Critical mucus bulletin! Science declares that nasal irrigation is good medicine

As regular readers know, it amuses me to veer away from my usual subject once in a while — roughly quarterly — for a critical mucus bulletin, because boogers make me snicker like a 6-year-old. Today’s bulletin comes to us via Science-Based Medicine: nasal irrigation works, and got a stamp of approval from a Cochrane review and Dr. Harriet Hall, the SkepDoc herself.

It’s a pleasure to talk about a treatment that works, for once. Almost every topic I research for SaveYourself.ca is a disappointment: the evidence for the vast majority of manual therapies is inadequate and discouraging, and sometimes I feel like a stuck record reporting on them, with one therapy after another failing the all-important “impress me” test.

Despite the good feeling I have after reading about the efficacy of sinus irrigation, I am never, ever doing that to myself again! Yuck! Water up my nose is worse than fingernails on a chalkboard!