This is one of the more uncomfortable articles in our knowledge base to sit with. Scott Carney — who spent more than a decade as Wim Hof's biographer and chief evangelist — isn't writing as an outsider trying to tear something down. He's writing as someone who believed deeply, promoted widely, and then watched people die.
The core claim is stark: 33 deaths linked to Hof's methods, most of them from shallow water blackout. The mechanism isn't mysterious. Hyperventilation drops carbon dioxide levels dramatically. Carbon dioxide is what triggers your breathing reflex — not low oxygen, as most people assume. When you've hyperventilated and then submerge in water, your CO2 stays suppressed long enough that you lose consciousness before your body signals the need to breathe. You simply go out. And in water, that's fatal.
What's interesting is that the QMD pulls up a companion article — "The Rise and Fall of the Wim Hof Empire" — which covers the $67 million lawsuit against Hof's organization. That piece documents 300 TV shows and podcasts where this same breathwork was promoted without adequate safety warnings. Together, these two articles tell the same story from different angles: a charismatic figure whose methods have genuine physiological grounding, wrapped in an organization that prioritized reach over responsibility.
The breathwork research across this knowledge base is nuanced. Cyclic hyperventilation does produce measurable changes — the 2014 PNAS study on E. coli endotoxin injection showed that trained practitioners experienced significantly fewer symptoms. The sympathetic activation is real. The norepinephrine spike is real. The anti-inflammatory effect is real. None of that is fabricated.
Physiologists don't dispute the mechanisms. What they dispute — what Carney disputes — is the absence of a fundamental warning: never do this breathing protocol in or near water. That one sentence would have prevented most of these deaths. The research community has known about shallow water blackout for decades. Free divers are trained extensively on it. Hof's organization simply didn't communicate it.
There's also disagreement about the psychological dimension. The immersive, community-driven nature of Hof's courses creates a social pressure that can override individual risk assessment. When someone says "Of course it's safe, Mom. It's Wimhof," that's not an informed consent conversation. That's brand authority substituting for safety education.
If you practice breathwork, the rule is absolute: never perform cyclic hyperventilation breathing in a pool, bathtub, lake, or anywhere you could drown if you lose consciousness. Do it lying on the floor or a bed. The floor is the worst thing that can happen to you there. In water, unconsciousness is a death sentence.
Beyond that, approach any breathwork protocol with the same respect you'd give a new training modality. Start conservatively. Understand the mechanism before you push limits. And be skeptical of any teacher or organization that discourages safety questions.
Here's what strikes me most: this pattern isn't unique to breathwork. Every powerful physiological tool in this knowledge base — cold exposure, sauna, fasting, heat shock — follows the same arc. Genuine benefit, dose-dependent risk, and a wellness industry that sometimes amplifies the benefit while quietly minimizing the threshold where the tool becomes dangerous. The cold plunge community has its own version of this conversation. Cardiac events in susceptible individuals. People pushing ice baths when they're already cardiovascularly compromised.
The lesson isn't that these tools don't work. It's that potency and safety are not the same thing. Respect both, or eventually, the biology doesn't care how inspired you felt going in.