SOLOTVINO (Ukraine): Driving by the village of Solotvino in western Ukraine, you’d never know that a unique healing haven for lung ailments lies deep beneath its dreary landscape of Soviet-era buildings and trash heaps.

Three hundred meters underground, hundreds of people with respiratory illnesses leave their ailments behind in the cavernous tunnels carved out of a working salt mine, the walls glistening with salt deposits.

“There are children who get one or two treatments and they forget about asthma,” says Yaroslav Chonka, the chief doctor at Ukraine’s allergological hospital in Ukraine’s Transcarpathian region, on the border with Romania, which has been treating patients with this alternative method since 1976.

Vlad Rybakov, a 12-year-old from Ukraine’s southern city of Odessa, is in the middle of his first treatment.

He came to get relief from an asthma that appeared out of nowhere two years ago and put a stop to his track-and-field days — and already, he feels a difference.

“Before, I would get attacks and it felt like I was going to run out of air,” he says, standing by an alcove carved from the side of a tunnel with beds for four patients. “But now I don’t get them anymore. And I can run again! When I get back to Odessa, I’ll start playing sports again with the other kids.”

The method practiced at the hospital is called speleotherapy — using the microclimates of underground places like mines or caves to treat lung ailments — and has been in use in eastern Europe since the beginning of the last century, when the first such spa was opened in a salt mine in the Polish village of Velicko, near Krakow.

The practice grew out of observations in the mid 1800s by a Polish health official that salt miners did not suffer from respiratory ailments like tuberculosis.

Today salt sanitoriums are dotted throughout central and eastern Europe. Some use salt mines, others salt caves, while others offer rooms lined with salt crystals.

What makes the Ukrainian allergological hospital unique is the location of its underground facility — at 300 meters below ground, it is the deepest facility of its kind in the world.

The air at that level, which feels heavy to a newcomer, is warm (a constant temperature of around 22 degrees Celsius — 72 Fahrenheit), permeated with salt (15 miligrams per cubic meter — 0.00053 ounces per 35 cubic feet), and nearly free of microbes and electromagnetic waves.

“We have a sterile environment equal to a surgery room,” says Chonka. “Our treatment is by microclimate underground that’s practically impossible to reproduce above ground.”

A single treatment usually lasts 24 days, during which a patient will descend into the mine up to 18 times for anywhere from three hours to overnight. The rest of the time is spent at the above-ground facility.—AFP