[HN Gopher] Why did people rub snow on frozen feet?
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Why did people rub snow on frozen feet?
Author : naberhausj
Score : 22 points
Date : 2024-11-15 21:50 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (outdoors.stackexchange.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (outdoors.stackexchange.com)
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Yeah but clearly people wouldn'tve been doing it if it hadn't
| worked, so what is the reason for trying that specific
| traditional method?
| unclad5968 wrote:
| The only thing I can find is that heating too fast might cause
| gangrene.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| > people wouldn'tve been doing it if it hadn't worked
|
| That's a bold claim!
| krisoft wrote:
| 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.
| norgie wrote:
| This was addressed in the accepted answer:
|
| > 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.
| hiatus wrote:
| > Yeah but clearly people wouldn'tve been doing it if it hadn't
| worked
|
| Like bloodletting, leeches, lobotomies...
| robbiep wrote:
| 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
| exe34 wrote:
| 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.
| riccardomc wrote:
| Clearly
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_methods_aga...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _people wouldn'tve been doing it if it hadn't worked_
|
| 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.
| aaron695 wrote:
| They are as dumb as HN users, would you not just look up old
| medical texts?
|
| https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/248760861 (1953)
| This must be done very slowly. The longer the part has been
| exposed to the cold the longer must be the time taken over
| restoring the circulation. Applying warmth, for instance,
| would almost certainly set up moist gangrene. Normal treatment
| would be to place the patient in a cold room and rub the frozen
| extremities with snow.
|
| What did the Germans say on this. This was obviously part of
| their concentration camp experiments.
|
| (1951) Don't rub snow, don't use heat. Experimenting with drugs -
| https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/139910391
|
| It's a good example of how slowly information moved pre-internet
| society.
| incognito124 wrote:
| I've experienced rapid warming of hands when handling snow
| without gloves. Maybe it's the same mechanism?
| sdwr wrote:
| I believe the logic is to heat gently through friction, and to
| promote blood circulation through manipulation.
|
| Warming up cold body parts is painful, so maybe it's about
| distracting from the pain as well.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| cyberax wrote:
| 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.
| schiffern wrote:
| Perhaps it started with people misunderstanding / misremembering
| _drying off_ by rubbing snow on wet skin. Being soaking 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/
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