It's interesting how it's counterintuitive I the exact same way as rubbing dry sand on your weet sand covered feet on the beach takes the sand off. Same mechanism too. Redistribution of the moisture back into the aggregate whole.
1. When your hands are really cold they aren't ready for warm water. If you start with cold water and warm it up you will figure out what your hands can handle and get to the point where you're safely adding heat. You might find the cool water is actually warmer than the outside of your hand to the touch.
2. If you hold snow blood rushes to the hand and the pumping feeling produces the sense of warmth
At first this feels like a burn, then like someone's putting needles into your hands, and then they just go numb. You can't do precise actions with your hand anymore and soon you'll lose most of the ability to move it at all. You might even lose the body part. All while the core of your body is still warm and you're still able to walk and talk.
But as said, not everyone experiences this. For some people, when they get cold, their body increases circulation in the hands, keeping them warm enough to continue working no matter what.
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1. In extreme cases, this is called white hands syndrome or reynauds syndrome and primarily affects women. It seems to have a hereditary component, but worsens permanently whenever the hands experience cold or vibration.
In the morning it feels hot.
But after hiking on a cold (not freezing) day the water feels SCALDING.
I suspect there are actually two "hot" shower types:
- the actual scalding shower with physical damage
- the "scalding" shower which is actually skin-temperature-sensor overload that is more psychological. It is more a accustomed temperature difference thing.
but below freezing / with frostbite, I have no idea.
But man do I not miss the pain of coming home from ski practice and finally getting off the tight boots, feeling the warmth and blood finally return to my feet. Burned as hell.
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.
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.
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://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
A lot of things come from somewhere and are not arbitrary. That’s all that’s being asked here.
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.
> 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.
Like bloodletting, leeches, lobotomies...
Bloodletting is standard of care for hemochromotosis; you can use leeches for that, but just drawing blood is probably more efficient; some blood banks will let you donate it, some say no because the donation isn't supposed to be of benefit to the donor.
Certainly, a lot of conditions where bloodletting was used don't warrant it, but it's not altogther bad.
I don't think there's a good use case for a lobotomy, though.
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.
