Ice baths and snow meditation can cold therapy make you stronger?

When Scott Carney set out to debunk the health benefits of extreme cold, a strange thing happened. He tells Tim Adams about lighting his 'inner fire'

Before Scott Carney set about climbing a Polish mountain in his underwear in temperatures 10 degrees below zero, he believed his days of adventure were just about over. He was in his mid-30s. An anthropologist by training and a journalist by vocation he had written two books about the dangerous extremes to which humans go to find salvation - the first about the black market in organ donation, the second about the fatal consequences of a particular meditation practice.

His journey to the Polish mountain - called SnAA3/4ka, 5,300ft, the pinnacle of the Silesian mountain range - had begun one afternoon at his computer in Long Beach, California, with palm trees swaying gently outside his window. He had been idly Googling when he came across a picture of a man in his 50s sitting cross-legged on a glacier in the Arctic Circle, unclothed.