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Why did people rub snow on frozen feet? (2017)

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Re: Why did people rub snow on frozen feet? (2017)

#81

Post by consf »

crazygringo wrote: post #27
schiffern wrote: post #18

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.

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Re: Why did people rub snow on frozen feet? (2017)

#82

Post by consf »

grugagag wrote: post #44

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’…

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Re: Why did people rub snow on frozen feet? (2017)

#83

Post by consf »

cyberax wrote: post #17

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. N…

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Re: Why did people rub snow on frozen feet? (2017)

#84

Post by consf »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #36

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.

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Re: Why did people rub snow on frozen feet? (2017)

#86

Post by binary132 »

mistrial9 wrote: post #21
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

what in the world

Re: Why did people rub snow on frozen feet? (2017)

#87

Post by wizzwizz4 »

exe34 wrote: post #72
DiscourseFan wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Re: Why did people rub snow on frozen feet? (2017)

#88

Post by jeltz »

schiffern wrote: post #18

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/

Yeah, I am familiar with using snow to dry off wet clothes.

Re: Why did people rub snow on frozen feet? (2017)

#89

Post by wizzwizz4 »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #25
hiatus wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah but clearly people wouldn’tve been doing it if it hadn’t worked Like bloodletting, leeches, lobotomies...

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…

Re: Why did people rub snow on frozen feet? (2017)

#90

Post by JumpCrisscross »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #59
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 did…

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.

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