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.
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.
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’d make some snowballs, feel cold for a few seconds then my hands would start warming up really fast, like glowing with heat. I think there’s something to it, though being a bit cold and having frostbites is a big difference. I personally never experience any frostbite.
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.
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.
This is interesting, I was taught that instead of the metabolic waste, the issue was the cold blood from extremities quickly cooling down the internals once allowed to circulate freely. Do you have any references for this?
Reperfusion injury can occur after a crush injury. The myoglobin, creatine, potassium and phosphorus from destroyed muscle cells cause kidney damage. The potassium is really important as it is supposed to stay locked within cells and high levels can cause arrhythmias. For more info look up crush syndrome and reperfusion injury. This is all slightly different from hypothermia but may share some pathways if cells are destroyed.
What it's worth, we were taught the same thing about people crushed under e.g. rubble in combat medic training 20 years ago. And the same consideration applies to removing a tourniquet that had been in place for over two hours as well.
Yeah it's extremely painful. I jumped into a frozen lake years ago and ran to a shower afterwards. Turned on the water, just slightly warm and it felt like my fingers and toes got smashed by a hammer.
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.
Whe sometimes I sleep on my one of my arms and they go numb, when I reposition and I start to feel it it comes with immediate and excruciate pain that luckily dies in intensity after a few moments. I wonder if this is just compressed nerves or it’s the blood supply that was cut off.
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
Some spas have this if you’d like to mimic it mildly. Aire in London has a very cool pool from which you can go to a very hot pool. I really enjoy the pins and needles effect.
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.
I had the same experience. I stepped into a hot shower with frostbite in two of my toes (just half of my big toe and bit of the the next toe over) and I inadvertently screamed and fell over, ripping the shower curtain down and everything. I wanted out badly. There’s no aching sensation quite like it that I’ve experienced. I’d definitely fail the gom jabbar.
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.
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.
After handling snow I've noticed this too. My hands are often cold by default, but if I handle snow it's as if the coldness crosses some threshold and your body says, OK, that's over the line! We're sending help!
Without being overly condescending, you do realise that most of the things that have been done throughout history, along with many we still do, are the result of cultural practice and have no evidence base whatsoever?
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
I don't understand though. Someone else brought up trepanation, but pre-modern humans lived in environment where they banged there head around a lot and it may have led to better outcomes for some people to get a hole in their skull so they retained it as a cultural practice. Why would a bunch of people decide, up until 1950 or so, that it was a good idea to rub snow into your feet when they were frostbitten just because it was some practice with no strong basis in reality. The alternative is doing nothing, so what would this do that would at least make people think it was working? Because it had to look like it was working, even if it really wasn't.
You might look into it to see if there’s something special about butter versus other oils/fats that may make butter specifically good for burns, but I understand that as keeping the air off of the burn, similarly to how oxygen tents work.
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.
I think the reasoning with topical coatings for burns is actually something to do with avoiding gases touching the burned area, which is why they use oxygen tents for people with severe burns over a large area. Petroleum jelly and other similar products block the air from touching the burn also.
I find that oils such as petroleum jelly or olive oil do provide pain relief for burns. I can only speculate as to the method of action, but I’m clearly not the only one. Apparently even air movement or contact can cause pain to burns due to the exposure of the dermis, and possibly other reasons.
> 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?
people still pray to personal gods to this day, expecting them to prioritise their petty little lives while others are suffering/dying of things that could be trivially solved with a bit of knowledge and technology.
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.
Having the confidence to believe that you are able to do something almost certainly makes it more likely that you'll do it. Its bullshit but it probably works unless its for basically impossible things. You can manifest a promotion if you believe in yourself and work hard (and have an idea that your boss maybe likes you). People are also not so bad at predicting things, you aren't going to manifest something that you have no hope is actually going to happen. But of course with something like a lottery ticket its stupid.
Oh I'm all for people having confidence in themselves. That's what religion is all about (except for the population control aspect).
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.
> 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.
Yeah. Maybe someone who got rubbed with snow got randomly better completely unrelated to the treatment and then superstition run wild with that coincidence.
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.
I don't think its smart to act like we are somehow at the pinnacle of human knowledge and nothing we've done before can be more effective than what we know works now.
https://www.ncexped.com/drying-off-snow/
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.
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://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/Stockdale-Concept.html
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Stockdale
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.
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
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.
> 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?
"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.
> 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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_methods_aga...
Like bloodletting, leeches, lobotomies...
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.