The bottom line is that supplements only work if there is a deficiency. If you take in any more than the body needs, the body just excretes it or stores it and it makes no difference except running the risk of an overload or an overdose. You can not “boost” anything by doing it. It also wastes your money, making for expensive urine.
Increasingly, you can see more advice to use zinc supplements to treat verrucae on the foot. Is that advice warranted?
Continue readingI was doing some digging around Amazon.com to see what sorts of products people are buying for the self-care of their foot problems and this one for Sever’s disease stuck out like a sore thumb. I can’t say I am surprised by this. What I was surprised by was I had never seen or heard of the product before and just how well it is selling.
It was this ‘half sock’ with a gel under the heel:
They are proving to be very popular on Amazon.com and just go to further illustrate what my not-so-scientific study on calcaneal apophysitis found in the most cases they seem to be self-managed and do just fine.
Link to the product on amazon.com.
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I am far from being any sort of infectious disease, emergency medicine or pharmacology expert and way out of my lane on this one, but if ‘Karen from Facebook’ can have a view, then why can’t I? What I do think I am good at is reading, evaluating and critiquing published scientific research as well as evaluating consensus among real experts and not just those who have a YouTube channel, and it is that which informs what I am writing about here. Observing all the political shitfuckery that has gone on around this has also been fun as well as informing and there is a lot to be learnt from the whole episode.
Hydroxychloroquine is in a class of medications that were first used to treat malaria, but are now more commonly used as a disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drug (DMARD) to treat conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, childhood arthritis and some other autoimmune diseases. In March 2020, the then USA President, Donald Trump touted hydroxychloroquine as a ‘game-changer’ for COVID-19. We now know that it was not even close to being that. How did it end up there?
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I have been doing my weekly update on research and views for a few years now and you start to see patterns in the research and the literature. One that really stood out like a sore thumb was vitamin D. At one stage a year or so ago, I was commenting at least weekly on something to do with vitamin D and the foot. I even got feedback that I was some sort of vitamin D junkie (I’m not). More lately its probably once a month or so, but that is still a lot compared with other topics. Its hard not to miss how much research has been regularly and recently added to the threads on Podiatry Arena on vitamin D and the diabetic foot and the thread on vitamin D and foot and ankle injuries. With that sheer volume of content and research one can not help but think that it might be important and relevant.
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It is disappointing to feel the need to write about ‘Grounding’ or ‘Earthing’ again. I have done it before here and here. Many others have done the same as it is great fodder for skeptical writers. ‘Grounding’ or ‘Earthing’ is still bollocks and made up pseudoscience nonsense. What is disappointing is those who have the benefit of allegedly developing the critical thinking skills that are supposed to come with getting a degree from a University fail to see through the nonsensical claims and blindly share it with no clue what is wrong with it. We have to do better.
I have previously written on all my clinical work, research and teaching experiences with calcaneal apophysitis and just how much I realised I did not know and just how much I learnt when my own child got it. As my daughters have just come out of the age bracket where the condition is common, I used that opportunity over the last few years to chat to as many of their friends and their friend’s parents that I could about their experiences with ‘Severs Disease’ whenever I could (an unrepresentative purposively selected sample with recall bias and no ethics approval, but, hey no worries).
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