exercise soreness, and even symptoms of depression. The term covers everything from a doctor freezing a mole off your skin with liquid nitrogen to stepping into a full-body chamber cooled to minus 130°C for two to three minutes. These are very different procedures with very different levels of evidence behind them, so it helps to understand each one on its own terms.
Skin Conditions and Cancer Treatment
The oldest and most established use of cryotherapy is in dermatology. Doctors apply liquid nitrogen directly to abnormal tissue, destroying it by freezing. This is routine for warts, precancerous growths called actinic keratoses, and certain skin cancers including basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas. The procedure takes seconds, is done in an office visit, and usually requires no anesthesia beyond the brief stinging of the cold itself.
For common warts, a single course of cryotherapy clears them about 49% of the time. Plantar warts on the soles of the feet are more stubborn, with clearance rates closer to 30%, which is why multiple sessions are often needed. Despite those modest-sounding numbers, cryotherapy remains one of the most widely used wart treatments because it’s quick, accessible, and works well enough when repeated.
Beyond the skin, cryosurgery is used for several internal cancers. The National Cancer Institute lists early-stage prostate cancer, liver tumors confined to the liver, certain bone cancers (mostly chondrosarcoma), non-small cell lung cancer, and retinoblastoma (a childhood eye cancer) among the conditions treatable with surgical freezing. It’s also used for precancerous cervical changes and benign bone tumors. In these cases, a probe delivers the cold directly to the tumor, and the procedure is more involved than a simple office visit.
Arthritis and Chronic Pain
Whole-body cryotherapy, where you stand in a chamber cooled to somewhere between minus 110°C and minus 170°C for two to three minutes, has shown consistent benefits for people with rheumatoid arthritis. In studies of RA patients, both morning pain, daytime pain during activities, and nighttime pain dropped significantly after about 10 to 20 days of treatment. One study comparing different cold methods found that the colder the exposure (minus 110°C versus minus 60°C or cold packs), the better the pain relief. A systematic review covering 257 RA patients confirmed that both local and whole-body cryotherapy significantly reduce pain scores and overall disease activity.
Beyond the numbers, what patients report is meaningful: less morning stiffness, more ability to move through daily tasks, and better sleep due to reduced nighttime pain. Cryotherapy doesn’t replace standard RA treatment, but it appears to work as a useful add-on, likely because the intense cold dampens the inflammatory signals that drive joint pain.
Athletic Recovery
Professional and recreational athletes are the most visible users of whole-body cryotherapy, and the science here is genuinely mixed. The theory is straightforward: intense cold reduces inflammation from hard training, letting you recover faster. Some of the research supports this. In professional tennis players, five days of twice-daily cryotherapy sessions dropped levels of a key inflammatory molecule (TNF-alpha) by 60%, compared to 35% in the untreated group. In volleyball players, a single session before exercise prevented the typical spike in inflammatory markers that follows hard training.
But other studies tell a different story. In rugby players, a single session had no effect on inflammation regardless of whether it lasted one, two, or three minutes. And in runners who completed a muscle-damaging workout, four cryotherapy sessions produced no measurable change in inflammatory markers compared to simply resting.
The pattern that emerges is this: a single session may not do much, but repeated sessions over several days seem to shift the body’s inflammatory balance in a favorable direction, boosting anti-inflammatory signals while keeping pro-inflammatory ones in check. The effects appear to depend heavily on the type and intensity of exercise, which explains why studies disagree. If you’re training hard over multiple days, a multi-day cryotherapy protocol is more likely to help than a one-off session after a single workout.
Depression and Anxiety
One of the more surprising applications is mental health. In a controlled trial of people with depressive and anxiety disorders, three weeks of whole-body cryotherapy as an add-on to standard treatment produced striking results. Nearly 35% of participants in the cryotherapy group saw their depression scores cut in half, compared to just 3% in the control group. For anxiety, 46% of the cryotherapy group experienced that same 50% reduction, while none in the control group did.
The study was small, and researchers describe it as preliminary. But the size of the effect is hard to ignore. The likely mechanism involves the intense cold triggering a surge of norepinephrine and endorphins, neurotransmitters that sharply influence mood. Whether the benefits last beyond the treatment period isn’t yet clear.
Multiple Sclerosis Symptoms
People with multiple sclerosis deal with a cluster of difficult symptoms: fatigue, muscle stiffness (spasticity), pain, and cognitive fog. Several research groups have tested whole-body cryotherapy in MS patients and found it can reduce fatigue and improve functional status, with measurable effects on both mental and physical well-being. The cold appears to activate antioxidant processes in the body while also improving mood and reducing anxiety. This doesn’t slow the disease itself, but for a condition where symptom management is central to quality of life, even modest improvements in fatigue and spasticity matter.
Weight Loss and Metabolism
Claims that cryotherapy burns hundreds of calories per session are common in marketing but poorly supported. What the research actually shows is more nuanced. Exposure to extreme cold increases levels of a hormone called irisin, which converts stored white fat into a more metabolically active form that burns energy to generate heat. In menopausal women with metabolic syndrome, repeated cryotherapy sessions led to reductions in abdominal fat. Obese men with low physical activity also showed irisin increases after cryogenic exposure.
These are real physiological changes, but they don’t translate to “burn 800 calories in three minutes,” as some cryotherapy centers claim. The metabolic boost from a single session is modest. Any meaningful body composition changes require repeated sessions over weeks, combined with exercise and dietary changes. Cryotherapy may give your metabolism a small nudge, but it is not a shortcut to weight loss.
What a Session Looks Like
A typical whole-body session lasts two to three minutes in a chamber cooled to between minus 110°C and minus 170°C (roughly minus 166°F to minus 274°F). Most facilities use a two-stage process: you first spend about 30 seconds in an adaptation room at around minus 25°C before entering the main chamber. You wear minimal clothing, gloves, socks, and ear protection to shield your extremities. Some newer chambers use electrically powered cold air rather than liquid nitrogen, with participants alternating between facing a fan and turning their back to ensure even cooling.
Research suggests that sessions shorter than two minutes may not produce meaningful physiological changes, while sessions longer than two and a half minutes don’t add much benefit. After you step out, your skin temperature stays below baseline for up to 90 minutes, which is part of how the treatment works: the rewarming process drives blood flow back to the surface and triggers many of the hormonal and anti-inflammatory responses.
Safety and Contraindications
Whole-body cryotherapy is not without risks, and the FDA has not cleared or approved any whole-body cryotherapy devices for medical use. Reported adverse events include one death (a cryotherapy center employee found in a chamber after using it unsupervised outside business hours), as well as cases of temporary memory loss and a torn abdominal aorta.
Certain conditions make cryotherapy genuinely dangerous. You should not use it if you have Raynaud’s disease, peripheral vascular disease, a condition called cryoglobulinemia (where abnormal proteins in the blood clump together in cold temperatures), or areas of skin with no sensation. People with uncontrolled high blood pressure or serious cardiovascular conditions also need to avoid it, since the sudden cold causes a sharp spike in blood pressure and heart rate. Any reputable facility should screen for these conditions before allowing a session.
Localized cryotherapy performed by a doctor, such as liquid nitrogen for warts or cryosurgery for tumors, carries a different and generally well-understood risk profile: temporary pain, blistering, swelling, and in some cases changes in skin pigmentation at the treatment site. These are standard medical procedures with decades of clinical use behind them.