Is Barefoot Contact With the Earth Necessary For Health?

campermon · **#21** by **campermon** » Feb 26, 2012 11:52 am

Read the article;

I can confirm that it was a load of bollocks.

Regina · **#22** by **Regina** » Feb 26, 2012 11:52 am

@ michael: Yes.

michael^3 · **#23** by **michael^3** » Feb 26, 2012 11:53 am

oh, ok then

campermon · **#24** by **campermon** » Feb 26, 2012 12:47 pm

michael^3 wrote:
Regina wrote:@[color=#CC0000][b]michael:[/b][/color] Yep. It's bollocks.

And you know this better than people from the Developmental and Cell Biology Department, University of California, who actually spent time and effort to study this phenomenon?

I'm a little confused about the lead author; 'Gaetan Chevalier, Ph.D'.

It is stated that he is from 'Developmental and Cell Biology Department, University of California' in the paper, but a look at that reputable institutes web pages shows no trace of him.

Gatean does pop up here; http://www.cihs.edu/cihs/Dr_Chevalier_bio.htm the 'California Institute for Human Science (CIHS)'.

A look at their website shows us that;

"CIHS is widely known for its cutting edge research into the field of energy medicine with a device called AMI, which is an apparatus to measure the function of the meridian points invented by Dr. Hiroshi Motoyama ."

and also;

"CIHS faculty and academic consultants are the cream of the fields of energy healing, integral studies and consciousness expansion research."

http://www.cihs.edu/index.php/about-cihs/

I don't know about you, but those quotes set my woo alarms off big style.

Gatean is also part of the 'Earthing Institute' http://www.earthinginstitute.net/index.php/overview

From that site, we have a link to http://www.earthing.com/ , that flogs 'earthing products'.....

From where we can by very overpriced sheets, see here https://shop.earthing.com/shopdisplaypr ... tegory=ALL

So, on balance,this appears to be the same old psuedoscientific bollocks to flog expensive gear scam.

Regina · **#25** by **Regina** » Feb 26, 2012 1:01 pm

Since you mention it, Campermon, there are interesting references:

6. Rossi W. The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe. Vol. 61. Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions; 1989.

8. Just A. Return to Nature: The True Natural Method of Healing and Living and The True Salvation of the Soul. New York, NY, USA: B. Lust; 1903.

campermon · **#26** by **campermon** » Feb 26, 2012 1:06 pm

Pulsar · **#27** by **Pulsar** » Feb 26, 2012 1:25 pm

From the article:

"Mounting evidence suggests that the Earth's negative potential can create a stable internal bioelectrical environment for the normal functioning of all body systems."

From the shop: https://shop.earthing.com/products/28/Earthing-Recovery-Bag-Sleep-System

"The Earthing Recovery Bag Sleep System was initially designed for Tour de France cyclists and has become popular with many athletes and travelers."

And for only $299! :rofl:

Regina wrote:
8. Just A. Return to Nature: The True Natural Method of Healing and Living and The True Salvation of the Soul Sole. New York, NY, USA: B. Lust; 1903.

FIFY

John P. M. · **#28** by **John P. M.** » Feb 26, 2012 1:28 pm

I knew a girl who is into this kind of stuff, and is a so-called 'Light worker' (as in working with the good energy of light, or perhaps rather 'light' as in something supernaturally good - and not as in working lightly, although I guess both meanings would fit), and she was always on about the importance of being 'grounded'. It's about Shakras and crystals and energy fields and all that stuff, IIRC. Some 'schisms' from that line of thought have tried to make it more 'sciency', to reach a different, probably larger audience.

I think studies that show the effectiveness of these kinds of things may be onto something, but that 'something' is more likely to be a mix of placebo and the fact that when you are taught that it has effect due to some 'cosmic energy' and you believe it (and want to believe it), you are likely to relax and feel at ease when you experience it and believe that 'good energy' flows through you.
So it might "work", even though it doesn't work (better than other types of relaxation and stress release). If they had a control group who had been told absolutely nothing about why they were told to walk around barefoot, and in interviews would be more of the 'down to earth'(!) type person overall, then perhaps the findings would be different. This is of course granting that the studies are impartial and conducted in a rigorous manner in the first place, which doesn't seem to be the case.

Regina · **#29** by **Regina** » Feb 26, 2012 1:49 pm

@ pulsar:

Mike_L · **#30** by **Mike_L** » Feb 26, 2012 1:57 pm

Regina wrote:I mean, if I walked around barefoot, my feet would encounter all kinds of interesting stuff. Plain ordinary dirt, spit, broken glass, piss (both animal and human), blood, the occasional syringe, chewing gum, oil, petrol, vomit, etc.,etc.

FFS, buy a vacuum cleaner for your carpet!

:grin:

campermon · **#31** by **campermon** » Feb 26, 2012 1:58 pm

Mike_L wrote:
Regina wrote:I mean, if I walked around barefoot, my feet would encounter all kinds of interesting stuff. Plain ordinary dirt, spit, broken glass, piss (both animal and human), blood, the occasional syringe, chewing gum, oil, petrol, vomit, etc.,etc.

FFS, buy a vacuum cleaner for your carpet!

Regina · **#32** by **Regina** » Feb 26, 2012 2:00 pm

Mike_L wrote:
Regina wrote:I mean, if I walked around barefoot, my feet would encounter all kinds of interesting stuff. Plain ordinary dirt, spit, broken glass, piss (both animal and human), blood, the occasional syringe, chewing gum, oil, petrol, vomit, etc.,etc.

FFS, buy a vacuum cleaner for your carpet!

You better stay under that chair if you still feel any need for your bollocks. :evilgrin:

Mike_L · **#33** by **Mike_L** » Feb 26, 2012 2:09 pm

kiore · **#34** by **kiore** » Feb 26, 2012 2:33 pm

As I posed before, barefoot contact with the earth (meaning soil) can be beneficial as a side effect of becoming a host to certain parasites..
The earthelectonythingeecontactmakesyoufeelbetterandthecompanyloadsofcash sleeping bag, as used by professional cyclists, who as we all know would never put anything 'unnatural' in their bodies.. :whistle:

seems to rely on a different mechanism.

Spearthrower · **#35** by **Spearthrower** » Feb 27, 2012 11:37 am

michael^3 wrote:So has anyone even bothered to read the article or are you just going to ridicule it because it doesn't seem to fit inside your view of the world?

Sorry Michael - some people's scientific literacy is sufficient to notice gaping flaws in claims, regardless of how many words are used.

Spearthrower · **#36** by **Spearthrower** » Feb 27, 2012 11:38 am

michael^3 wrote:
Regina wrote:@[color=#CC0000][b]michael:[/b][/color] Yep. It's bollocks.

And you know this better than people from the Developmental and Cell Biology Department, University of California, who actually spent time and effort to study this phenomenon?

Correlation and causation, mon amis.

halucigenia · **#37** by **halucigenia** » Mar 02, 2012 1:23 pm

campermon wrote:"CIHS faculty and academic consultants are the cream of the fields of energy healing, integral studies and consciousness expansion research."

And just how does one become a consciousness expansion research consultant :smoke:

That sounds like the job for me.

Weaver · **#38** by **Weaver** » Mar 02, 2012 1:28 pm

halucigenia wrote:
campermon wrote:"CIHS faculty and academic consultants are the cream of the fields of energy healing, integral studies and consciousness expansion research."

And just how does one become a consciousness expansion research consultant

Smoke a shitload of weed, drop some acid, then convince yourself that there's career potential to being a lifelong stoner.

Calilasseia · **#39** by **Calilasseia** » Mar 11, 2012 10:03 pm

Oh lovely. Let's take a look at this woo shall we?

First of all, from the first link in the OP:

It is well established, though not widely known, that the surface of the earth possesses a limitless and continuously renewed supply of free or mobile electrons as a consequence of a global atmospheric electron circuit.

Oh really? If this was the case, it would be possible to measure current flows through the atmosphere on a routine basis. Don't recall this ever having been done in any of the extant physics literature. Indeed, it's one of the reasons why, in the days when televisions and computer monitors were constructed around cathode ray tubes (CRTs), the CRTs needed to have all the air evacuated from within, because the electrons produced by the electron gun at the rear of the CRT would not reach the screen otherwise. So the idea that electrons move freely in air at 1 bar atmospheric pressure is not supported by the evidence. Oh, and it's not just CRTs that need to be evacuated - another piece of apparatus whose workings have been well known for 80 years, is the electron microscope. Electron microscopes typically accelerate their electrons with much higher potential differences than CRTs in televisions and computer monitors - typically, CRTs have a maximum potential difference of around 25,000 volts operating in the electron gun, many CRTs operating at a potential difference considerably lower than this, whilst quite a few electron microscopes have potential differences of a million volts accelerating their electrons. Yet even with a million volts accelerating the electrons, an electron microscope's interior needs to be evacuated, and a very high standard of high vacuum maintained in order for the instrument to operate reliably. It's one of the reasons why electron microscopes are expensive pieces of kit, typically affordable only by government-backed research institutions, or wealthy corporate bodies connected with biomedical research.

Indeed, the only time electricity flows as a current through the atmosphere is during a thunderstorm. This is because, in order for a current to flow through the atmosphere, enough charge has to be gathered in a well-defined space to facilitate ionisation of the air. Only once air molecules are ionised, is it possible for a current to pass through the air, and the energy requirements for ionisation of air are significant. It's why lightning bolts tend to be intermittent, and not continuous, phenomena - the conditions leading to the development of a path of ionised air molecules through which the current can flow take time to develop.

Plus, during a thunderstorm, it's the thunderclouds that accumulate negative charge, not the ground. Which means that the above quote has its basic physics ass-backwards.

Wearing shoes with insulating soles and/or sleeping in beds that are isolated from the electrical ground plane of the earth have disconnected most people from the earth's electrical rhythms and free electrons to flow from the earth to the body.

Given the above exposition of the actual behaviour of electrons in air I've provided, I think we can dismiss this next sentence as complete hooey.

Meanwhile ...

Environmental medicine generally addresses environmental factors with a negative impact on human health. However, emerging scientific research has revealed a surprisingly positive and overlooked environmental factor on health: direct physical contact with the vast supply of electrons on the surface of the Earth. Modern lifestyle separates humans from such contact. The research suggests that this disconnect may be a major contributor to physiological dysfunction and unwellness. Reconnection with the Earth's electrons has been found to promote intriguing physiological changes and subjective reports of well-being. Earthing (or grounding) refers to the discovery of benefits-including better sleep and reduced pain-from walking barefoot outside or sitting, working, or sleeping indoors connected to conductive systems that transfer the Earth's electrons from the ground into the body. This paper reviews the earthing research and the potential of earthing as a simple and easily accessed global modality of significant clinical importance.

So do tell me, why is it that during a thunderstorm, the ground is positively charged, and all the extra electrons are found several thousand feet up in thunderclouds?

As for the article itself, the full citation is as follows:

Earthing: Health Implications Of Reconnecting The Human Body To The Earth’s Surface Electrons by Gáetan Chevalier, Stephen T. Sinatra, James L. Oschman, Karol Sokal and Pawel Sokal, Journal of Environmental & Public Health, 2012:291541, Epub 2012 Jan 12

Oh look, the full paper is downloadable for free! Get it here.

From that paper:

Chevalier et al, 2012 wrote:It is an established, though not widely appreciated fact, that the Earth’s surface possesses a limitless and continuously renewed supply of free or mobile electrons. The surface of the planet is electrically conductive (except in limited ultradry areas such as deserts), and its negative potential is maintained (i.e., its electron supply replenished) by the global atmospheric electrical circuit [1, 2].

The two references cited to support this are:

[1] The Local Diurnal Variation Of Cloud Electrification And The Global Diurnal Variation Of Negative Charge On The Earth by E. Williams and S. Heckman, Journal of Geophysical Research,
98(3): 5221–5234 (1993)

[2] On The Generation And Evolution Of Aeroelectric Structures In The Surface Layer" by S. Anisimov, E. Mareev, and S. Bakastov, [i]Journal of Geophysical Research D, 104(12): 14359–14367 (1999)

The first of these papers has as its abstract the following:

Williams & Heckman, 1993 wrote:Both the amplitude and the phase of the ionospheric potential and Carnegie curve of atmospheric electricity are considered to distinguish causes for the negatively charged earth in fair weather. Satellite-observed longitudinal distributions of electrical activity are convolved with local diurnal variations of cloud-to-ground lightning and point discharge current to produce universal diurnal variations which are compared with the Carnegie curve. The amplitude ratio (maximum-minimum)/mean) for the predicted universal diurnal variation of point discharge shows good agreement with the Carnegie curve, whereas the predicted amplitude ratio for lightning is 2–3 times greater. These comparisons suggest that conduction current other than lightning is the dominant charging agent for the Earth's surface.

Interesting. So why does the National Geographic page on this subject (link here) depict the ground as positively charged (and therefore suffering an electron deficit) when depicting the anatomy of a thundercloud? Likewise, this treatise:

Lightning: Physics And Effects by Vladimir A. Rakov and Martin A. Uman, ISBN 0 521 58237 6

depicts the ground as positively charged during a thunderstorm. Chapter 1 of this work is downloadable from here.

Sadly, one paper I cannot access (another bloody paywall) is this one:

Upward Electrical Discharges From Thunderstorms by Paul R. Krehbeil, Jeremy A. Riousset, Victor P. Pasko, Ronald J. Thomas, William Rison, Mark A Stanley & Harald E. Edens, Nature Geoscience, 1: 233-237 (23rd March 2008) [Abstract available here]

because I suspect that its contents would prove illuminating, given that the authors describe in their paper a model of electrical charge distributions in thunderclouds, viz:

Thunderstorms occasionally produce upward discharges, called blue jets and gigantic jets, that propagate out of the storm top towards or up to the ionosphere1, 2, 3, 4. Whereas the various types of intracloud and cloud-to-ground lightning are reasonably well understood, the cause and nature of upward discharges remains a mystery. Here, we present a combination of observational and modelling results that indicate two principal ways in which upward discharges can be produced. The modelling indicates that blue jets occur as a result of electrical breakdown between the upper storm charge and the screening charge attracted to the cloud top; they are predicted to occur 5–10 s or less after a cloud-to-ground or intracloud discharge produces a sudden charge imbalance in the storm. An observation is presented of an upward discharge that supports this basic mechanism. In contrast, we find that gigantic jets begin as a normal intracloud discharge between dominant mid-level charge and a screening-depleted upper-level charge, that continues to propagate out of the top of the storm. Observational support for this mechanism comes from similarity with 'bolt-from-the-blue' discharges5 and from data on the polarity of gigantic jets[/sup]6[/sup]. We conclude that upward discharges are analogous to cloud-to-ground lightning. Our explanation provides a unifying view of how lightning escapes from a thundercloud.

A less technical discussion of this paper can be found here.

So ... unless I've got my wires seriously crossed, it's beginning to look as if we're dealing with woo once more.

michael^3 wrote:So has anyone even bothered to read the article or are you just going to ridicule it because it doesn't seem to fit inside your view of the world?

Read the above, and see why I have serious suspicions about this. Not least, because it contradicts what I've learned about the physics of electrons, and the behaviour of electrostatic charges on the large scale, particularly with respect to weather. This is what's known as "having paid attention in science class".

michael^3 wrote:
Regina wrote:@[color=#CC0000][b]michael:[/b][/color] Yep. It's bollocks.

And you know this better than people from the Developmental and Cell Biology Department, University of California, who actually spent time and effort to study this phenomenon?

Who appear to be contradicting decades of research by a considerable number of physicists? Hmm, why does this make me suspicious?

Spearthrower wrote:
michael^3 wrote:So has anyone even bothered to read the article or are you just going to ridicule it because it doesn't seem to fit inside your view of the world?

Sorry Michael - some people's scientific literacy is sufficient to notice gaping flaws in claims, regardless of how many words are used.

As I said earlier, this is known as "having paid attention in science class".

orpheus · **#40** by **orpheus** » Mar 11, 2012 11:08 pm

Well, the other day I walked four miles around Manhattan in my VivoBarefoot shoes. Felt fantastic! But actually barefoot in Manhattan? Eww.

Is Barefoot Contact With the Earth Necessary For Health?

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