About a year ago, I wrote a blog post about ‘earthing’ or ‘grounding’. The idea here is that by connecting ourselves with soil or wet sand or sea, say, we can ‘suck up’ electrons that effectively act as ‘antioxidants’ that can quell inflammation and enhance health. The blog post links to a review article of the practice, as well as my own experiences with it. In particular, it seemed as though earthing might have quickly resolved a persistent pain in my left ankle and foot.
I’ve been earthing regularly ever since and my pain has not returned. I also mentioned in my original post a pain in my left elbow which had not resolved but has resolved now. I also forgot to mention that I was prone to pain coming from somewhere around my left hip that had bothered me for several months too. That pain has also resolved.
As I pointed out in my original post, the resolution of my pains may have had nothing to do with grounding (I will never know). However, my hunch (and it is just that) is that earthing has brought me real benefits.
Purely by chance, I came across a recently-published earthing study this week.
The study took 10 people and earthed them for 2 hours [1]. The individuals were assessed before and during the earthing treatment for the amount of charge on their red blood cells (known as ‘zeta potential’). The small negative charge on red blood cells essentials causes the cells to repel each other, and helps keep them from clumping together. This is important, because clumping of red cells can cause blood to become more viscous, potentially impairing blood flow, particularly in the smallest vessels.
During earthing, the zeta potential on the red cells increased significantly, and clumping of cells decreased. Also, the authors of the study noted that 3 people had back or neck/shoulder pain before earthing, and that this had resolved in two of them during earthing.
From a scientific standpoint, this study has some limitations including the fact that the study was small and lacked a control group (a group for whom the approach was the same except that the equipment was not actually grounded). Three of the four authors also have a financial interest in the company which sponsored the study (sellers of earthing kit).
These things notwithstanding, I think this newest earthing study adds at least something to the current body of evidence concerning this practice. This study should, I think, be taken in the context of other better conducted studies (see previous blog post) which have demonstrated that earthing does indeed have the capacity to benefit the body’s physiology.
I use earthing kit in my home and find this convenient, but such kit is not essential to derive whatever benefits earthing may offer. Yesterday, for example,I spent an hour in the park with my bare feet planted on the ground. At the end of the hour I felt truly invigorated and refreshed. Was it the break from my desk, the fresh air, the sun, the grounding effect or something else that had this effect? I just don’t know. What I do know is that the end result felt good and it did not cost me a dime.
References:
1. Chevalier G, et al. Earthing (Grounding) the Human Body Reduces Blood Viscosity – a Major Factor in Cardiovascular Disease. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. 2013;19(2):102-110
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Walked around the garden yesterday barefoot for an hour or so. Today my aches and pains are worse than usual! How much conductivity is there likely to be with dry grass, or concrete? Perhaps the addition of water is required.
I read Earthing (grounding) the human body reduces blood viscosity-a major factor in cardiovascular disease.
It wasn’t a double-blinded RCT (real grounding vs sham grounding). I smell…electrons! 😉
I have an earthing sheet on my bed – always feel great after sleeping on it.
Excellent to hear this from one so trustworthy. I shall remove my ‘Invisible Shoes’ (US paper-thin huaraches) and walk around on my French field – if it stops raining. I don’t have any pains but have passed this on to one who does; have always been a lot sceptical (too New Age-y) but will read a lot more now – before forking out any cash. Many thanks for this — and for your newsletter which I read avidly.
Is it also possible that some of these benefits came from the removal of shoes and socks? Removing any restrictions can only be beneficial to muscles, ligaments bones and nerves and might also allow for better blood circulation?
Nigel
You’ll see that fact that there was no control group acknowledged already in the post. Also there is some double-blind research I referred to in the earlier post.
John Collins
Your comment about it being New Age-y made me think about an email I had earlier today, essentially dismissing it along with ‘crystals’. I’ve asked that person if he’s read any of the research or dismissed it out-of-hand. Good on you for not being in the latter category!
Sorry John. My skepticism made me scroll down too quickly!
No probs Nigel – easily done!
My grandmother, a Scot, lived to 96, had 10 children and walked barefoot for much of the Summer. She also made her grandchildren do the same when we stayed for the Summer holidays. It was amazing how quickly we became used to the feel of bare feet and how well we felt after 6 weeks walking on sand, grass and splashing in rain puddles. Her whole philosophy (if you can call it that) was to get as close to the sun and earth as possible. I remember her saying to anyone who suggested putting children to bed when it was still light: ‘it’s an awfly (awfully) lang Winter’. Not scientific but wise!
Your grandmother was so right! I was always put to bed quite early as a child and could hear the other children playing outside on warm, light summer evenings; have always attributed much of my lifelong insomnia to early bedtimes! I shall try to follow her barefoot example, too (weather permitting).
My feet do not get cold since sleeping with an earthing strip under the sheet across the bottom of the bed.Even waking up with both feet stuck out the bottom of the bed in an unheated room they were warm.The effect lasts all day too.
On page 175 of the the book, ‘Earthing: The most important health discovery ever?’ are some photographs of three individuals blood samples taken before and after just forty minutes of earthing. One set looks ‘clumpy’ and one set looks markedly more decoupled, evenly dispersed, and more fluid.
In preparing an appeal against a disciplinary hearing and a decision to issue a final written warning for absence from work (through diagnosed and certified ill health) I had reason to try to get more acquainted with the workings of the immune system. Gayton and Hall ( an ageing ninth edition I picked up cheaply) helped a lot. Where once any such discussion would have seemed gobbledegook this time it made sense.
OK, so white blood cells are the first responders who cruise around the body and tissues looking for invading and infectious agents that are around all the time, but that don’t always result in significant symptoms. There are six different types of white blood cells but two are of most interest, the neutrophils and the macropahges. These cells zap invading critters like bacteria and viruses and ”eat’ them. These helpful white blood cells literally ingest’ these marauders. It’s a process that the medical profession calls ‘phagocytosis’.
But I gather that the white blood cells can behave quite radically. Comparable with small arms fire in a field battle some of these cells can release a shower of powerful free radicals called an oxidative burst. Their job is to disable and weaken the marauding invaders in readiness for phagocytosis.
Free radicals have gotten a bad rap, for they can result in a lot of radical damage from oxidative stress after the battle, but their radical aspect makes them invaluable weapons during the fight itself. Generally free radicals are molecules, often quite sizeable, that have been stripped of an electron – rendering them with a net positive charge and and ambitions to have contacts with potential sources of a free, or dis-placeable, electron and that makes them reactive. It makes a free radical useful in one context, and harmful in another.
It boils down to chemistry, to the energy balances and trades that arise in the bods between atoms (usually reported in electron volts) and to the partial or complete mobility of electrons that can result in proton gradients and tiny force fields that guide one molecule to have contact with another, or not, in much the same way a magnet has a ‘north’ pole that will pair with ‘south’ or that will repel another ‘north’.
How fortuitous that this more systematic analysis of ‘zeta potential’ came to your attention and you brought it to mine. Multicellular life must rely upon some unidentified influence that makes cells want to come together – as in ‘birds of a feather stick together’ – which is great for the less mobile of our cells while being less conducive to the workings of the more mobile variants like blood cells.
It’s right that blood cells should be shrouded in this small negative charge that has them disperse, because that encourages fluidity in the generally aqueous environment of blood. What might constitute the ‘influence’ that might generally encourage cells to flock together to build multi-cellar ventures? Might it be a constituent o membranes? And wouldn’t it be one of the most ironic eventualities ever if the active constituent of cell membranes that might give rise to this weak force or influence of ‘stickiness’ turned out to be cholesterol? – a thought that only came to me in this moment.
What I was leading to though is that mobile cells that have a purpose as first responders in the case of violation (such as when infectious agents are rampaging), like the neutrophils and the macrophages, must have their functionality severely impeded if they have ‘clumped’ or coupled due to absence of sufficient ‘zeta potential’. Their capacity to ‘zap’ or ‘phagocytose’ a virus or bacteria must be significantly downgraded. This is a useful thing to know with the level cynicism and division amongst the echelons in the workplace being currently what it is.
The final written warning was issued (to another – not me) because it was ruled the illnesses could not be work related. But two of the illnesses were viral. There is a much prospect, if not more, for any person to pick up a viral infection at work as anywhere else: Lots of scope in workplaces such as supermarkets or anywhere with a throughput of patrons. This means that if it cannot be proven that the discrete moment of infection happen elsewhere; then the possibility that the infection happened in the workplace cannot be ruled out. Not only that but also:
There is a distinct occupational health issue here. If an occupation or workplace denies adequate access to ‘free electrons’ then we will be less able to fight off these infectious agents at the instant we contract them and therefore more will proliferate within us and lead to symptoms and upon more occasions.
So rhino-virus (colds) and influenza, along with other common ailments, that may render us unfit for work for a few days, are now a bigger problem problem within developed societies because we are encouraged to dose-up and soldier on, and because an occupational health issue in many a workplace works to the advantage of the virus. In this more inclusive sense it adds new dimensions to how we might think about ‘competitive pressures’ in which we’re giving advantage, through over zealous use of absence control procedures to the the species of virus etc. Isn’t it strange how objectivity can be so counter intuitive, Dr Briffa?
‘Coughs and sneezes spread diseases’ and that’s and that’s an eventuality that has been established for some time. And the workplace is not exempt from coughs and sneezes.
Let’s spare a thought for Lindas’ appeal and let’s hope she wins a battle that not only gets her off the hook, but restores good sense, counters the rising levels of cynicism, and promotes more humility in the working environment.
Will you Dr Briffa, and those that pass by here, wish Linda success? And who would like to learn the result of her appeal?
Lessons to learn: If ever anyone is forced to be absent from work as a result of common, or even the less common, infectious conditions plainly state the possibility of a work related causal connection in the return to work interview. They stack the odds in their favour, and I only had seven case to submit the appeal and build a reasoned argument so poorly constructed as this.
In the clamour to make money, the reason why people join together in joint enterprise gets overlooked (it’s to place food upon our tables) yet birds of feather ought to stick together. There is evidently something at large that discourage this through being very divisive. In the words of Rolf Harris, ‘Can you see what it is yet?’
It isn’t money as such, it has more to do with a systemic scarcity of a kind of money called ‘fiat currency’.
Imagine building a balance sheet for the whole world. Disconcertingly it balances The liabilities in total will equate to the sum of the assets. that makes for more competition, rivalry, cynicism, and stress than is strictly necessary. It even precipitated events as tracked and escalated into World War II. Fiat currency has a lot to answer for that truly civilised people should want to avoid, and finacialism doesn’t make people rich – it makes the majority poor – and ill, often.
Dr Briffa, thank you so, so, very, very much. You have inspired, truly, as did one Mr Harris (of which there could be many) who raised the issue or ‘work related’ and chanced to pick upon the wrong person.
Doctor, I feel better already!
John,
Is there any research that you are aware of that quantifies the time needed to be grounded in order to see benefits?
As in, does it need to be X number of minutes at a time, or can irregular short moments of being grounded give the same effect?
Been thinking about purchasing an earthing mat for a while now so your sharing of your experiences are helpful.
Thanks!
Hi,
I teach tai chi and qigong and attend occasional seminars with tai chi masters. One of the things they emphasize is practicing outdoors in bare feet whenever possible …
because it improves grounding and enhances well being.
Perhaps earthing in the context above and grounding in tai chi are the same thing.
If so perhaps other tai chi thoughts are relevant.
Other preferences are to practice near big old trees and open water – large ponds, lakes and the sea – again the suggestion is that the accumulation of energy in the area makes it easier to be grounded.
And finally there is a specific grounding exercise where you stand very still and literally think about grounding ( also called rooting) yourself by visualizing the connection between your feet all the way down to about 12″ below the surface – think of yourself as a tree planted in the soil.
PS if you try to do this exercise be very careful and start with about 5 minutes – being still takes a lot of energy and practice – the urge to twitch, scratch can be irresistible.
A final thought it appears walking barefoot on the beach is not for romantics and dog walkers.
All the best
I have a technical question. I read some articles on earthing and became interested enough to try it. I bought some ground straps like the electronics industry uses that have a 1 M ohm resistance built in. I connected them to the ground system in my house. I didn’t feele any chage after two or three weeks of use (about 1 hour a night). Should I look for a ground strap without the builtin resistance or just keep using what I have?
Sounds on a quackery side, but walking barefoot is so pleasant, that I am ready to believe it is beneficial. I especially like walking along the beach on the very edge of the ocean water, it reconciles me with Florida heat.
Does this have any connection with the relative longevity of gardeners? Who, of course, are earthing themselves via their hands in the soil.
A further thought – what is the effect of modern rubber-backed carpets (or insulation)? They would mean that even if you were barefooted in the house, or in leather soled shoes, you would still be insulated from the ground.
Since electrons move kind of fast, how does 2 or 10 hours of “grounding” change the number of free electrons on the body, more than, say, touching the ground with your hand for 2 seconds does?
Sure, it would give you more time in whatever alleged state you feel is of benefit, but I can’t imagine it taking hours for the electrons to flow from the Earth to the body — that seems kind of daft. Nor do I think the number of sensory neurons on the feet is relevant except that they kinda help us feel the ground for the usual purpose of walking on it.
And if you’ll see my other comments on this blog, you’ll know I’m not criticising you for the sake of. Both here and elsewhere, I’ve thought and think about you in positive terms. Yet this seems a pretty accurate summary of the problems with the Earthing concept:
My initial impulse was not to dismiss it. It was to consider it.
To start with, that’s how I roll. Second, it came from you. But having thought about it, I think you’re left with the placebo effect as your only plausible mechanism.
Dr. Briffa, may I ask, where is the above analysis at NeuroLogica Blog wrong? Because it makes perfect sense to me.
Finally, and guilt by association is not my point, whatever you do or don’t think about Earthing, I hope none of your readers end up taking their scientific cues from this guy, because he’s also this guy.
Now I’m not even going to say that guy is wrong about his health recommendations necessarily. He looks in great shape and he likes berries and such and that makes sense. But when you watch the second video, you may notice some odd leaps in forming conclusions. Just sayin’.
One suspects old wine in new skins:
the orgone energy accumulator
I love peaceful-parenting advocate Dayna Martin and here’s her take on grounding (Facebook image)
OK, she’s not making a point about electricity, and in fact she’s making one about respecting kids, but aside from that, the photo is awesome and does show grounding with the Earth. I feel being in touch with the Earth can have wonderful psychological side effects.
Plus probably other physical ones through the molecules in the air, etc.
Of course this works. I am a healthy older man and i have used grounding now for 18 months!
Every morning I notice that i am not so old and my Wife has told me that my sleepingapne is half compare to earlier. So of course my cirkulutation is little better than before!
Maybe just some few procents, but this is really good!
Your experience is so common. I hear these things on a routine basis. From all over the world now.
The whole thing is very simple: The Earth’s natural, gentle electric field is like a global treatment table. There is nothing “new agey” about this at all. This is really a timeless reality that has simply been revived now. Humans have increasingly separated themselves from Nature, and the increase in chronic illness is a primary consequence. Reconnecting with the Earth we live on is a simple antidote.
One of the comments here is that it sounds like quackery, yet it feels so good to walk barefoot on the beach, or as you did, in the park. Either way, park of beach, you are getting the same “stuff” from the Earth, and it is nurturing and healing. The Earthing products were made for indoor use to accommodate the research as well as to satisfy a natural, growing demand. They are “barefoot substitutes.”
The zeta potential study that you report on in your blog is indeed a small pilot study. You have to start somewhere. However, the implications are massive. A natural blood thinning and anti-inflammatory effect. Think of diabetics with cardiovascular disease. They have extremely poor zeta potential I have read quite a few reports of vastly improved neuropathy in the lower extremities through Earthing. One doctor has told me he has had a number of chronic cases that were healed with Earthing. There is little that conventional medicine has for this condition.
Earthing is something very special.
Best wishes
Martin Zucker, co-author of the Earthing book
Christoph,
Evolutionary biologists have trended to pin-point the origins of live to around 3.9 billion years. They are also quite convinced live began in proximity to deep ocean vents. The temperatures in such places could be turbulent, there could be a clash of alkalinity and acidity, with gases bubbling through, and the medium in which all this happened was, and remains a striking electrolyte. Something these people agree on is that the distinction between life, and the non-living involves proton gradients, which arise because electrons have become electrons have become ‘unpaired’.
We can readily see the global water cycle is a requisite for life, but the water cycle also results in the global electrical circuit, and quite undeniable there is 3.9 billion years of provenance of life residing upon the negative terminal of a giant battery.
Life is as bio-electrical as it is complex biochemistry. Life is radical chemistry.
The mistake you are making is confusing the whole and parts.
Electrons move kind of fast but only in good conductors, and they don’t move at all in the most resistant of insulators. But they move kind of slower in semi-conductors.
If you touch ground for 2 seconds you may balance a local and external charge for your fingers, your hand, of aspects of the body, but there remain balances and tiny electrical charges within the workings of cells and physiology that will be unaffected by such short correction to the levels ‘isolation’ only the human has achieved. Sure a short touch of ground may discharge some ‘static’, but it will not be long enough to address levels of latency, capacitance, or semi-conductivity that resides within.
We knew long a go that a current could cause a frogs leg to twitch, and we’ve known the nervous system and brain involves a lot of detectable electrical activity, how can it be so difficult to entertain that life requires frequent grounding, but in the rush to modernity we just didn’t notice?
Along the way to becoming diabetic, or developing cancer, or developing MS no one feels any different. They merely feel different once the symptoms arise.
There are people whose experience of earthing won’t have them feel much different, but they will be addressing the oxidative stress, inflammation, and physiological duress that associate with the pathway to developing the kind of chronic disease we rarely notice developing.
My heart goes out to ‘Sharon’, and her family. The interval between receiving a diagnosis of MS and her passing was no more than three years. She was the kindest, warmest, most ordinary and likeable person a person could meet, and in the face of an explanation she may not have understood earthing either.
Nice change in discussion from metabolic related health. Living in Africa close to the warm Indian ocean means that many of us not only wallow in the salt water for some hours a week but also walk barefoot a lot. For me whatever elusive benefit there may be in earthing is way overcome by the sheer freedom of skin to earth and water. In future, I will make sure that I caress as many water pipes as possible during the day to get that drained feeling out of me that old age and lack of coffee tends to bring.
Bruce,
When I first experimented with earthing it was in relations to a troublesome strain of the right elbow. i stripped a length of single core copper wire and rigged a length of flex, small croc clip, and aregular three pin plug so i could coil the copper wire around the elbow while sleeping. it helped a lot.
The 1 megaohm resistance in standard ESD wristbands is there to limit the flow of current. its a trckle charge (or more correctlly ‘discharge’) that is desired. I suspect the steady discharge ad rebalancing is healthy and adaptive, whereas a rapid rebalancing wouldn’t be because the current could be high wheareas in an entirely natural setting it would always be low.
It can be a bit tricky to gets ones head around. Its the deficit oif electrons (net positive charge in the body) that encouarges the flow of free electrons into the body, but once the demand is satisfied the rate of flow of free electrons into the body would be slow.
I suspect, but have’t yet established, that we lose -ve ions via ionised carbon dioxide exhaled in th respiratory cycle. it is acknowledged that blue sky days result in more highly ionised oxygen for us to breath and the -vely ionised O2 helps the transport of O2 in the blodd and invogoartes body and mind aiding ‘blue-sky thinking’. It seems queer that respiration could take in healthy and vitalising -ve ions and yet also be the pathway via which the could be a lsoo of -ve ions, yet Martin Zuker and his chums reckon were are depeleted of free electrons (ions). There has to be a way via which the loss and deficit arises, and intuition makes me question respiration.
We do not have to be grounded, btw, a source of free electrons as if from the -ve terminal of any battery is good, but the earths potential has its own cycles, and ‘ground’ will signal those cycles.
Earthing may be anti-nflammatort and vitalising in the absence of the 1 megaohm resitor, but it is probably expedient and sensible to keep the currents low, and so the resistor is the safest bet.
The simple ESD wristband makes a good footstrap. Allied to a coily cord and a bonding plug a wristband used as a footstrap is the most cost effective way of sleeping grounded at night.
If I rigged a battery (AAA 1.5V) to a wristband (conatct to -ve only) and I wore that while cycling or walking I’d be interested to monitor, with a multimeter, how long it would take for the battery to discahrge from the -ve terminal only. I had to think hard and slow, but I figure it would dishrge to 0.75V and no less. Whereas a battery used to drive a lamp could discharge to zero volts.
Chris,
I take your point regarding resistance. I’d need to see experiments of that aspect in particular and a detailed analysis of it to credit it.
The studies that have been done so far on this haven’t been great, I think, and they’ve been few. If this is really the best thing going in medicine/health as the promoters think, I hope they remedy this.
Especially if they’re selling products related to that.
Christop. Of course – the most in our lives is about money, but this is not so expensive to test by your self. Compare to much other things, it is cheapy and simple!
Great blog post, very interesting and makes much sense!
We – as a species – were never meant to wear shoes. Indeed, I have read some articles championing running barefoot, and I know Eddie Izzard has been practising this over the last couple of years (often via the Thames Path in London).
I myself hear the call of the sea, and while I have no desire to swim in it, whenever I am visiting a coastal area I MUST go stand on the shore, at the sea edge or paddling ankle-deep. I try to get a good 10 minutes at least of this, usually gazing out across the water, taking in the view, the smell, the feeling of being *connected*, the spray on my face, and YES I can feel my battery recharging: this is something I have always said!
I will have to do some reading :o)
Dr Briffa,
Something has been bothering me about this Earthing thing.
Looking at matters from a systems analysis kinda perspective I began to wonder about how we get depleted of free electrons or how we build up positive charge. The authors suggest it is induced, in a way, by the gradient in the global electrical circuit, and I should think that is correct. However.
Since life is radical chemistry, ie. highly ionised or based deeply upon ion exchanges, it dawned on me very slowly that we could be losing ions in some way. Leading suspects could involve one of several of these: excretia, urine, or exhaled breath condensates (EBCs).
I am not so familiar with chemistry, or biochemistry, to be certain, but since a paper speaks of a rise in the basicity of EBCs during exertion then a rise in hydroxide ionisation (OH-) is intimated, perhaps. Exercise and exertion raise the pH of the exhaled breath and its condensates it would seem. Not fully conclusive yet, but it would make sense I’ve -ve ions were sacrificed as an accompaniment to breathing because of the balance of H+ transport in the blood.
In the absence of free electrons our body and physiology would trend to lower pH, notwithstanding I haven’t the faintest idea of what I am talking about, but the attributes of amino acids and proteins may conform to the Zwitterion effect, where they tend to be cationic (in acid) and anionic (in base). Presumably, a swing in pH, as a result of free electron deficiency, could alter behavioural aspects of, or outcomes stemming from, anything involving a zwitterion?
Bless ‘Biochemistry for Dummies’ (Moore and Langley) cos if I figured it right the book deserves the claim in title !
What do you think?
Hi Chris
I must say, never heard of the Zwitterion effect before.
The explanation you offer seems plausible and am wondering if Martin Zucker might have a view.
Perhaps send him and email here info@earthinginstitute.net and see what comes back.
I have been grounding for several months & the ONLY thing I have noticed through it is the reduction in STATIC, I get in bed or sitting in my chair, although, sitting at my desk & grounding, I STILL GET LOTS OF STATIC….When I wake in the morning I am still very sore & stiff………… *** HOW long does it take for grounding to really take effect????****