Salt in Socks

Sprinkle a few spoonfuls of coarse salt into a pair of socks, put them on in the evening, and — depending on which video you watched — you will relieve tired feet, drain the swelling from your legs, stop your feet sweating, head off a cold, or flip your nervous system out of "tired but wired" and into deep sleep. "Salting your socks" is an old household remedy that has found a very large second life online, and it is worth taking seriously for one simple reason: a lot of people try it and report that it works. This page is about what is actually happening when they do. The short version is that there is a real, well-documented physiological effect hiding in this remedy — but it belongs to the socks, not the salt. Warming your feet before bed is one of the best-replicated findings in sleep science. The salt is a passenger. And for one group of people — anyone with diabetes, nerve damage, poor circulation, or broken skin on their feet — the salt is not a harmless passenger at all, which is the one thing the popular videos never mention.

Table of Contents

  1. What "Salting Your Socks" Actually Is
  2. What the Two Versions Promise
  3. The Part That Is Real: Warm Feet and Sleep
  4. The Nervous-System Claim
  5. "The Salt Draws the Swelling Out"
  6. The Foot Organ-Map Claim
  7. "Colds Start From the Feet"
  8. Foot Sweat and Odor
  9. The Dangerous Claim
  10. Who Should Never Put Salt in Their Socks
  11. Swelling Is a Symptom, Not a Chore
  12. What Actually Works Instead
  13. The Honest Bottom Line
  14. Research Papers
  15. Connections
  16. Featured Videos

What "Salting Your Socks" Actually Is

Two versions of this remedy circulate, and they are different enough that it is worth separating them before judging either.

The older folk version. Pour two or three tablespoons of coarse table salt or sea salt into each sock — coarse, because fine salt sifts straight through the weave. Wool or cotton socks are preferred, the denser the better. Optionally add a drop or two of essential oil. Put the socks on in the evening and then walk around the house doing chores for at least ten minutes, and ideally all evening, taking them off before bed. The salt granules are said to deliver a "micro-massage" to the soles, activate pressure points connected to the internal organs, improve circulation, draw fluid out of swollen legs, absorb sweat and odor, and — if you steam your feet in a hot footbath first — ward off an oncoming cold. You are told to reuse the same salt for about a week, drying the socks on a radiator between wears, and to keep at it for at least a month before judging the results.

The modern "nervous system" version. Spread a small amount of salt inside your socks, put your feet in, and simply stand for about sixty seconds, gently shifting your weight. Then sit, close your eyes, and notice your breathing slow and your shoulders drop. The explanation offered here is neurological rather than mystical: the sole of the foot is densely packed with nerve endings, that sensory channel is understimulated all day inside flat shoes, and the salt crystals pressing into the skin create a surge of input that nudges the body out of a low-grade stress state and into "rest and digest" mode. To its credit, this version is explicit that it is not curing a cold and not killing a virus — and it says outright, "it's not about the salt."

That last remark is closer to the truth than anything else in either version, and we will come back to it. But first, the full list of what the remedy is supposed to do.

What the Two Versions Promise

Collected from both, the claims are:

That last one is a folk-spiritual belief rather than a health claim, and it is not something evidence can speak to in either direction; we will leave it where it belongs. The rest can all be checked. They do not all fare the same way — some are true, one is true for reasons that have nothing to do with salt, several are physiologically impossible, and one is actively backwards. Taking them in order of how much truth they contain:

The Part That Is Real: Warm Feet and Sleep

Start with the strongest thing in the whole remedy, because it is genuinely strong. Warming your feet in the evening really does help you fall asleep — and it does so through a mechanism that is well understood and repeatedly confirmed.

Falling asleep is not something your brain does in isolation. It is coupled to a drop in your core body temperature, and the way your body drops its core temperature is by dumping heat out through the skin of the hands and feet. Blood vessels in those extremities dilate, warm blood flows to the surface, heat radiates away, and the core cools. Sleep follows. In a landmark 1999 paper in Nature, Kräuchi and colleagues measured this directly and found that the degree of blood-vessel dilation in the hands and feet — captured as the temperature difference between the extremities and the trunk — was the single best physiological predictor of how quickly someone fell asleep. Their title said it plainly: warm feet promote the rapid onset of sleep.

Warming the feet from the outside kick-starts that same process. In a controlled study of bed socks in a cool room, wearing socks to bed shortened the time to fall asleep, increased total sleep time, and reduced night-time awakenings compared with sleeping barefoot. A 2019 meta-analysis found the same thing for passive body heating more generally — a warm bath or shower one to two hours before bed shortened sleep onset by roughly eight or nine minutes on average and improved self-rated sleep quality. Hot footbaths in winter show the same effect.

So when someone puts on thick wool socks in the evening, stands quietly, and reports that their shoulders drop and their body finally feels ready to rest — that is real, and it is exactly what the physiology predicts. It is also precisely what would have happened with plain, empty socks. The warmth comes from the wool and from your own feet. Salt is not a heat source; a spoonful of cold sodium chloride in a sock does not warm anything. It is being carried along by an effect it did not produce.

This matters, because it explains why the remedy has such staying power. It works — people are not imagining the calm and the better sleep. The folklore has simply credited the wrong ingredient for two hundred years.

The Nervous-System Claim

The modern version deserves a more careful hearing than the old one, because it is built out of real anatomy. Let us grade it piece by piece.

What is true: the sole of the foot is genuinely well supplied with touch receptors — Merkel discs and Ruffini endings that report sustained pressure, Meissner and Pacinian corpuscles that report movement and vibration. Microneurography studies, in which researchers record from single nerve fibres in awake volunteers, have mapped these receptors across the foot sole in detail. That sensory channel is functionally important: plantar touch input is a major contributor to balance and posture, which is why standing steady gets measurably harder when the soles are numbed or chilled. It is also true that moderate-pressure touch can shift the autonomic nervous system toward the parasympathetic side — massage studies have measured exactly that, with increased vagal activity and heart-rate variability changes during and after moderate-pressure massage. Pleasant, sustained pressure on the body is a real route into the "rest and digest" state.

What is overstated: the claim that the sole is "one of the most neurologically dense areas in your entire body." It is not. When researchers mapped tactile innervation density across the whole human body, the fingertips came out far ahead of everything else — the foot sole is respectably innervated but is nowhere near the top, and single-unit recordings put its afferent density well below that of the hand. The related idea that "that part of your brain is asleep" because you wear shoes is a figure of speech, not a finding; the cortical map of your foot does not go dormant.

What is untested: the specific idea that salt granules are a good way to deliver this input. No study has ever compared standing on salt to standing on a plain textured mat, a pebbled surface, a foot roller, or simply getting a foot massage. And there is a real physical objection: a hard, sharp granule under a weight-bearing sole is not "massage." It is focal point pressure — mechanically, it is the same thing as a pebble in your shoe. Massage distributes force; a grain of salt concentrates it into a small area. Concentrated point pressure on the sole is not a neutral intervention, and in the wrong foot it is precisely the mechanism that causes tissue to break down (see below).

The honest summary: the destination is plausible — sensory input and warmth on the feet can help you unwind, and if standing quietly for sixty seconds while paying attention to your breath makes you feel calmer, it very likely did. But notice how much of that protocol is doing the work independently of the salt: you stopped scrolling, you stood still, you closed your eyes, you attended to your breathing, and your feet were warm. Those are the active ingredients of a great many relaxation practices, and none of them require sodium chloride.

"The Salt Draws the Swelling Out"

This is the claim that fails most clearly, and it fails on basic anatomy.

The idea is intuitive: salt pulls water out of things — it is why salt cures meat and wilts a cucumber — so salt against the skin should pull the fluid out of a swollen leg. But osmosis requires a membrane that water can actually cross. Your skin is specifically built not to be that membrane. The outermost layer, the stratum corneum, is a ten-to-twenty-micrometre sheet of flattened dead cells packed in a lipid matrix — the "bricks and mortar" arrangement — and its entire evolutionary job is to stop water moving freely in either direction. It is the reason you do not shrivel in a salt bath, and the reason you do not swell up in a fresh-water one. Dry salt sitting on the outside of that barrier has no route to the fluid in your calf, which sits in the interstitial space far below the dermis and is drained by veins and lymphatic vessels the salt never touches.

There is a neat experimental check on this. When researchers had volunteers soak a forearm daily for six weeks in a concentrated Dead Sea salt solution — a far more aggressive salt exposure than a few grains in a sock — the salt-treated skin did not dry out. It came out better hydrated, with improved barrier function, compared with tap water. If weeks of immersion in strong brine increases skin hydration, a spoonful of dry granules is certainly not siphoning fluid out of your legs.

So why do people's ankles genuinely look better in the morning? Look closely at the instructions. You are told to put the socks on and walk around the house doing chores, and then to lie down and sleep. Walking activates the calf-muscle pump — every step squeezes the deep veins of the leg and drives blood and fluid back toward the heart — and lying flat for eight hours removes the gravitational pressure that pooled the fluid there in the first place. Movement and elevation are the two most effective non-drug treatments for dependent leg swelling, and this protocol quietly prescribes both. Then it credits the salt.

The Foot Organ-Map Claim

The older version claims the granules press on "acupuncture points responsible for the health of most internal organs and systems." This is reflexology — the belief that specific zones on the sole correspond to specific organs, so that pressure on one part of your foot acts on your liver, another on your kidneys, and so on.

There is no anatomical structure that would carry such a map, and no physiological pathway by which pressure on a patch of sole would selectively act on a distant organ. More to the point, it has been tested. When Ernst and colleagues systematically reviewed the randomised controlled trials of reflexology, their conclusion was that the best available evidence does not convincingly show reflexology to be an effective treatment for any medical condition. We cover this in more depth on our Reflexology page.

None of which means a foot rub is worthless. Pressure and touch on the feet feel good, can genuinely relieve foot and plantar-fascia pain, and — as noted above — can nudge the autonomic nervous system toward relaxation. That is a real and worthwhile effect. It simply is not routed through your internal organs, and the salt adds nothing to it.

"Colds Start From the Feet"

Here the folklore earns more credit than you might expect — though not for the salt.

The claim is that chilled feet cause a reflexive drop in blood flow in the nose and throat, which lets a cold take hold. It sounds like pure grandmother-lore. But it has actually been tested, and it partly held up. At the Common Cold Centre in Cardiff, Johnson and Eccles randomised 180 healthy volunteers either to sit with their feet in cold water for twenty minutes or to sit with their feet in an empty bowl. Over the following days, about 14% of the chilled group developed cold symptoms, versus about 6% of the control group — a statistically significant difference.

The authors' interpretation is important, because it is more modest than the folklore. Chilling does not create a virus. Their proposal was that cooling constricts blood vessels in the nose, which weakens local immune defence, and that this allows a virus the person was already carrying without symptoms to become a full-blown cold. And there is now a plausible molecular mechanism: a 2023 study found that nasal cells release swarms of tiny antiviral vesicles when challenged by a virus, and that dropping the temperature of the nasal lining — which happens with ordinary cold-air exposure — substantially blunts that antiviral response.

So the honest verdict is that "keep your feet warm in winter" is defensible advice, and the mechanism the old wives proposed turns out to be roughly the right shape. But note carefully what this does and does not license. It supports warmth and dryness. It says nothing whatever about salt. Sodium chloride is not an immune stimulant, it does not enter your bloodstream through the sole of your foot in any meaningful amount, and no study has ever suggested that a salted sock outperforms a warm dry one. And you still have to meet the virus. If you want the benefit this research actually supports, put on warm dry socks — and wash your hands. See Common Cold and Cold & Flu Treatments.

Foot Sweat and Odor

This is the most physically plausible claim in the remedy, and it deserves a fair hearing — but it does not survive one intact.

Start with what is true. The soles have the highest density of eccrine sweat glands anywhere on the body, and they can produce a genuinely impressive amount of moisture inside a shoe. And salt is hygroscopic, in a limited way. The relevant number is its deliquescence point: at room temperature, sodium chloride begins absorbing water from the air at about 75% relative humidity. Below that, dry salt just sits there doing nothing. Inside a warm, occluded sock, humidity climbs well past 75% — so yes, the salt will start pulling in moisture.

The problem is what it becomes when it does. Salt that has absorbed water does not stay a dry powder; it dissolves into a brine. You are now standing in a salty slurry, which is not a dry foot — it is a wet, salty one. Brine held against skin under occlusion is macerating and irritating, especially in the tender web spaces between the toes. Compare that with a real desiccant or a genuine antiperspirant, which stops the sweat rather than dissolving in it.

The odor claim runs into a more elegant problem. Foot odor is not caused by sweat — eccrine sweat is essentially odorless. It is caused by skin bacteria metabolising that sweat into volatile compounds, chiefly isovaleric acid, which is what gives feet their characteristic cheesy smell. The dominant organisms doing this are staphylococci and related species. And here is the catch: staphylococci are notably salt-tolerant. This is not a subtle point — the standard laboratory medium for isolating staphylococci is mannitol salt agar, which contains about 7.5% sodium chloride precisely because that concentration kills off most other bacteria while staphylococci grow happily. The main organism responsible for your foot odor is close to the one bacterium that salt will not discourage.

Then there is the instruction to keep the same salt in the same socks for a week, drying them on a radiator between wears. A warm, damp, salty, repeatedly-worn sock is a hospitable place. Occlusion and moisture are the classic conditions for athlete's foot, and macerated, cracked skin between the toes is a well-known entry point for bacterial cellulitis of the lower leg.

The Dangerous Claim

One of the videos opens with a passage that has nothing to do with socks at all, and it is the most harmful thing in either of them. It states that salt "lowers bad cholesterol levels, reduces the risk of heart diseases, decreases the likelihood of heart failure, and minimises the risks of serious conditions such as diabetes."

This is backwards, and someone with high blood pressure could be hurt by believing it.

The evidence runs firmly the other way. A Cochrane analysis of long-term trials found that reducing salt intake lowers blood pressure — by roughly 4/2 mmHg in people with hypertension, in a dose-dependent way — and a companion review in the same journal linked lower sodium intake to reduced stroke and fatal coronary heart disease. The strongest evidence is the Salt Substitute and Stroke Study, which randomised nearly 21,000 people in rural China to a reduced-sodium salt substitute or ordinary salt and followed them for about five years: the substitute group had fewer strokes, fewer major cardiovascular events, and lower mortality. These are hard outcomes, not surrogate markers. Eating more salt does not protect your heart.

We should be scrupulous about one thing, because the site's standard is accuracy rather than tidiness. There is a real scientific controversy buried under that garbled claim. A separate Cochrane review by Graudal and colleagues, pooling mostly short-term feeding studies, found that sodium restriction produced small increases in cholesterol and triglycerides, along with rises in renin, aldosterone, and noradrenaline. That finding is genuine and has been argued over for years. But notice that it points the opposite way from the video: it suggests that cutting salt may nudge cholesterol up slightly — not that eating salt brings it down. And it does not overturn the hard-outcome data on strokes and deaths. Nobody who has read that literature concludes "so salt your food to lower your LDL."

And none of it has the slightest bearing on socks. This is a claim about dietary sodium that has been smuggled into a video about a topical practice. Salt in a sock does not enter your bloodstream in any quantity that could affect your cholesterol, your heart, or your blood sugar — which, given the direction of the evidence, is the one mercy here. If you want to think seriously about sodium, see Sodium and Hypertension.

Who Should Never Put Salt in Their Socks

This is the section the popular videos do not have, and it is the reason this page exists.

Loose, abrasive granules inside a sock, worn while walking around the house for an entire evening, are a foreign body pressing into the sole of your foot. On a healthy foot with normal sensation, that is mostly harmless: if a grain digs in, it hurts, you notice, and you take the sock off. Pain is the safety mechanism. The danger arises when that safety mechanism is missing.

If any of the first four describe you, the honest advice is simple: do not do this. The upside is a warm sock, which you can have for free, and the downside is a wound you cannot feel. See Diabetes, Peripheral Neuropathy, and Peripheral Artery Disease.

Swelling Is a Symptom, Not a Chore

One instruction in the folk version deserves separate attention: keep wearing the salted socks for at least a month before you judge whether they are working.

Set aside that a month is long enough for almost anything to seem to improve. The real problem is different. Persistent swelling in both legs is a symptom that deserves a diagnosis, not a month of home remedies. The common causes include heart failure, chronic venous insufficiency, kidney disease, liver disease, and an underactive thyroid — and, very often and very reversibly, medication. Calcium-channel blockers such as amlodipine, widely prescribed for blood pressure, cause dose-dependent ankle swelling in a substantial fraction of the people who take them; gabapentin, pregabalin, NSAIDs, pioglitazone, and steroids can all do it too. In those cases the swelling often resolves with a dose change or a different drug — a conversation, not a sock.

Swelling in one leg is a different and more urgent matter. A single leg that becomes swollen, warm, painful, or red — particularly if it comes on over hours or days — can be a deep vein thrombosis or a cellulitis, and both need to be assessed promptly rather than treated with salt.

A month of salted socks is a month of not finding out which of these you have. That is the real cost of the remedy, and it is larger than anything the salt could plausibly deliver.

What Actually Works Instead

Everything the remedy is reaching for has a better-supported answer, and most of them are just as cheap.

For tired, aching feet: a warm footbath for ten to fifteen minutes; lying down with the legs elevated above heart level for fifteen or twenty minutes; calf and plantar-fascia stretches; supportive, cushioned footwear; and rotating between two pairs of shoes so each dries fully.

For sleep — and this is the remedy's real effect, delivered honestly: warm your feet. Plain socks to bed work, and were shown to shorten sleep onset and increase total sleep time in a controlled trial. A warm bath or shower one to two hours before bed does the same thing, with meta-analytic support. See Sleep Hygiene and Insomnia.

For leg swelling: first, find out why (above). Then: graduated compression stockings, which are genuinely evidence-based for venous insufficiency and are the closest thing to what people hope the salt is doing — except that they work, by mechanically opposing the pressure that pushes fluid into the tissue. Add leg elevation, ankle-pump exercises, movement breaks if you stand or sit all day, and — here is the irony — less salt in your diet. The genuine salt intervention for swollen ankles is eating less of it, not wearing it. See Varicose Veins and Lymphedema.

For sweaty, smelly feet: dry thoroughly between the toes after washing; wear moisture-wicking socks and change them daily; rotate shoes so each gets 24 hours to dry out. The genuine first-line topical treatment for sweaty soles is aluminium chloride hexahydrate (typically 10–20%), applied to dry skin at night — it plugs the sweat ducts, and unlike salt it actually stops the moisture rather than dissolving in it. Treat any athlete's foot. For severe cases, dermatologists offer iontophoresis and botulinum toxin, both well established.

For avoiding colds: keep your feet warm and dry in cold weather — the Cardiff research genuinely supports this — and wash your hands, which supports it more.

The Honest Bottom Line

Salting your socks is not dangerous nonsense in the way that, say, ear candling is. If you have healthy feet with intact skin and normal sensation, and you enjoy the ritual, an evening in salted socks is unlikely to hurt you, and you will probably feel calmer and sleep better afterwards.

But you should know why. The socks are doing the work. Warm feet trigger the vasodilation that drops your core temperature and lets you fall asleep — that is real, replicated, and the best-supported thing in this entire remedy. Standing still for a minute with your eyes closed, attending to your breathing, is a relaxation practice in its own right. Walking around the house and then lying down for the night moves fluid out of your legs. Every one of those effects is available to you in plain, empty socks, for free, with no grit underfoot.

The salt, meanwhile, cannot draw fluid through skin that is built to be waterproof; cannot reach your organs through a foot map that does not exist; will not stop the salt-tolerant bacteria that make your feet smell; is not an immune stimulant; and has never been compared head-to-head against a plain warm sock in any study. The most candid line in either video is the one that says it out loud: it's not about the salt.

And for one group of people, the salt is not merely superfluous. If you have diabetes, neuropathy, poor circulation, or any break in the skin of your feet, abrasive granules loose in a sock you walk on for an evening are the precise hazard that foot-care guidelines are written to prevent — and neither video warns you. That omission, rather than the folklore, is the thing worth taking seriously.

Put the salt back in the kitchen — where, if anything, you should be using a little less of it. Keep the socks.

Research Papers

Every citation below has been verified against Crossref. Where a paper has no DOI, a PubMed link is given instead.

Warm Feet, Body Temperature, and Sleep

  1. Kräuchi K, Cajochen C, Werth E, Wirz-Justice A. Warm feet promote the rapid onset of sleep. Nature. 1999;401(6748):36–37.
  2. Ko Y, Lee JY. Effects of feet warming using bed socks on sleep quality and thermoregulatory responses in a cool environment. Journal of Physiological Anthropology. 2018;37(1):13.
  3. Haghayegh S, Khoshnevis S, Smolensky MH, Diller KR, Castriotta RJ. Before-bedtime passive body heating by warm shower or bath to improve sleep: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Sleep Medicine Reviews. 2019;46:124–135.
  4. Sung EJ, Tochihara Y. Effects of bathing and hot footbath on sleep in winter. Journal of Physiological Anthropology and Applied Human Science. 2000;19(1):21–27.

The Foot Sole, Touch, and the Autonomic Nervous System

  1. Kennedy PM, Inglis JT. Distribution and behaviour of glabrous cutaneous receptors in the human foot sole. The Journal of Physiology. 2002;538(3):995–1002.
  2. Strzalkowski NDJ, Peters RM, Inglis JT, Bent LR. Cutaneous afferent innervation of the human foot sole: what can we learn from single-unit recordings? Journal of Neurophysiology. 2018;120(3):1233–1246.
  3. Corniani G, Saal HP. Tactile innervation densities across the whole body. Journal of Neurophysiology. 2020;124(4):1229–1240.
  4. Diego MA, Field T. Moderate pressure massage elicits a parasympathetic nervous system response. International Journal of Neuroscience. 2009;119(5):630–638.
  5. Ernst E, Posadzki P, Lee MS. Reflexology: an update of a systematic review of randomised clinical trials. Maturitas. 2011;68(2):116–120.

The Skin Barrier and Salt

  1. Elias PM. Stratum corneum defensive functions: an integrated view. Journal of Investigative Dermatology. 2005;125(2):183–200.
  2. Bouwstra JA, Ponec M. The skin barrier in healthy and diseased state. Biochimica et Biophysica Acta — Biomembranes. 2006;1758(12):2080–2095.
  3. Proksch E, Nissen HP, Bremgartner M, Urquhart C. Bathing in a magnesium-rich Dead Sea salt solution improves skin barrier function, enhances skin hydration, and reduces inflammation in atopic dry skin. International Journal of Dermatology. 2005;44(2):151–157.

Cold Exposure and the Common Cold

  1. Johnson C, Eccles R. Acute cooling of the feet and the onset of common cold symptoms. Family Practice. 2005;22(6):608–613.
  2. Huang D, Taha MS, Nocera AL, Workman AD, Amiji MM, Bleier BS. Cold exposure impairs extracellular vesicle swarm-mediated nasal antiviral immunity. Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. 2023;151(2):509–525.

Dietary Sodium and Cardiovascular Risk

  1. He FJ, Li J, MacGregor GA. Effect of longer term modest salt reduction on blood pressure: Cochrane systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised trials. BMJ. 2013;346:f1325.
  2. Aburto NJ, Ziolkovska A, Hooper L, Elliott P, Cappuccio FP, Meerpohl JJ. Effect of lower sodium intake on health: systematic review and meta-analyses. BMJ. 2013;346:f1326.
  3. Neal B, Wu Y, Feng X, et al. Effect of salt substitution on cardiovascular events and death (SSaSS). New England Journal of Medicine. 2021;385(12):1067–1077.
  4. Graudal NA, Hubeck-Graudal T, Jurgens G. Effects of low-sodium diet vs. high-sodium diet on blood pressure, renin, aldosterone, catecholamines, cholesterol, and triglyceride. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2020;12:CD004022. (The dissenting analysis, included here for completeness.)

Diabetic Foot, Neuropathy, and Foot-Care Guidelines

  1. Armstrong DG, Boulton AJM, Bus SA. Diabetic foot ulcers and their recurrence. New England Journal of Medicine. 2017;376(24):2367–2375.
  2. Bus SA, Lavery LA, Monteiro-Soares M, et al. Guidelines on the prevention of foot ulcers in persons with diabetes (IWGDF 2019 update). Diabetes/Metabolism Research and Reviews. 2020;36(S1):e3269.
  3. Schaper NC, van Netten JJ, Apelqvist J, Bus SA, Hinchliffe RJ, Lipsky BA. Practical guidelines on the prevention and management of diabetic foot disease (IWGDF 2019 update). Diabetes/Metabolism Research and Reviews. 2020;36(S1):e3266.
  4. Boulton AJM, Armstrong DG, Albert SF, et al. Comprehensive foot examination and risk assessment. Diabetes Care. 2008;31(8):1679–1685.

Swelling, Sweating, and Skin Infection

  1. Lim CS, Davies AH. Graduated compression stockings. Canadian Medical Association Journal. 2014;186(10):E391–E398.
  2. Makani H, Bangalore S, Romero J, Wever-Pinzon O, Messerli FH. Peripheral edema associated with calcium channel blockers: incidence and withdrawal rate — a meta-analysis of randomized trials. Journal of Hypertension. 2011;29(7):1270–1280.
  3. Trayes KP, Studdiford JS, Pickle S, Tully AS. Edema: diagnosis and management. American Family Physician. 2013;88(2):102–110. — Search PubMed.
  4. Nawrocki S, Cha J. The etiology, diagnosis, and management of hyperhidrosis: a comprehensive review — therapeutic options. Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology. 2019;81(3):669–680.
  5. Ilkit M, Durdu M. Tinea pedis: the etiology and global epidemiology of a common fungal infection. Critical Reviews in Microbiology. 2015;41(3):374–388.

Heat as Therapy

  1. Malanga GA, Yan N, Stark J. Mechanisms and efficacy of heat and cold therapies for musculoskeletal injury. Postgraduate Medicine. 2015;127(1):57–65.
  2. French SD, Cameron M, Walker BF, Reggars JW, Esterman AJ. Superficial heat or cold for low back pain. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2006;(1):CD004750.

Live PubMed Searches

  1. Foot warming, sleep onset, and thermoregulation
  2. Plantar cutaneous afferents and balance
  3. Reflexology randomised controlled trials
  4. Stratum corneum water barrier and permeability
  5. Cold exposure and common cold susceptibility
  6. Plantar hyperhidrosis and aluminium chloride
  7. Diabetic foot ulcer prevention and footwear
  8. Dietary sodium reduction and cardiovascular outcomes
  9. Graduated compression stockings for leg edema
  10. Bilateral leg edema — differential diagnosis

Connections

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