health

She froze to death using the beauty treatment. Now cryotherapy is coming to Australia.

The last text message Chelsea Ake ever sent was to her boyfriend.

It was simple. Insignificant, if for the fact it wasn’t the last time she spoke ever to him.

“I am closing down the shop and I’m going to hop in for a quick treatment before I come home,” she wrote.

That treatment was cyrotherapy. And that’s the treatment that killed her.

In tonight’s episode of Sunday Night, the program investigated Cyrotherapy: the newest trend to hit Hollywood and disseminate across all parts of the world.

The idea behind the treatment is simple: partakers are literally freezing their way to good health. It appeals to an inherent sense of vanity in all of us, promising anti-aging benefits and an ability to speed up the slowest of metabolisms.

You will not find a colder place on earth than in a cryotherapy chamber, where temperatures plummet to as low as minus 180 degrees Celsius. It is, a Sunday Night claimed, “balmier on Mars”. At that temperature, a rose literally shatters.

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Athletes like Lebron James and Micheal Phelps have dabbled in the treatment,  actress Mandy Moore has posted about its benefits and many-a-more celebrities are rallying to the cause.

But in October last year, just minutes after texting her boyfriend, 24-year-old Chelsea died after becoming trapped in a cryochamber for 10 hours when it failed to turn off.

So how did it manage to kill someone who had been so completely seduced by the benefits?

According to Cyrotherpay cynics, we shouldn’t be asking how this happened, but why it didn’t happen sooner.

Rick Harris, a lawyer representing the Ake family, and told Sunday Night the therapy’s design has fundamental flaws that led to Chelsea’s death. That it wasn’t operator fail. And that it could happen to anyone.

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“People don’t know that if they stoop down too low they’re going to die.

The Ake family’s lawyer, Rick Harris.

“It’s reasonable to think you can jump into a machine to make yourself feel better, but if you bend over a foot your dead. That’s a design defect.”

It seems Chelsea’s only mistake that fateful October night was entering the chamber without supervision.

“She got in. She set the machine. She never came out,” Harris told the program.

“She was found rock solid frozen the next morning.”

For Harris’ legal team, their fear lies in the alleged intrinsic malfunction of the chamber Ake was operating, for which they have no cause, no explanation and nothing to stop another death occurring. The exposure to danger, they believe, is real.

“Our theory is there was some sort of malfunction that allowed the nitrogen to be dispersed into the chamber beyond what was intended,” he said.

From here, for Harris and Ake’s family, they are committed to exposing the risk that promoters of the treatment take ever single time they set foot in that freezing chamber.

“Just because something is new, doesn’t mean it’s safe,” he said.