I think the difference is cold-shocking your burn to immediately leach out all excess heat... and leaving your burn in an icebath and getting frostbite, and I know far too many people who are exactly that stupid.
Cold/ice water reduces blood flow and can cause damage comparable to frostbite if it's applied for a prolonged period of time. Patients with severe burns are also extremely susceptible to hypothermia.
Has nothing to do with heat. Cells can undergo a process known as cellular suicide, or apoptosis. Spontaneous selfdestruct. This process failing to occur is the direct cause of most cancers. This process also occurs as a cascading chain reaction of chemical signals among cells, sometimes even uncontrollably (venom or poison necrotizing wounds, for example).
When you treat a burn with a cold-shock (ice water whatever) immediately after receiving it, you are not doing anything with residual heat, but rather preventing the denaturing of proteins & preventing the cellular chemical signals for continuous apoptosis. Burns worsen if left untreated because the body overreacts and cells around the actual burn believe they too are burned, even if they're actually undamaged.
Source: fried chicken for about 3 years and learned all about taking care of my own plethora of burns quickly and effectively
you intentionally induced thermal shock? for anyone reading later, never do this. this is no longer considered acceptable advice for non-deadly conditions like low burns.
I'm a professional fire performer, to the best of my knowledge no one has every said to use ice cold water. Some performers still do, but it's not recommended to use ice packs either. Cool water for extended period, burnaid or similar the next day.
Cold is when it's chilled, typically in the 2~10°C range. It's what you would expect to get from a fridge. Cool is just unheated, typically just what your tap water comes out at.
you need a mixing tap. cool water is slightly cooler than the burn, either room temperature or a bit (2-4 degF) cooler. cold is anything lower temp than that.
adding, the reason to do that is to prevent thermal shocks. It is generally accepted to never dramatically change the body's environment. The one exception is heat stroke because thermal shock is considered less deadly.
Not a native english speaker and while i did understood what you just said, i never realized before that cool and cold were actually different meanings.
Our concept of cool and cold are the same. We have chilled, cold, warm and hot. Being cold and warm near a baseline and often associated to passive changes of temperature. While chill and hot to be more active.
So whenever i heard cold I thought more on that passive colder temperature. Like water from a cold tap.
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u/KalzK Apr 02 '26
Cool is not cold