Any Grounding Experience?

[Hobbit]

Here is an humorous link on double blind studies :
http://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459
citation:
"As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials. Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute."

 

[Ahcuah]

I've just seen some discussion of a new paper,

Grounding the Human Body Improves Facial Blood Flow Regulation: Results of a Randomized, Placebo Controlled Pilot Study .

Now, I really, really doubt there is anything to Earthing (or grounding). On the other hand, if there really is an effect I am willing to change my mind. There is a possibility, however remote, of some sort of chemistry we haven't seen before, I suppose. Unfortunately, all of the studies are either done by the promoters (and sellers) of Earthing, and/or the papers appear in "fringe" journals. This one was advertised in the discussion as not like those.

The journal does seem to be legit, as far as I can tell. The author, Gaétan Chevalier, has his affiliation listed as Developmental and Cell Biology Department, University of California at Irvine, Irvine, USA. That's good. But if you check with UCI, his status is "Visiting Assistant Researcher", and if you google him, you find out he is the director of the Earthing Institute. Hmmm. Not so independent after all.

So, what do others (particularly Sid, among others) think about the paper?

Why do they always do these studies searching for what can only be characterized as odd effects. Facial blood flow? And then I worry about whether these people really know how to use the device they are using. (Pons and Fleischmann had that problem with cold fusion; and I also saw a barefoot running paper in which the researchers didn't realize that their speed measurement device got a speed by measuring steps per minute and then applying an average stride length--then they found that running barefoot increased speed when it was really changing the real stride length.)

Sometime I really wish somebody like Dr. Lieberman would look at this, pulling in the other experts at Harvard to guard against all the problems we see in all these other studies. But what do you folks think?


So, do folks think there is anything to the study?

 

[Longboard]

"The author, Gaétan Chevalier, has his affiliation listed as Developmental and Cell Biology Department, University of California at IrvTine, Irvine, USA. That's good. But if you check with UCI, his status is "Visiting Assistant Researcher"
The affiliation does lend some credibility, but to me the status not so much.

 

[Sid]

http://academia.stackexchange.com/q...scientific-research-publishing-scirp-journals
https://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011...ublishing-new-journal-spam-and-“open-access”/
http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/2012/04/12/scam-publisher-fools-swedish-c/