Every family tends to have a common or unique adage that parents use to make their children follow particular advice. It may often have a scientific basis or be completely ridiculous. The one common in my family was that you improve the immune system if you take cold showers. When I was young, my mom always used to say this adage to make me want to regularly take cold showers, especially before traveling somewhere. After unwillingly doing it several times, I did actually start to feel better. However, evidence support is essential to support the parents’ claim and prove the concept that was hardly promoted in our family.
Cold bathing is claimed to bring multiple health benefits, such as the immune system and cardiovascular circulation improvement. A cold shower can indeed make one feel more awake, but does it have a direct medically proven effect on the immune system? A randomized controlled trial intended to find a clinical basis for these claims (Buijze et al., 2016). It was found that cold showers for 30 consecutive days indeed resulted in a 29% reduction of sickness absence (Buijze et al., 2016). Moreover, when combined with physical activity, it escalated up to a 54% reduction (Buijze et al., 2016). The perceived energy level was also reported to increase. Thus, such an experiment led to recognizing regular cold showering effect on the general person’s well-being.
Parents deeply care about their children and want them to be healthy. It may often lead to being apprehensive or even neurotic when asking children to comply with all their health advice. The most horrible thing about this overprotection is that these adages are often not scientifically proven or even harmful. Thus, it is always necessary to check on the so-called effectiveness of well-known medicine to stay healthy.
Resource
Buijze, G. A., Sierevelt, I. N., van der Heijden, B. C., Dijkgraaf, M. G., & Frings-Dresen, M. H. (2018). The effect of cold showering on health and work: A randomized controlled trial. PloS One, 13(8).