Cobblestones are Good for You

pin_gween writes "Need to lose weight, lower blood pressure, help your balance? The Oregon Research Institute reports that walking on 'cobblestone mat surface resulted in significant reductions in blood pressure and improvements in balance and physical performance.' The benefits may have foundations in 'the principles of reflexology, in that the uneven surface of the cobblestones stimulate and regulate "acupoints" located on the soles of the feet.' Although the study was conducted with elderly patients, no reason to think it can't help most folks."

Comments

Re:Quack! Don't waste your time/money!

[jericho4.0]

The OP is modded "troll" as I write this.

Our society has become a place where truth has no value, and people think it rude to demand proof. Everywhere I hear and see belief in magic and superstition, from reflexology to homeopathy to physic hotlines. Much of it cloaked in pseudoscience and defended as science. WTF happened to rationalism?

Reflexology /foot massage

[FidelCatsro]

Now Reflexology is a foot massage , there is no difference apart from that a foot massage will generally be more thorough .
Things it can help with are
1:) Foot pain
2:) lower ankle pain
3:) stress , it feels great
4:) probably nothing else
Walking on cobbles (depending on the cobbles) can be a very relaxing experience .
This has nothing to do with the principles of reflexology which have been consistently proven to be nothing more than a nice foot massage. Of course it can help lower blood pressure if the high blood pressure is caused by stress, its relaxing , its fun.
Why ruin a perfectly good (if obvious) research piece by comparing it to snake oil

Re:Quack! Don't waste your time/money!

[ziekke]

"Thinking critically" also means being skeptical of the claims of current medical orthodoxy - looking at the actual evidence rather than being swayed by name-calling.

You are exactly right, however I don't see how that was relevant in my post, or in this thread, as we are not disputing medical practice. I never said that quacks didn't exist in every line of practice. However I will say that anyone practicing acupuncture or reflexology is a quack.

Reflexology has nothing to do with Chinese Medicine.

I didn't mention reflexology together with chinese medicine for no reason. RTFA. Excerpt: "Cobblestone-like walking paths are common in China. The activity is rooted in traditional Chinese medicine and relates to some of the principles of reflexology, in that the uneven surface of the cobblestones stimulate and regulate "acupoints" located on the soles of the feet."

Many pracitioners of Chinese Medicine don't care much about trying to find a Western Medicine explanation for how acupuncture

Whether they care or not doesn't mean it works just because they believe in it. Proof of acupuncture is anecdotal at best, there is absolutely no proof that such techniques are scientifically sound.

Sure there have been lots of "studies" done on acupuncture claiming that it Really Works, however none of which were appropriate in controlling placebo and other factors such as blinding.

They see it work every day, that's enough for them.

But what about all the times that it doesn't work? And there are many. The trouble with things like this is people focus more on the times they succeed and tend to forget about all the times that things failed.

(The same can be said of many Western physicians, a surprising number of whom have little interest or knowledge of biology.)

There is a huge difference between a medical doctor prescribing you a treatment that has been properly scientifically and medically proven and tested without knowing the exact biological aspects, and some quack sticking needles in you because he believes in meridians and qi, and all the other things that whatever acupuncturist you talk to believes.

The CM model is very much a functional, not a structural, one; the Vital Substances, the Zang-Fu organs, and the meridians are best understood by what they do, not by chopping people up looking for them.

You don't have to chop people up to look for meridians. You simply have to submit the practice to a real scientific double blind-placebo controlled test. Fancy that, here is an example: http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/abstract/143/1/1 0

For some real information see http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/ acu.html

To quote:

The National Council Against Health Fraud has concluded:

• Acupuncture is an unproven modality of treatment.
• Its theory and practice are based on primitive and fanciful concepts of health and disease that bear no relationship to present scientific knowledge
• Research during the past 20 years has not demonstrated that acupuncture is effective against any disease.
• Perceived effects of acupuncture are probably due to a combination of expectation, suggestion, counter-irritation, conditioning, and other psychologic mechanisms.
• The use of acupuncture should be restricted to appropriate research settings, Insurance companies should not be required by law to cover acupuncture treatment, Licensure of lay acupuncturists should be phased out.
• Consumers who wish to try acupuncture should discuss their situation with a knowledgeable physician who has no commercial interest [20].

Re:Quack! Don't waste your time/money!

[ziekke]

Believe it or not, you pretty much nailed it right on the head there.

There are lots and lots of Doctors (and not necessarily Medical Doctors, this includes physicists, biologists, etc.) that subscribe to some of these quackery beliefs, not even limited to simply reflexology or acupuncture. Dowsing, astrology, HOMEOPATHY all that stuff is just as unproven and fake as the next. The belief in some of these things even falls down to psychological factors (such as the ideomotor effect (2) with regards to dowsing, and placebo effect for most - if not all - alternative medicine practices). It's interesting how a physicist can believe that dowsing really works, but they are out there!

In the case of the "traditional chinese medicine", the arguement is that it has been around for 2000 years So It Must Work!. Unfortunately, just cause it's been around for a long time, doesn't mean it works either.

Aside from the personal/psychological influences that cause people to follow these things, a huge factor are the people marketing the products and therapies.

Snake oil charmers tend to be able to sell this stuff by scaring people with lies. Fear that the "industry" is out to get you. Fear that "drugs" are poisoning you. It's easy to get someone to believe that there are conspiracies (that are conveniently unprovable) working against them and that the only way out is their form of alternative medicine.

A lot of people lured to alternative medicine are done so because they feel they have been somehow wronged by the MD profession. Like they believe they have a true illness that MDs can't locate/cure (because it doesn't exist). So they go to a naturopath who is only too happy to say "Of course there's something wrong with you! Now that will be $50 a week for therapy plus $35 a month for my homeopathic pills. Don't worry, they are 100x diluted so they are SUPER-effective!". Lots of alternative medicine practitioners even go so far as to claim you have an illness you don't know about, and that only they can cure it! Colonix for example is one such thing, as well as people who say you should be taking TONS of vitamin supplements for various reasons. Anyone heard of magnet therapy (Quackwatch Info)?

The sad thing about it all, is that it's difficult to combat with logic and sense. You say "but its not proven" and they say "You just have to believe!" or "So-and-so said it worked, so it must! I don't care if science says it doesn't".

If you go to http://quackwatch.org/ there is an insane amount of information there with regards to how people get sucked in to this stuff.

Re:Quack! Don't waste your time/money!

[Apreche]

The NCCAM is not real science.

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/ nccam.html

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/altm ed/snake/evidence.html

Also, search within this page for NCCAM
http://www.randi.org/jr/042602.html

And that's just skimming the surface.

The NCCAM is a bunch of quackery and pseudoscience. The most you will ever get from acupuncture, reflexology, chiropracty or any other bullshit is the placebo effect. If anyone claims that any of these things are real, as them why they haven't won the million dollar challenge.

But don't believe me just on my word. Do your own research. Use google. Go to the library. Read what real scientists and various studies say about the NCCAM and the bs that is most alternative medicine. When you are done, you will become as enraged as I am that your tax dollars are spent funding this crap instead of working on real medicine.

On Science, Not Science, and Not Not Science

[DynaSoar]

jericho4.0 (565125) sez: "Yeah. I'll take that as a hypothesis when I see any evidence of it, you know, actually working."

Then go to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi and put in "Journal of the American Geriatrics Society" and keep checking until the PubMed listing in entered, or go to http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/jgs/0/0 and keep checking until the EarlyOnline posts it. It was just accepted and hasn't appeared yet.

But I'm betting most of the whiners really don't care nearly as much about TFA as they do about getting the chance to whine.

And for the dinks that can't follow links and at least read the release from ORI, reflexology IS a science where they noticed the effect and developed the hypothesis from. Put "reflexology" in the search window in the PubMed link and you'll get 187 references. People doing scientific investigation of something is the verb definition of "science".

Remember, NIH has a center devoted to studying "alternative" therapy, and some of these "alternatives" have been around since before the ancestors of most Europeans (from whence comes "Western" medicine) were tribes yet to gain the smarts and strengths enough to challenge the Romans.

Yes, the Office of Alternative Medicine has been able to "validate" very little of what's been presented to them. The fact that they can't do in 10 years what's worked for a thousand only means "it doesn't work" if you ignore the vast majority of the evidence, which is most often done by insisting it appear in peer reviewed journals, and the hell with centuries of success.

And if you'll notice, this study wasn't funded by OAM. The NIH centers themselves are going around OAM, because they ARE run by scientists who realize there must be something there. This may be in part due to the fact that 50% of the people doing research at NIH are not from the US. Or maybe it's the other way around.

Because it is true that's why

[marcus]

Personal experience:

We got a treadmill. It is great for dialing in your heart rate. Adjust your speed in 1/10 of MPH increments and the incline with 1/2 degree resolution. Want 145 BPM and the monitor shows 139? It's easy, just speed up 1/10th MPH.

Problem is, it is smooth, very smooth, IOW boring as far as your body is concerned.

After months of watching TV while running on the 'mill, the weather was looking good and I got a wild hair and decided to run "in the wild". I ran the same distance(by GPS), in same amount of time, with the same heart rate monitor and maintained the same pulse rate. The next day, I was sore all over. My legs ached up and down as well as a variety of trunk muscles from hips to abs to ribs to shoulder blades.

The only difference was that I ran on grass, dirt, up and down curbs, wooden bridges, dried creek beds, and I actually had to turn corners. It's a lot more of a workout than the smooth, monotonous 'mill.