Totally.

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.

i've never heard of people doing this to skin or clothes, but i know it's a thing for dogs and horses - you rub snow on their feet after a stream crossing, and the dry snow pulls the water out of their fur.

Exactly! Snow acts like a sponge because its surface area and structure allow it to absorb water effectively without melting immediately

For some people[1], when their body temperature drops below a certain point, circulation in hands and feet is reduced. This helps heat the body core, saving organs while potentially sacrificing hands or feet.

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.

Are you trying to say that wearing gloves is a bad thing? Because while yes, you can get used to cold hands if you have good circulation, there is a point where you cannot function without gloves. If the temp is -20F with 20mph winds, you are not going to be functional in bare hands. Although sure, if you are talking about +20F with little wind, some people can work in mild cold like that all day.

Thermoception is indeed thought to be a response to heat flux rather than absolute temperatures. If the tissue is colder, water at the same temperature should warm it up faster and thus elicit a stronger heat perception.

Reperfusion injury can occur after a crush injury. The myoglobin, creatine, potassium and phosphorus from destroyed muscle cells cause kidney damage. The potassium is really important as it is supposed to stay locked within cells and high levels can cause arrhythmias. For more info look up crush syndrome and reperfusion injury. This is all slightly different from hypothermia but may share some pathways if cells are destroyed.

What it's worth, we were taught the same thing about people crushed under e.g. rubble in combat medic training 20 years ago. And the same consideration applies to removing a tourniquet that had been in place for over two hours as well.

That was a part of my training for snow rescues. It's probably a combination of both.

You can’t feel anything on that side of your big toe after how long? Is full recovery ever expected?

A friend was a Vietnamese POW. The first torture done was to tourniquet his upper arms until they colored to black and then loose the bindings (repeatedly).

Returning circulation is much more brutal than it might sound.

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.

I don't understand though. Someone else brought up trepanation, but pre-modern humans lived in environment where they banged there head around a lot and it may have led to better outcomes for some people to get a hole in their skull so they retained it as a cultural practice. Why would a bunch of people decide, up until 1950 or so, that it was a good idea to rub snow into your feet when they were frostbitten just because it was some practice with no strong basis in reality. The alternative is doing nothing, so what would this do that would at least make people think it was working? Because it had to look like it was working, even if it really wasn't.

I think most (but not all) such things actually did work, and were based on real evidence, we just don’t have easy access to that evidence and context anymore. It is quite likely that modern people are just arrogantly dismissing something they don’t understand.

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.

Word games. They don’t have an “evidence base” that are up to our standards. They might have an “evidence base” in the sense that it worked for past generation and folklore now says that it should be done.

A lot of things come from somewhere and are not arbitrary. That’s all that’s being asked here.

Butter on burns was passed down to my mom. I let that one die off with her generation.

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.

No it was a full alternative to it.

(Clean) leeches are actually pretty handy sometimes.

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.

Oddly, electroconvulsive therapy seemes to have panned out.

I don't think its smart to act like we are somehow at the pinnacle of human knowledge and nothing we've done before can be more effective than what we know works now.