Reflexology

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What are your feelings about Reflexology to help relieve foot pain? Avoid surgeries? etc. Does anyone have a reflexologist on staff?

 

Reflexology is a fraudulent scam.

See:
Reflexology is not an effective treatment for any medical condition
Systematic review of the efficacy of reflexology

 

I disagree. I have had physical therapy for back and neck pain and it was somewhat successful. I was advised to see a massage therapist once or twice a month. The mt I went to begins each session (I've had three sessions thus far.)with reflexology and it has done more for my back and neck pain than two months of pt. On top of that it has helped my foot pain that I had following the partial removal of my sesmoid bone in my left foot. And no it isn't all in my head. It is, however, the most relaxing hour of my month.

 

Reflexology does have its place in relieving pain. I am a qualified Reflexologist and Acupuncturist and routinely use a combination of treatments to help with non specific and arthritic pain. It is well documented that massage helps to allieviate pain and if the is a placebo effect surely this is a treatment if it has helped anyway?

look outside the box and do research yourself. I did my MSc Podiatry using acupuncture for heel pain and demonstrated that it was an effective modality despite lack of evidence in medical journals or online etc. At the end of the day I want to be Podiatrist that helps people over come pain if I can, not just do the clinical stuff.

 

Reflexology is a pseudoscientific fraud peddled by practitioners of quackery and woo to scam the gullible public out of their hard earned money.

It is biologically implausible and every piece of scientific evidence has shown that it does not work.

Show us the evidence? Anecdotes are NOT evidence.

That sounds more like a "massage" than "reflexology"! Ever head of the placebo effect?

It has no place. It does not work at relieving pain (a good foot massage might relieve pain)

Foot massage has, but reflexology has failed dismaly in every single randomized controlled trial!

I did and that is why its a pseudoscientific fraud peddled by practitioners of quackery and woo to scam the gullible public out of their hard earned money.

Acupuncture has been shown to work better than a placebo; reflexology has been shown to be no better than a placebo.

 

Craig,
Don't knock what you haven't tried. I was skeptical when I had my first visit. Now after my third, I'm looking forward to further relief.
janq

 

I've not tried trepanning, but I'd be happy to knock it. Don't knock what you've not tried is an absurd argument.

Having said that...

Not true. Every piece of scientific evidence has show it does not work better than a placebo. Thats a different thing.

Here I disagree. Like it or not the placebo effect is real. From memory, Haake showed a 40% improvement in LBP with his placebo control group (and his acupuncture tx group). If I had LBP and someone offered me a pill with a 40% effectiveness, I'd take that pill in a heartbeat.

In cases where medical intervention has reached the end of its range, or for conditions where there is a strong psychosomatic element (like LBP or Headaches) I can see a place for a treatment which addresses the psychosomatic element of the patients need.

Did it? Or did it just fail to work better than the control group.

I think thats a little harsh.

People will happily and legimitately pay for complimentary medicine which is no more than placebo. The practitioners can legitimately say "this treatment has a success rate, but we don't fully understand why" with hands on hearts and be telling the gospel truth. So much of what ails us is based in part or in full on psychosomatics, if complimentary medicine speaks to that element of the aetiology and convention medicine is, and I think it is, often bad at identifying and treating that then I don't see it as a bad thing.

The pseudoscience behind it is clearly dodgy, and the claims made by some practitioners are ludicous. But I don't think its logical to extrapolate from that that it has no place.

The one thing I would stress here is that I'm talking about complimentary medicine, rather than alternative medicine of the Matthias Rath or MMS school. That is scary and dangerous and should be stepped on hard.

 

"I did and that is why its a pseudoscientific fraud peddled by practitioners of quackery and woo to scam the gullible public out of their hard earned money."

That's fine Craig, I don't mind wearing the cap.

 

total quackery bull**** but you cant beat abit of relief.

 

I think the theory is quite flawed but the practice is quite effective. Many massage methods have been based on flawed theory but quite effective. As research has been done on different massage methods the beneficial component has proved t be much different than that proposed by the originators. As one instructor put it " If your work is successful don't change what you are doing, change your understanding of why you are doing it.