Why did people rub snow on frozen feet? (2017)(outdoors.stackexchange.com) |
Why did people rub snow on frozen feet? (2017)(outdoors.stackexchange.com) |
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.
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
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Warming up cold body parts is painful, so maybe it's about distracting from the pain as well.
Returning circulation is much more brutal than it might sound.
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.
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
A lot of things come from somewhere and are not arbitrary. That’s all that’s being asked here.
That's a bold claim!
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.
Like bloodletting, leeches, lobotomies...
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.
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.
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 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.
My feet were too cold to notice that water got inside my boot, then by the time my toes were freezing there was no way my nerves could let me know. I only spent around 4 hours like that, but it was enough. It wasn’t even painful until the moment it went into the shower so I had no idea what was going on even once I got home into a warm house. It’s sneaky stuff.
I do remember being creeped out by how white and immobile my toes were. I knew that wasn’t great, but I didn’t think they’d literally begun to freeze. I’m a lot more careful now.
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.
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...
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Also, oxygen's a gas.
If the complication was a subdural hematoma then similar procedures are still the standard of care today, and certainly we wouldn't be drilling to people's skulls as treatment if our ancestors never did anything similar.
>The discovery was the scientific method.
The "scientific method" is for use in objective science like measuring the speed of light. Until the patient dies, medical care is subjective. Its like with this recent election, telling a bunch of people that the "economy is good" doesn't matter if they themselves don't feel that way. In just the same way, 60 or 70 years ago someone from a developed country could've come into the undeveloped world and removed cancerous tumors by using surgical procedures that left someone with permanent disabilities, but maybe their witch doctor would've used some strange treatment that looked crazy and stupid but actually triggered a global immune response that not only removed the cancer but left the patient with a better outcome since they suffered no permanent side effects from the treatment, one which would be considered "more advanced" by today's standards, but wasn't even considered by the developed world back then. That one might claim something is "objectively" fact is only possible subjectively, and the hubris of believing that your subjective stance, even when accompanied by evidence, is absolutely true, will lead you to discount almost anything that stands outside of it as "unscientific." But you yourself cannot possibly die in your own experience, even though death is the condition of possibility for true objectivity, so until you reach that moment which never comes, you are constantly grappling with this dialectical approach to the world that constantly reshapes and reformulates itself in relation to all the experiences, feelings, and memories that you have.
>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.
It's true, but as I said most medical practices today are still derived from pre-modern medicine, even if they have been improved upon. One could make the same argument for much of what we do, since measuring outcomes won't always be able to differentiate between patients who get better on their own and those who improve with the treatment, since most treatments besides pills are impossible to test in a double blind study (you don't see double-blind studies for heart surgery techniques, for instance). Doctors do a lot based on their feelings about whats up and what they think works, far more than you are probably comfortable with, simply because there is no alternative besides constant self-criticism and research. That's why case studies are so important in the medical field, since they offer a subjective approach to the objective circumstance using objective tools that are determined subjectively.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2802370/#:~:text=We....
"Must've done something wrong while manifesting this time :shrug:"
:facepalm: !!!!!1111eleven
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.
> 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."
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-t...
I’ve also had some larger burns and immersed them in ice water for the immediate treatment, but after the first day or so, I found that petroleum jelly based topical ointments were easier to apply and maintain, as the burn was on the bottom of my foot, which was a distinctly horrible place to have a burn.
But air exposure was happening most of the time, the way I cooled my burns, so it definitely was the cooling, that did help in my case.
(A wet towel with ice in it)
And I learned to not mess with the wounds at all. I think the last time I had a burn, I opened the the blister to get the fluid pressure out. Bad idea, this time I left it and it healed way faster. It healed so good, that after my first night of pain and cooling, I did not had to do anything with it, except giving it a rest.
I stepped on flaming plastic barefoot and fortunately was able to almost immediately immerse the foot in water, which caused the plastic to fuse to my foot for a few hours until the ice water was able to reduce the swelling. Then my foot shrank away from the mostly rigid plastic mass. It was a pretty horrible experience all around considering the small surface area of the burn, and part of the reason why I don’t like walking around barefoot generally, if I had to guess, as it happened when I was around 5 years old. My folks would later be volunteer firefighters and first responders, and I learned a lot of field first aid skills by proxy and through my own shenanigans. I’m glad I’ve never needed to be hospitalized for serious injury, though apparently not for lack of trying.