Smells like quackery, but then something does feel strangely good about laying on soil. Not necessarily with bare skin, but always supposed it's psychological. That intuitive feeling that something about it feels right is probably why the grift works.<p>Maybe one day we'll conclusively find some mechanism at work for that, but this paper doesn't bring us any closer to that day.<p>See: "Disclosure: G. Chevalier, S. T. Sinatra, and J. L. Oschman are independent contractors for Earthx L. Inc., the company sponsoring earthing research, and own a small percentage of shares in the company."
I’m entirely willing to believe that there’s reason to research electrical+chemical+biological effects coming from skin contact with the ground. That there might be measurable biological effects is plausible enough, although the much simpler explanation is that feeling nice walking around on bare feet has small positive effects on health.<p>Flowers, for example, specially use electric charge to attract and interact with bees.<p>The people writing this paper however, write like they don’t even have freshman physics levels of understanding of electricity.
What I get from this is that cooling your feet is probably good for you (it is the evolutionary norm) so Einstein was right to wear sandals all the time, even to the White House.
It's tempting to dismiss this, but it's a bona fide randomized double blind study that found significant improvements in inflammation and pain versus placebos. And the sacrifice required amounts to wearing a patch on your foot when you sleep. I'd prefer to know the mechanism, but it sounds like no risk and low effort for a reasonable benefit, if it replicates.<p>I wonder if it would help to have a conductive patch through shoes and socks, for grounding during normal daily perambulation.