More On Foot Detoxing

I got this from friend and fellow PMTI alum Sandi Kissane:

I was introduced to the foot bath when I worked at a health club for a short period of time. Frankly, I felt a little like a snake oil salesman. The so-called "research" that the company who developed the foot bath has, in my humble opinion, a poor research design and is more largely based on testimonials and anecdotal evidence rather than being based in good science.

At the crux of my skepticism is something that took place during my training for using the foot bath. The gentleman that was conducting the training, on a real life client, examined the nasty water and concluded that the woman was having difficulty with her gall bladder. She laughed hysterically because she had her gall bladder removed 5 years previous.

One of my first clients for the foot bath later called me and said that if I looked up these foot baths on YouTube I would find videos showing that the water will change similarly if you put something else (like a carrot as I later found) in the water. There was a plethora of videos inserting various other objects in the water and consistently getting the same results.

I'm not sure what to make of this and so without better science, I ultimately left the health club because the owner and I could not come to some sort of understanding regarding my conscience relative to marketing something I don't fully understand.

I admit that I wondered the same thing about the foot detox. I wonder about detoxes in general. I was thinking to myself "I wonder if she's ever tested this without feet in it, just to see what it does on its own".

I had a similar experience with ear candling. Everyone likes to cut the candles open afterwards and point to the junk inside and say "see, that's the junk/wax that was in your ear".

I did a lot of testing of ear candles on my own and discovered a few things:

1. The "ear junk" is a by-product of the candle burning. Even if the candle burns while I'm just holding it in my hand, it gets junk inside. That's not ear wax.

2. The type of candle really makes a difference. The more expensive ones really do burn cleaner and have less clogging.

3. Ear candling will not clean your ears out. It can help relieve sinus pressure. That's where I got my most consistent benefits.

But I learned all that from my own experiments done over the course of a couple of weeks. (Ask Pam Moyer at I Street Massage. I was setting things on fire all the time!) Most people don't do that.

We so want there to be some ..... magic. We want there to be old-timey simple remedies. We want easy access to the ways of the body. And we are, rightly, skeptical that the way to be "healthy" lies exclusively in the hands of modern Western medicine.

We are open to other answers. And that's cool. But it's not enough if we're putting ourselves out there as professionals. It's just not enough. We owe it to our clients to do our own explorations and often our own experiments.