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by dvh 943 days ago
Every cold shower study is fundamentally flawed as it can only be done on healthy individuals. This skews the result. The subconscious selection is often done before the official selection, this makes it really hard to do right.
5 comments

> Every cold shower study is fundamentally flawed as it can only be done on healthy individuals.

Could you explain what you mean by that? Why can't unhealthy individuals participate? And even if they can't, are study results still not applicable for healthy people?

If I have muscle or respiratory difficulties, 100% I can't take a cold shower.
I am not asking why some people might not be able to take a cold shower (which is different than just being "unhealthy"), I am asking why the studies are "fundamentally flawed" because of that. Like obviously the studies can't include those people, but does that somehow negate the results for the people that do participate? It seems like any given study would have some % of people who cannot participate.
In the documentary about Wim Hof (by Vice think), he was friends with a guy with terminal cancer who said doing the cold plunges made the cancer bearable and changed his life.
Often people who have made their identity about a thing make claims about the thing like this
I mean he wasn’t claiming it cured him. He was just some philosophy professor who was suffering existential terror as one does at the end of life. And he said that doing cold plunges helped him, an avowed atheist, face death’s door with courage. I feel like that’s something that should at least give us pause, similar to how psilocybin seems to have a similar effect.
What is that "My identity is the thing I'm obsessed with", called?
Honest question folks. Like Sublimation or reverse sublimation?
Disagreed, it sounds like you haven't tried.
Um, no. Just have the control group do anything that is not a cold shower and then compare the results between both groups. Yes the findings may not be applicable to the entire human population but that is true with any RCT.
So what's wrong with that?

You could also argue that almost all studies are done with adults, or individuals who aren't deceased, etc.

PS: Look up the Doomsday Argument

So what do you suggest to improve the situation? Do studies on unhealthy individuals as well? Or dont do any study altogether?
We should definitely aim to do more studies that account for different people's conditions. As long as limitations are called out then it's fine imo.

A core reason why we need to do as many trials as possible for different interventions is that there's no one-size-fit all approach. I believe that some things will work for some and not others.

The bottleneck is in having a standard framework to validate the impact of interventions and understanding "whether or not it works for you" with empirical evidence (not anecdotes)

Could this apply to exercise studies as well?
yes and also with 'vaccine studies' that also has the 'healthy user bias'
All shapes and sizes of people receive vaccines... most from a very young age.
sure dude whatever
Not sure I follow. You disagree? Why, on what basis, etc...?
their account was created in 2022 but only has comments from the last few days, and mostly / entirely about vaccine-related topics. total karma as of this moment at -4.

essentially, a pre-staged shillbot with no history. 4/10 effort, try harder, get some fake repost history in there first