It easy to come across recommendations that urine therapy should be used to treat chilblains with lots of references to “my mum” or “my grandma” used to use it and swears by it fixing their chilblains (Google it). There is not a shred of evidence that it helps except for the unreliable anecdotes and testimonials. You will occasionally have a patient ask about it, because they heard about it from their grandma or they Googled it.
Continue readingWe all have seen those photos of swimmers at the Olympics with bruises all over their bodies and wondered, “whaaaaaaaaaat?”.
It is an alleged therapeutic technique known as cupping where the therapist places special cups on your skin to create suction to supposedly help with with pain and inflammation and as a type of deep-tissue massage.
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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?
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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.
Chilblains are generally not that responsive to treatment with most interventions having some effect, but no one intervention really curing them or having any great consistent affect. Lots of people have opinions and preferences for treatments, most of which have not yet been shown to do any better than a placebo. When there are no definitive treatments shown to work for a condition, then the wide range of anecdotal recommendations and choices to treat will contain many treatments that simply can not work and if they do appear to work, then its more likely to be the natural history rather than the treatment.
Continue readingSome people must think some people are really stupid. I recently screen shot some pictures posted on a website that I stumbled across and has now been taken down. They must think that people really are that stupid. It was from a website promoting and selling a “bunion corrector”.
Here is the first image. This was the bunion allegedly before the use of the bunion corrector:
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