Review: Cold water immersion: kill or cure? Talk by Dr Heather Massey from the University of Portsmouth

Published 19:03 on 16 Nov 2022

Last Thursday evening around a hundred ESC members and guests came to hear Dr Heather Massey give a talk on the benefits of cold water swimming and the research that is taking place in this area.

Heather works at the Extreme Environments Laboratory at the University of Portsmouth with world renowned Professor Mike Tipton. She described the evidence-based medicine pyramid and the process of moving from an idea or research at the base of the pyramid to randomised trials and systematic reviews at the top.

The issue of our local water quality was not mentioned!

She described the risks of swimming, and cold-water shock in particular, with lots of evidential research.

The research on the benefits of cold water swimming is generally less advanced and is at the lower end of the medicine pyramid.

One project Heather is working on is whether cold water swimming can help someone with depression - there is quite a lot of evidence that doing an outdoors group activity is beneficial.

There is much hearsay that people with specific conditions, such as MS, find it beneficial, but more research is required by Heather and other research teams.

Heather answered a wide range of questions from the audience, including offering tips on how to prepare to dive into the cold South Ocean, off the Chile coast, in the dark in December at the start of an Iron Man contest. Not for the faint-hearted!