Perhaps it got started with people misunderstanding / misremembering drying off by rubbing snow on wet skin. Being wet in cold conditions can be a death sentence so you need to dry off quickly, and this is one of the recommended methods.
Oh wow, that's counterintuitive until you remember that snow basically works like a sponge. So as long as it starts out cold enough and you're quick enough, the snow can soak up water before it melts and gets you wet all over again.
It's interesting how it's counterintuitive I the exact same way as rubbing dry sand on your weet sand covered feet on the beach takes the sand off. Same mechanism too. Redistribution of the moisture back into the aggregate whole.
i've never heard of people doing this to skin or clothes, but i know it's a thing for dogs and horses - you rub snow on their feet after a stream crossing, and the dry snow pulls the water out of their fur.
When I was a kid we’d be spending a whole day playing in snow. When we’d come home in the evening with ice on the shoes, hair and cold hands and feet - but not as bad as getting real frost bites - would have a little warm up. My grandmother taught me to wash my hands with cold water at first then gradually add warm water. I still remeber cold water felt warm on frozen hands. Also many times when my hands were cold I’d make some snowballs, feel cold for a few seconds then my hands would start warming up really fast, like glowing with heat. I think there’s something to it, though being a bit cold and having frostbites is a big difference. I personally never experience any frostbite.
1. When your hands are really cold they aren't ready for warm water. If you start with cold water and warm it up you will figure out what your hands can handle and get to the point where you're safely adding heat. You might find the cool water is actually warmer than the outside of your hand to the touch.
2. If you hold snow blood rushes to the hand and the pumping feeling produces the sense of warmth
If you wear gloves, you'll always wear gloves - annec-data from the crew I used to go out with catching shorebirds, in Scotland, in the middle of winter. The glove wearers we unable to function within an hour of taking them off to band, measure and release the birds. The non-glove wearers were able to keep going for as long as it took.
For some people[1], when their body temperature drops below a certain point, circulation in hands and feet is reduced. This helps heat the body core, saving organs while potentially sacrificing hands or feet.
At first this feels like a burn, then like someone's putting needles into your hands, and then they just go numb. You can't do precise actions with your hand anymore and soon you'll lose most of the ability to move it at all. You might even lose the body part. All while the core of your body is still warm and you're still able to walk and talk.
But as said, not everyone experiences this. For some people, when they get cold, their body increases circulation in the hands, keeping them warm enough to continue working no matter what.
________________
1. In extreme cases, this is called white hands syndrome or reynauds syndrome and primarily affects women. It seems to have a hereditary component, but worsens permanently whenever the hands experience cold or vibration.
Are you trying to say that wearing gloves is a bad thing? Because while yes, you can get used to cold hands if you have good circulation, there is a point where you cannot function without gloves. If the temp is -20F with 20mph winds, you are not going to be functional in bare hands. Although sure, if you are talking about +20F with little wind, some people can work in mild cold like that all day.
But after hiking on a cold (not freezing) day the water feels SCALDING.
I suspect there are actually two "hot" shower types:
- the actual scalding shower with physical damage
- the "scalding" shower which is actually skin-temperature-sensor overload that is more psychological. It is more a accustomed temperature difference thing.
but below freezing / with frostbite, I have no idea.
Thermoception is indeed thought to be a response to heat flux rather than absolute temperatures. If the tissue is colder, water at the same temperature should warm it up faster and thus elicit a stronger heat perception.
I think the "cold water first" thing is mainly to avoid scolding your skin while you're numb.
But man do I not miss the pain of coming home from ski practice and finally getting off the tight boots, feeling the warmth and blood finally return to my feet. Burned as hell.
One thing to keep in mind, is that if somebody is hypothermic and not just frostbitten, then rapid re-warming is a bad idea.
Body protects itself by shutting down blood flow to skin and extremities, keeping the core warm. So if the extremities are rapidly re-warmed, then blood vessels in them dilate. And then blood starts flowing through oxygen-depleted tissues that are cold and full of accumulated metabolic waste.
Not a good combination, and you might end up with organ damage as a result.
Gradual re-warming instead gives the body time to slowly clear the waste as blood flow re-establishes itself.
This is interesting, I was taught that instead of the metabolic waste, the issue was the cold blood from extremities quickly cooling down the internals once allowed to circulate freely. Do you have any references for this?
Reperfusion injury can occur after a crush injury. The myoglobin, creatine, potassium and phosphorus from destroyed muscle cells cause kidney damage. The potassium is really important as it is supposed to stay locked within cells and high levels can cause arrhythmias. For more info look up crush syndrome and reperfusion injury. This is all slightly different from hypothermia but may share some pathways if cells are destroyed.
What it's worth, we were taught the same thing about people crushed under e.g. rubble in combat medic training 20 years ago. And the same consideration applies to removing a tourniquet that had been in place for over two hours as well.
So what does that actually look like in practice, lifting the piece of rubble an inch at a time? How slowly would you release a tourniquet in that situation?
I'm not a medical doctor, but my understanding is that in the scenario of "patient's limb has been trapped/crushed for an extended period and can now be freed" you're supposed to tourniquet off the limb before freeing it.
This helps both for delaying reperfusion issues until the patient can be in the hospital with IV lines in place, and also in case there's an injury which could cause massive blood loss (since a trapped limb is inherently one which is hard to inspect for injuries).
Gradual re-warming is key because it allows the circulatory system to carefully reintegrate blood flow while clearing waste products at a manageable pace
I can easily see where you would get the idea to rub snow on the tissue from my own experiences with second degree frostbite. I did lukewarm water and that hurt. It felt like my hands were going to explode. Every impulse was screaming that it was exactly the wrong thing to do and I should go back outside where the pain was less.
I had the same experience. I stepped into a hot shower with frostbite in two of my toes (just half of my big toe and bit of the the next toe over) and I inadvertently screamed and fell over, ripping the shower curtain down and everything. I wanted out badly. There’s no aching sensation quite like it that I’ve experienced. I’d definitely fail the gom jabbar.
I still can’t feel anything in that side of my big toe, and it occasionally throbs mildly and I think of how incredibly painful serious and extensive frostbite would really be.
Since OP isn't responding, I'll add that I completely lost feeling in the nose about ten years ago by staying outside in −45°C for way too long, and it never recovered. The front half feels like it's permanently under anesthetic. Other than that, it looks and works as it always did.
I didn't even notice anything until three passerby in a row said that my nose looks funny and I should probably do something about it ASAP.
Also from hypothermia the impulse is that direction, once when I got it I became so incredibly hot that I wanted to dress naked. If I hadn't known the signs I probably would have.
Yeah it's extremely painful. I jumped into a frozen lake years ago and ran to a shower afterwards. Turned on the water, just slightly warm and it felt like my fingers and toes got smashed by a hammer.
A friend was a Vietnamese POW. The first torture done was to tourniquet his upper arms until they colored to black and then loose the bindings (repeatedly).
Returning circulation is much more brutal than it might sound.
Whe sometimes I sleep on my one of my arms and they go numb, when I reposition and I start to feel it it comes with immediate and excruciate pain that luckily dies in intensity after a few moments. I wonder if this is just compressed nerves or it’s the blood supply that was cut off.
ok that is terrible, but note that gently slowing circulation to arms or legs and then returning circulation is a simple theraputic action that has been used for millennia
Some spas have this if you’d like to mimic it mildly. Aire in London has a very cool pool from which you can go to a very hot pool. I really enjoy the pins and needles effect.
Incidentally there are some studies that show you get better at it with more frequent exposure. I have kayaked for many years and have found this to be the case - if my hands get cold now, dipping them into the water to further cool then hence opening the veins is very effective if counterintuitive way of warming my hands up.
After handling snow I've noticed this too. My hands are often cold by default, but if I handle snow it's as if the coldness crosses some threshold and your body says, OK, that's over the line! We're sending help!
Without being overly condescending, you do realise that most of the things that have been done throughout history, along with many we still do, are the result of cultural practice and have no evidence base whatsoever?
Whilst 1956 seems to be a fairly late date to stop what would seem in the surface to be a counter intuitive practice, 80 years earlier blood letting was still in vogue
I don't understand though. Someone else brought up trepanation, but pre-modern humans lived in environment where they banged there head around a lot and it may have led to better outcomes for some people to get a hole in their skull so they retained it as a cultural practice. Why would a bunch of people decide, up until 1950 or so, that it was a good idea to rub snow into your feet when they were frostbitten just because it was some practice with no strong basis in reality. The alternative is doing nothing, so what would this do that would at least make people think it was working? Because it had to look like it was working, even if it really wasn't.
We didn’t bother recording deaths because unless you were rich it didn’t matter. It still doesn’t. Who died in South Sudan today? We don’t know. We will never know.
It’s stupidly false to project modern standard into ancient cultures. Even the concept of cartography is anthropologically new.
Most people trepanned with pre-modern medicine in the regions quoted below did not die, "It is a well-documented procedure in Oceania and Africa well into the twentieth century, with an estimated survival of more than 90%. There is good documentation of the tools used and of the antiseptic precautions regularly taken by witch doctors." [0]
And by that logic we know that these procedures must've worked since they didn't kill all the people the were used on, hence they were passed down for generations and survived to the modern era for us to scrutinize!
Now was it just chance or did they actually have something effective to them? There are a number of modern medicines derived from traditional practices[1], not to mentioned thousands of documented medicinal herbs that are understudied and difficult to cultivate (like the Monotropa Uniflora [2] for example). But we help ourselves little by fulling ignoring the possibility of their effectiveness. In any case, its not as if any of our medical practices we employ today does not have its source in traditional medicine, its just we can critically engage with those practices and attempt to develop something out of them with evidence-based trials. But a paradigm shift in thinking about medical practice won't happen if one always makes the same assumptions about what works and what makes people healthy. Examining these traditional/folk practices can help us do so.
For every traditional medicine that was proven there are more that were disproven. The paradigm shift wasn’t in the 1950s but in the Age of Enlightenment. The discovery was the scientific method.
The point about trepanning wasn’t that it was deadly but that it is wrong. It doesn’t help the underlying problems. The answer to why people keep doing it is desperation and the immune system works, which means most illnesses work themselves out, including after the ineffective intervention.
I think most (but not all) such things actually did work, and were based on real evidence, we just don’t have easy access to that evidence and context anymore. It is quite likely that modern people are just arrogantly dismissing something they don’t understand.
Whenever we get the inkling to belittle our ancestors, we need to remember that we are nowhere as capable as they were.
Men today cannot build the Great Pyramids of Giza or invent Greek Fire, Roman Concrete, or Damascus Steel like the men of millenia past have.
Our only solace lies in the brutal fact that we invented the internet with which we can shitpost someone on the other side of the world. That is one thing our ancestors did not have and our successors will never surpass.
I agree with your general point that we are in no way inherently superior to our ancestors, but Roman concrete, Damacus steel, and Greek fire are inferior to what we have today to accomplish the same things.
Word games. They don’t have an “evidence base” that are up to our standards. They might have an “evidence base” in the sense that it worked for past generation and folklore now says that it should be done.
A lot of things come from somewhere and are not arbitrary. That’s all that’s being asked here.
people still pray to personal gods to this day, expecting them to prioritise their petty little lives while others are suffering/dying of things that could be trivially solved with a bit of knowledge and technology.
Praying to gods has a correlation with better medical outcomes, thats why they have chapels in hospitals. Same thing with visits from friends and families. Its not like everything can be solved by "advancing" technology.
The article you've linked describes multiple medical benefits of prayer. By "they don't work", do you mean "the observed benefits are explicable without divine intervention"?
Having the confidence to believe that you are able to do something almost certainly makes it more likely that you'll do it. Its bullshit but it probably works unless its for basically impossible things. You can manifest a promotion if you believe in yourself and work hard (and have an idea that your boss maybe likes you). People are also not so bad at predicting things, you aren't going to manifest something that you have no hope is actually going to happen. But of course with something like a lottery ticket its stupid.
Oh I'm all for people having confidence in themselves. That's what religion is all about (except for the population control aspect).
If someone uses religion (or manifesting) to go down the path of "god helps those that help themselves", all the power to them! (as long as they don't make me believe in it)
I really am talking about people like that one radio moderator I was thinking of when making the comment: was "manifesting" all day yesterday so that someone would win the x-thousand dollars in the contest on their show this morning. Was "manifesting" getting tickets for Taylor Swif as well recently. Stuff like that. Like you said, all just manifesting "lottery ticket" type stuff. Magical thinking basically. Just "sit around and manifest and it'll happen". That's the :facepalm: stuff.
You might look into it to see if there’s something special about butter versus other oils/fats that may make butter specifically good for burns, but I understand that as keeping the air off of the burn, similarly to how oxygen tents work.
Today we apply petroleum jelly (Vaseline, Neosporin, etc.) over skin to help it heal, but butter is basically going to do the same thing of keeping in moisture.
I think the reasoning with topical coatings for burns is actually something to do with avoiding gases touching the burned area, which is why they use oxygen tents for people with severe burns over a large area. Petroleum jelly and other similar products block the air from touching the burn also.
I find that oils such as petroleum jelly or olive oil do provide pain relief for burns. I can only speculate as to the method of action, but I’m clearly not the only one. Apparently even air movement or contact can cause pain to burns due to the exposure of the dermis, and possibly other reasons.
> Also, oxygen's a gas.
Yeah, I think it must be carbon dioxide or some other gas that is naturally occurring in the atmosphere that causes the painful sensation, otherwise they wouldn’t use specifically oxygen?
"HBOT helps wound healing by bringing oxygen-rich plasma to tissue starved for oxygen. Wound injuries damage the body's blood vessels, They release fluid that leaks into the tissues and causes swelling. This swelling deprives the damaged cells of oxygen, and tissue starts to die. HBOT reduces swelling while flooding the tissues with oxygen. The higher pressure in the chamber increases the amount of oxygen in the blood. HBOT aims to break the cycle of swelling, oxygen starvation, and tissue death.
HBOT prevents "reperfusion injury." This is the severe tissue damage that happens when the blood supply returns to the tissues after they have been deprived of oxygen. Blood flow can be interrupted by a crush injury, for instance. If this happens, a series of events inside the damaged cells leads to the release of harmful oxygen radicals. These molecules can do damage to tissues that can't be reversed. They cause the blood vessels to clamp up and stop blood flow. HBOT encourages the body's oxygen radical scavengers to seek out the problem molecules and let healing continue.
HBOT helps block the action of harmful bacteria and strengthens the body's immune system. HBOT can disable the toxins of certain bacteria. It also increases oxygen concentration in the tissues. This helps them resist infection. And the therapy improves the ability of white blood cells to find and destroy invaders.
HBOT encourages the formation of new collagen and new skin cells. It does so by encouraging new blood vessels to grow. It also stimulates cells to make certain substances, like vascular endothelial growth factor. These attract and stimulate endothelial cells needed for healing."
Yeah. Maybe someone who got rubbed with snow got randomly better completely unrelated to the treatment and then superstition run wild with that coincidence.
Or maybe people understood initially that you should do the rubbing next to a fire. And then the rubbing only has positive efect because it lets the person administering it feel when the heat is too much, and naturally adjusts the distance to prevent burns or injury from too fast warming up.
Or maybe someone told people to do it because they thought it might help and never bothered to check if it does anything or not.
Or maybe people did know it does nothing but there was no other option and doing something about the injury felt better than doing nothing.
Maybe it was doing mechanically nothing but the care and personal touch had a beneficial effect due to placebo.
Maybe it made the injury worse, thus more likely that they amputated and paradoxically that saved the injured from worse outcomes like gangrene.
There is so many other possibility than “if they did it it must have worked”. Who knows.
> rapid rewarming from open campfires or other sources of dry heat caused so much devastation.....Dry heat from ....open fires....cannot be controlled. Excessively high temperatures are usually produced, resulting in a combined burn and frostbite, a devasting injury that leads to far greater tissue loss.
Sounds like it was an overreaction to applying excessive heat to the frostbitten tissue.
(Clean) leeches are actually pretty handy sometimes.
Bloodletting is standard of care for hemochromotosis; you can use leeches for that, but just drawing blood is probably more efficient; some blood banks will let you donate it, some say no because the donation isn't supposed to be of benefit to the donor.
Certainly, a lot of conditions where bloodletting was used don't warrant it, but it's not altogther bad.
I don't think there's a good use case for a lobotomy, though.
Electroconvulsive therapy is about as effective as bloodletting. There are conditions for which bloodletting is an effective treatment, such as iron overload. But in most people, and under most circumstances, losing meaningful quantities of blood leads to long-term injury and/or death. Likewise, electrocuting the nervous system often causes permanent disability and/or death, and is a fairly effective torture method.
Lobotomy, too, can be an effective treatment for epilepsy. But I'm sure we can all agree that certain people in the past were way too quick to resort to it. (The Soviet Union banned it in the 1950s, on human rights grounds.) Likewise, I'm rather worried by the high incidence of involuntary (read: forced, non-consensual) electroconvulsive therapy. 10% is way too high, and I've seen numbers higher than that…
I don't think its smart to act like we are somehow at the pinnacle of human knowledge and nothing we've done before can be more effective than what we know works now.
> don't think its smart to act like we are somehow at the pinnacle of human knowledge and nothing we've done before can be more effective than what we know works now
Sure. Population growth is exponential. Deifying ancient knowledge is over-attributing knowledge to when we had little in both knowledge per person and persons per se.
Sanctifying traditional medicine means you’re out of ideas. You aren’t bad. But move on.
Still deifying traditional practice. Trepanation doesn’t do anything for seizures. Was commonly prescribed for them. We stopped doing that after discovering what caused them. The list goes on and on.
Perhaps it got started with people misunderstanding / misremembering drying off by rubbing snow on wet skin. Being wet in cold conditions can be a death sentence so you need to dry off quickly, and this is one of the recommended methods.
https://www.ncexped.com/drying-off-snow/
Oh wow, that's counterintuitive until you remember that snow basically works like a sponge. So as long as it starts out cold enough and you're quick enough, the snow can soak up water before it melts and gets you wet all over again.
Totally.
It's interesting how it's counterintuitive I the exact same way as rubbing dry sand on your weet sand covered feet on the beach takes the sand off. Same mechanism too. Redistribution of the moisture back into the aggregate whole.
i've never heard of people doing this to skin or clothes, but i know it's a thing for dogs and horses - you rub snow on their feet after a stream crossing, and the dry snow pulls the water out of their fur.
Exactly! Snow acts like a sponge because its surface area and structure allow it to absorb water effectively without melting immediately
Yeah, I am familiar with using snow to dry off wet clothes.
An idiot taking advice from Bear Grylls. He forgot to chug some piss to warm up after trying to give himself frostbite.
When I was a kid we’d be spending a whole day playing in snow. When we’d come home in the evening with ice on the shoes, hair and cold hands and feet - but not as bad as getting real frost bites - would have a little warm up. My grandmother taught me to wash my hands with cold water at first then gradually add warm water. I still remeber cold water felt warm on frozen hands. Also many times when my hands were cold I’d make some snowballs, feel cold for a few seconds then my hands would start warming up really fast, like glowing with heat. I think there’s something to it, though being a bit cold and having frostbites is a big difference. I personally never experience any frostbite.
I think those are two different phenomena:
1. When your hands are really cold they aren't ready for warm water. If you start with cold water and warm it up you will figure out what your hands can handle and get to the point where you're safely adding heat. You might find the cool water is actually warmer than the outside of your hand to the touch.
2. If you hold snow blood rushes to the hand and the pumping feeling produces the sense of warmth
If you wear gloves, you'll always wear gloves - annec-data from the crew I used to go out with catching shorebirds, in Scotland, in the middle of winter. The glove wearers we unable to function within an hour of taking them off to band, measure and release the birds. The non-glove wearers were able to keep going for as long as it took.
For some people[1], when their body temperature drops below a certain point, circulation in hands and feet is reduced. This helps heat the body core, saving organs while potentially sacrificing hands or feet.
At first this feels like a burn, then like someone's putting needles into your hands, and then they just go numb. You can't do precise actions with your hand anymore and soon you'll lose most of the ability to move it at all. You might even lose the body part. All while the core of your body is still warm and you're still able to walk and talk.
But as said, not everyone experiences this. For some people, when they get cold, their body increases circulation in the hands, keeping them warm enough to continue working no matter what.
________________
1. In extreme cases, this is called white hands syndrome or reynauds syndrome and primarily affects women. It seems to have a hereditary component, but worsens permanently whenever the hands experience cold or vibration.
Are you trying to say that wearing gloves is a bad thing? Because while yes, you can get used to cold hands if you have good circulation, there is a point where you cannot function without gloves. If the temp is -20F with 20mph winds, you are not going to be functional in bare hands. Although sure, if you are talking about +20F with little wind, some people can work in mild cold like that all day.
I keep my shower at the same temperature.
In the morning it feels hot.
But after hiking on a cold (not freezing) day the water feels SCALDING.
I suspect there are actually two "hot" shower types:
- the actual scalding shower with physical damage
- the "scalding" shower which is actually skin-temperature-sensor overload that is more psychological. It is more a accustomed temperature difference thing.
but below freezing / with frostbite, I have no idea.
Thermoception is indeed thought to be a response to heat flux rather than absolute temperatures. If the tissue is colder, water at the same temperature should warm it up faster and thus elicit a stronger heat perception.
I think the "cold water first" thing is mainly to avoid scolding your skin while you're numb.
But man do I not miss the pain of coming home from ski practice and finally getting off the tight boots, feeling the warmth and blood finally return to my feet. Burned as hell.
The snowball trick you mentioned might relate to how blood flow rushes back to cold extremities as a response to the brief exposure
One thing to keep in mind, is that if somebody is hypothermic and not just frostbitten, then rapid re-warming is a bad idea.
Body protects itself by shutting down blood flow to skin and extremities, keeping the core warm. So if the extremities are rapidly re-warmed, then blood vessels in them dilate. And then blood starts flowing through oxygen-depleted tissues that are cold and full of accumulated metabolic waste.
Not a good combination, and you might end up with organ damage as a result.
Gradual re-warming instead gives the body time to slowly clear the waste as blood flow re-establishes itself.
This is interesting, I was taught that instead of the metabolic waste, the issue was the cold blood from extremities quickly cooling down the internals once allowed to circulate freely. Do you have any references for this?
Reperfusion injury can occur after a crush injury. The myoglobin, creatine, potassium and phosphorus from destroyed muscle cells cause kidney damage. The potassium is really important as it is supposed to stay locked within cells and high levels can cause arrhythmias. For more info look up crush syndrome and reperfusion injury. This is all slightly different from hypothermia but may share some pathways if cells are destroyed.
What it's worth, we were taught the same thing about people crushed under e.g. rubble in combat medic training 20 years ago. And the same consideration applies to removing a tourniquet that had been in place for over two hours as well.
So what does that actually look like in practice, lifting the piece of rubble an inch at a time? How slowly would you release a tourniquet in that situation?
I'm not a medical doctor, but my understanding is that in the scenario of "patient's limb has been trapped/crushed for an extended period and can now be freed" you're supposed to tourniquet off the limb before freeing it.
This helps both for delaying reperfusion issues until the patient can be in the hospital with IV lines in place, and also in case there's an injury which could cause massive blood loss (since a trapped limb is inherently one which is hard to inspect for injuries).
That was a part of my training for snow rescues. It's probably a combination of both.
Gradual re-warming is key because it allows the circulatory system to carefully reintegrate blood flow while clearing waste products at a manageable pace
I can easily see where you would get the idea to rub snow on the tissue from my own experiences with second degree frostbite. I did lukewarm water and that hurt. It felt like my hands were going to explode. Every impulse was screaming that it was exactly the wrong thing to do and I should go back outside where the pain was less.
I had the same experience. I stepped into a hot shower with frostbite in two of my toes (just half of my big toe and bit of the the next toe over) and I inadvertently screamed and fell over, ripping the shower curtain down and everything. I wanted out badly. There’s no aching sensation quite like it that I’ve experienced. I’d definitely fail the gom jabbar.
I still can’t feel anything in that side of my big toe, and it occasionally throbs mildly and I think of how incredibly painful serious and extensive frostbite would really be.
You can’t feel anything on that side of your big toe after how long? Is full recovery ever expected?
Since OP isn't responding, I'll add that I completely lost feeling in the nose about ten years ago by staying outside in −45°C for way too long, and it never recovered. The front half feels like it's permanently under anesthetic. Other than that, it looks and works as it always did.
I didn't even notice anything until three passerby in a row said that my nose looks funny and I should probably do something about it ASAP.
Also from hypothermia the impulse is that direction, once when I got it I became so incredibly hot that I wanted to dress naked. If I hadn't known the signs I probably would have.
Dealing with frostbite is no small feat... Did you have lasting effects from the experience?
I believe the logic is to heat gently through friction, and to promote blood circulation through manipulation.
Warming up cold body parts is painful, so maybe it's about distracting from the pain as well.
Pain is a constant companion during re-warming
Yeah it's extremely painful. I jumped into a frozen lake years ago and ran to a shower afterwards. Turned on the water, just slightly warm and it felt like my fingers and toes got smashed by a hammer.
A friend was a Vietnamese POW. The first torture done was to tourniquet his upper arms until they colored to black and then loose the bindings (repeatedly).
Returning circulation is much more brutal than it might sound.
That story reminds me of the Stockdale Paradox:
https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/Stockdale-Concept.html
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Stockdale
Whe sometimes I sleep on my one of my arms and they go numb, when I reposition and I start to feel it it comes with immediate and excruciate pain that luckily dies in intensity after a few moments. I wonder if this is just compressed nerves or it’s the blood supply that was cut off.
Is this an extreme version of the "pins and needles" phenomenon (paresthesia)?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paresthesia
ok that is terrible, but note that gently slowing circulation to arms or legs and then returning circulation is a simple theraputic action that has been used for millennia
Trying to understand the relevance of this comment
It was all a big misunderstanding.
What, the Vietnam war?
what in the world
Some spas have this if you’d like to mimic it mildly. Aire in London has a very cool pool from which you can go to a very hot pool. I really enjoy the pins and needles effect.
I've experienced rapid warming of hands when handling snow without gloves. Maybe it's the same mechanism?
What you are seeing is probably cold induced vasodilation
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4843861/
Incidentally there are some studies that show you get better at it with more frequent exposure. I have kayaked for many years and have found this to be the case - if my hands get cold now, dipping them into the water to further cool then hence opening the veins is very effective if counterintuitive way of warming my hands up.
After handling snow I've noticed this too. My hands are often cold by default, but if I handle snow it's as if the coldness crosses some threshold and your body says, OK, that's over the line! We're sending help!
What would RFKjr do?
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Yeah but clearly people wouldn’tve been doing it if it hadn’t worked, so what is the reason for trying that specific traditional method?
Without being overly condescending, you do realise that most of the things that have been done throughout history, along with many we still do, are the result of cultural practice and have no evidence base whatsoever?
Whilst 1956 seems to be a fairly late date to stop what would seem in the surface to be a counter intuitive practice, 80 years earlier blood letting was still in vogue
I don't understand though. Someone else brought up trepanation, but pre-modern humans lived in environment where they banged there head around a lot and it may have led to better outcomes for some people to get a hole in their skull so they retained it as a cultural practice. Why would a bunch of people decide, up until 1950 or so, that it was a good idea to rub snow into your feet when they were frostbitten just because it was some practice with no strong basis in reality. The alternative is doing nothing, so what would this do that would at least make people think it was working? Because it had to look like it was working, even if it really wasn't.
Most of them died!
We didn’t bother recording deaths because unless you were rich it didn’t matter. It still doesn’t. Who died in South Sudan today? We don’t know. We will never know.
It’s stupidly false to project modern standard into ancient cultures. Even the concept of cartography is anthropologically new.
Most people trepanned with pre-modern medicine in the regions quoted below did not die, "It is a well-documented procedure in Oceania and Africa well into the twentieth century, with an estimated survival of more than 90%. There is good documentation of the tools used and of the antiseptic precautions regularly taken by witch doctors." [0]
And by that logic we know that these procedures must've worked since they didn't kill all the people the were used on, hence they were passed down for generations and survived to the modern era for us to scrutinize!
Now was it just chance or did they actually have something effective to them? There are a number of modern medicines derived from traditional practices[1], not to mentioned thousands of documented medicinal herbs that are understudied and difficult to cultivate (like the Monotropa Uniflora [2] for example). But we help ourselves little by fulling ignoring the possibility of their effectiveness. In any case, its not as if any of our medical practices we employ today does not have its source in traditional medicine, its just we can critically engage with those practices and attempt to develop something out of them with evidence-based trials. But a paradigm shift in thinking about medical practice won't happen if one always makes the same assumptions about what works and what makes people healthy. Examining these traditional/folk practices can help us do so.
[0]https://www.scielo.br/j/anp/a/rsfbjBsF9RFVgMz3DwzsnkC/?lang=... [1]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6273146/ [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotropa_uniflora#Uses
For every traditional medicine that was proven there are more that were disproven. The paradigm shift wasn’t in the 1950s but in the Age of Enlightenment. The discovery was the scientific method.
The point about trepanning wasn’t that it was deadly but that it is wrong. It doesn’t help the underlying problems. The answer to why people keep doing it is desperation and the immune system works, which means most illnesses work themselves out, including after the ineffective intervention.
I think most (but not all) such things actually did work, and were based on real evidence, we just don’t have easy access to that evidence and context anymore. It is quite likely that modern people are just arrogantly dismissing something they don’t understand.
Whenever we get the inkling to belittle our ancestors, we need to remember that we are nowhere as capable as they were.
Men today cannot build the Great Pyramids of Giza or invent Greek Fire, Roman Concrete, or Damascus Steel like the men of millenia past have.
Our only solace lies in the brutal fact that we invented the internet with which we can shitpost someone on the other side of the world. That is one thing our ancestors did not have and our successors will never surpass.
I agree with your general point that we are in no way inherently superior to our ancestors, but Roman concrete, Damacus steel, and Greek fire are inferior to what we have today to accomplish the same things.
Practical Engineering on Roman concrete. The TL;DR is that we are far more advanced. https://youtu.be/qL0BB2PRY7k?si=kqiyxOTLBQw9h4_F
We do know how to make Damascus steel: https://youtube.com/shorts/1DNWLZ8IiMQ?si=c4-Ch7C3Q_6zcYoi
This fellow says we don't know how to make the historical Greek fire but acknowledges we can make identical substances: https://youtube.com/shorts/wiHXE6lhLmo?si=OPEjW40cck5aQAsv
We could build the Great Pyramid today using modern methods in 5 years using 2000 workers and $5 billion USD vs historical 20 years and 10s of thousands of workers: https://www.livescience.com/18589-cost-build-great-pyramid-t...
Word games. They don’t have an “evidence base” that are up to our standards. They might have an “evidence base” in the sense that it worked for past generation and folklore now says that it should be done.
A lot of things come from somewhere and are not arbitrary. That’s all that’s being asked here.
people still pray to personal gods to this day, expecting them to prioritise their petty little lives while others are suffering/dying of things that could be trivially solved with a bit of knowledge and technology.
Praying to gods has a correlation with better medical outcomes, thats why they have chapels in hospitals. Same thing with visits from friends and families. Its not like everything can be solved by "advancing" technology.
nope, the evidence is pretty clear on prayers: they don't work.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2802370/#:~:text=We....
The article you've linked describes multiple medical benefits of prayer. By "they don't work", do you mean "the observed benefits are explicable without divine intervention"?
And people "manifest" and somehow don't wonder why randomly "it works" or "doesn't work".
"Must've done something wrong while manifesting this time :shrug:"
:facepalm: !!!!!1111eleven
Having the confidence to believe that you are able to do something almost certainly makes it more likely that you'll do it. Its bullshit but it probably works unless its for basically impossible things. You can manifest a promotion if you believe in yourself and work hard (and have an idea that your boss maybe likes you). People are also not so bad at predicting things, you aren't going to manifest something that you have no hope is actually going to happen. But of course with something like a lottery ticket its stupid.
Oh I'm all for people having confidence in themselves. That's what religion is all about (except for the population control aspect).
If someone uses religion (or manifesting) to go down the path of "god helps those that help themselves", all the power to them! (as long as they don't make me believe in it)
I really am talking about people like that one radio moderator I was thinking of when making the comment: was "manifesting" all day yesterday so that someone would win the x-thousand dollars in the contest on their show this morning. Was "manifesting" getting tickets for Taylor Swif as well recently. Stuff like that. Like you said, all just manifesting "lottery ticket" type stuff. Magical thinking basically. Just "sit around and manifest and it'll happen". That's the :facepalm: stuff.
Butter on burns was passed down to my mom. I let that one die off with her generation.
You might look into it to see if there’s something special about butter versus other oils/fats that may make butter specifically good for burns, but I understand that as keeping the air off of the burn, similarly to how oxygen tents work.
I dunno, I can see logic to that.
Today we apply petroleum jelly (Vaseline, Neosporin, etc.) over skin to help it heal, but butter is basically going to do the same thing of keeping in moisture.
I think the reasoning with topical coatings for burns is actually something to do with avoiding gases touching the burned area, which is why they use oxygen tents for people with severe burns over a large area. Petroleum jelly and other similar products block the air from touching the burn also.
Nope. It's to form a barrier to keep bacteria out, with the downside that it also traps bacteria in.
Also, oxygen's a gas.
I find that oils such as petroleum jelly or olive oil do provide pain relief for burns. I can only speculate as to the method of action, but I’m clearly not the only one. Apparently even air movement or contact can cause pain to burns due to the exposure of the dermis, and possibly other reasons.
> Also, oxygen's a gas.
Yeah, I think it must be carbon dioxide or some other gas that is naturally occurring in the atmosphere that causes the painful sensation, otherwise they wouldn’t use specifically oxygen?
Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy
"HBOT helps wound healing by bringing oxygen-rich plasma to tissue starved for oxygen. Wound injuries damage the body's blood vessels, They release fluid that leaks into the tissues and causes swelling. This swelling deprives the damaged cells of oxygen, and tissue starts to die. HBOT reduces swelling while flooding the tissues with oxygen. The higher pressure in the chamber increases the amount of oxygen in the blood. HBOT aims to break the cycle of swelling, oxygen starvation, and tissue death.
HBOT prevents "reperfusion injury." This is the severe tissue damage that happens when the blood supply returns to the tissues after they have been deprived of oxygen. Blood flow can be interrupted by a crush injury, for instance. If this happens, a series of events inside the damaged cells leads to the release of harmful oxygen radicals. These molecules can do damage to tissues that can't be reversed. They cause the blood vessels to clamp up and stop blood flow. HBOT encourages the body's oxygen radical scavengers to seek out the problem molecules and let healing continue.
HBOT helps block the action of harmful bacteria and strengthens the body's immune system. HBOT can disable the toxins of certain bacteria. It also increases oxygen concentration in the tissues. This helps them resist infection. And the therapy improves the ability of white blood cells to find and destroy invaders.
HBOT encourages the formation of new collagen and new skin cells. It does so by encouraging new blood vessels to grow. It also stimulates cells to make certain substances, like vascular endothelial growth factor. These attract and stimulate endothelial cells needed for healing."
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-t...
I wonder if cultured butters of the past also might have had anti-microbial properties.
> people wouldn’tve been doing it if it hadn’t worked
That's a bold claim!
Yeah. Maybe someone who got rubbed with snow got randomly better completely unrelated to the treatment and then superstition run wild with that coincidence.
Or maybe people understood initially that you should do the rubbing next to a fire. And then the rubbing only has positive efect because it lets the person administering it feel when the heat is too much, and naturally adjusts the distance to prevent burns or injury from too fast warming up.
Or maybe someone told people to do it because they thought it might help and never bothered to check if it does anything or not.
Or maybe people did know it does nothing but there was no other option and doing something about the injury felt better than doing nothing.
Maybe it was doing mechanically nothing but the care and personal touch had a beneficial effect due to placebo.
Maybe it made the injury worse, thus more likely that they amputated and paradoxically that saved the injured from worse outcomes like gangrene.
There is so many other possibility than “if they did it it must have worked”. Who knows.
This was addressed in the accepted answer:
> rapid rewarming from open campfires or other sources of dry heat caused so much devastation.....Dry heat from ....open fires....cannot be controlled. Excessively high temperatures are usually produced, resulting in a combined burn and frostbite, a devasting injury that leads to far greater tissue loss.
Sounds like it was an overreaction to applying excessive heat to the frostbitten tissue.
No it was a full alternative to it.
Clearly
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_methods_aga...
The only thing I can find is that heating too fast might cause gangrene.
> Yeah but clearly people wouldn’tve been doing it if it hadn’t worked
Like bloodletting, leeches, lobotomies...
(Clean) leeches are actually pretty handy sometimes.
Bloodletting is standard of care for hemochromotosis; you can use leeches for that, but just drawing blood is probably more efficient; some blood banks will let you donate it, some say no because the donation isn't supposed to be of benefit to the donor.
Certainly, a lot of conditions where bloodletting was used don't warrant it, but it's not altogther bad.
I don't think there's a good use case for a lobotomy, though.
Oddly, electroconvulsive therapy seemes to have panned out.
Electroconvulsive therapy is about as effective as bloodletting. There are conditions for which bloodletting is an effective treatment, such as iron overload. But in most people, and under most circumstances, losing meaningful quantities of blood leads to long-term injury and/or death. Likewise, electrocuting the nervous system often causes permanent disability and/or death, and is a fairly effective torture method.
Lobotomy, too, can be an effective treatment for epilepsy. But I'm sure we can all agree that certain people in the past were way too quick to resort to it. (The Soviet Union banned it in the 1950s, on human rights grounds.) Likewise, I'm rather worried by the high incidence of involuntary (read: forced, non-consensual) electroconvulsive therapy. 10% is way too high, and I've seen numbers higher than that…
> people wouldn’tve been doing it if it hadn’t worked
Now do trepanation and corpse medicine.
Like, look around you. We’re a stupid species. Not consistently. But a lot. We’ve always been a bunch of apes banging around.
I don't think its smart to act like we are somehow at the pinnacle of human knowledge and nothing we've done before can be more effective than what we know works now.
> don't think its smart to act like we are somehow at the pinnacle of human knowledge and nothing we've done before can be more effective than what we know works now
Sure. Population growth is exponential. Deifying ancient knowledge is over-attributing knowledge to when we had little in both knowledge per person and persons per se.
Sanctifying traditional medicine means you’re out of ideas. You aren’t bad. But move on.
See my above comment
Still deifying traditional practice. Trepanation doesn’t do anything for seizures. Was commonly prescribed for them. We stopped doing that after discovering what caused them. The list goes on and on.