07/06/2026
Oats, specifically oat baths, can be a great introduction to the power of herbal medicine. I’ve lost count now of the times I see oat baths recommended on various social media forums to help soothe chicken pox and eczema. It’s accepted as a normal thing because friends and family have used it and found it helped. The gold standard is having it backed by medical research/ clinical trials… come talk to a medical herbalist, there are loads of useful plants out there (with empirical AND clinical evidence backing their effectiveness)
Still on the theme of herbal topicals for the skin, I once had the privilege of meeting celebrity botanist the late David Bellamy in London. For many people in Britain and around the English-speaking world, he was one of the great popularisers of botany and natural history, rather like a highly exuberant botanical counterpart to Sir David Attenborough. He confided to me that as a child he had very severe eczema that was only cured by regular oatmeal baths. This had made him a quiet lifelong advocate for herbal medicine. There are now several clinical trials that attest to the benefits of the topical application of oat preparations for chronic skin disorders such as eczema.
For example, recently there was a 2025 open-label, single-arm study published that evaluated a regimen using a 1% colloidal oatmeal cream twice daily together with a gentle baby wash in 31 infants and young children (aged 3 to 72 months) with mild-to-moderate atopic dermatitis. Over 4 weeks, significant improvements were reported in eczema severity scores, pruritus, skin barrier measures, sleep and quality of life, with some benefits reportedly evident from day 1. Twenty-nine participants completed the study, and only two adverse events were reported (papular rash and contact dermatitis).
The study is clinically relevant because it assessed a practical real world skincare routine rather than a moisturiser alone, and the findings are consistent with the known barrier-supportive and antipruritic effects of colloidal oatmeal. However, the evidence strength is limited by the absence of a placebo or comparator group, the open-label design, the small sample size and the short 4-week duration. Mild paediatric eczema often improves with consistent emollient use alone, so it is impossible to determine how much benefit was specifically attributable to the oatmeal in the formulation.
There are better designed trials for colloidal oatmeal. A 2020 randomised, double blind, placebo-controlled trial evaluated a 1% colloidal oatmeal cream as adjunctive therapy in 50 adults with chronic irritant hand eczema. All participants initially used fluocinolone 0.025% ointment for 2 weeks, after which the oatmeal cream or base cream was continued alone for a further 4 weeks. Both groups improved during the steroid phase, but after corticosteroid withdrawal the oatmeal group maintained improvement, whereas the control group showed substantial relapse. By week 6, mean Hand Eczema Severity Index (HECSI) scores had fallen from 68 to 24 in the oatmeal group but rebounded to 54 in controls, with similar findings for itch severity and quality-of-life scores.
This is one of the stronger colloidal oatmeal studies because it was randomised, double blind and placebo-controlled, and used validated clinical tools. The design also clinically reflects real-world steroid step-down management, making the apparent steroid-sparing effect particularly interesting.
For more information see:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41037526/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32273745/
