However, I’m curious now to try them as someone mentioned it could just be a really great exfoliator. As a runner my feet are in awful shape…it might do the trick to make them look and feel nice for sandal weather.

As far as I know, it’s usually harmless. I can imagine all sorts of ways the process could malfunction when you mix fire, hot wax, lying on your side, and shoving something in your ear.

Being a top-level predator isn’t really a problem when your prey isn’t poisoned from modern industry. Eating too much fish is only a problem because of Mercury introduced into waterways from things like Coal Plant emissions. Again, you can thank your Free Market Is Always Right legislators (mostly Republicans or their international analogs) for the current state of affairs. Of course, lots of pollution was done before we knew it was bad, but lots more continued after we discovered it was bad.

It sucks when science discovers something bad about something you hold dear. The proper solution, of course, is to put your hands over your ears and yell, “LALALALALALALALA.”

On an aside… Color me shocked but… Ear candling doesn’t work? I mean I thought all it was purported to do was remove ear wax build-up? Hearing loss due to built-up ear wax is actually a problem I get at least once per year. I’ve never tried candling because, well, I’d rather have a trained professional, like an ENT, clean me out. Are there some extraordinary claims I’m not aware of? Or is it just dangerous for the same reason Q-tips are dangerous when jammed in the ear?

I had no idea that’s what they did. I never looked at the product beyond seeing that it’s a scam like ear candling and such.

Modern humans are fairly polluted. Your liver collects a lot of stuff that it doesn’t know what to do with. This is the problem of being a top-level predator. Why do you think they tell you not to eat certain types of fish too often? Plus, of course, there’s the stuff blowing around that we inhale.

I used to have a job analyzing soil and water samples for heavy metal contamination. It’s pretty scary how many toxic sites there are. Anyway, one sample we had was from a poor neighborhood in Oakland. The soil was high in lead. The kids in that neighborhood had high lead levels in their blood, which leads to all sorts of developmental problems. The neighborhood was near a freeway. The lead was from the leaded gas. This was during the Bush 1 administration. Reagan had halted all efforts to get lead out of the gasoline, so you can thank him for much of the lead those kids breathed in. Eventually California got tired of waiting for the federal government, so we banned leaded gasoline on the state level. Eventually the federal government followed, with the Republicans screaming bloody murder the whole time. They were only off by a little. It wasn’t murder. Just slow poisoning.

It’s obvious they turn black overnight due to normal perspiration and the fact that something pretty sticky will probably hold onto what comes out of your skin during perspiration and skin cell shedding on your foot. And the average foot (especially if you go around barefoot outside a lot) is likely pretty darn dirty, even after showering. Also, they obviously get less black each night as more of the built-up ickiness in your thick calloused foot skin sheds away each night onto the sticky surface. So who knows — they may be an effective foot exfoliator for all I know!

What I want to know is this: are the toxicity reports they mail you just pulled out of their collective asses, or is there really detectible trace amounts of heavy metals in normal foot-skin due to the feet’s presence on, well, the Earth? Just curious how deep this fraud extends. If they mail you completely made-up toxicity figures, that’s a felony on several levels, including mail fraud, right?

Yes, you can mail in your dirty footpads for a toxicity analysis.

Seriously? Oy vey…Don’t tell me you need a prescription.

I wish. If you had to go to your doctor to get a prescription for those things, that would give him the chance to smack you for being an idiot.

Bing McGhandi wrote about this fraud a couple of weeks ago. I noticed that my local Walgreens is selling them too. Shameful!

Parrotlover: I saw the commercial for that magic tape. Wow, that’s just fucking pathetic….I thought I had seen the worst with homeopathy.