By David Berkowitz
Dr. Oz
Before his fame as a television host, reflexology piqued Dr. Oz’s interest in alternative practices and provided motivation to form the Complementary Care Cardiac Care Unit at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City. As detailed in his book Healing from the Heart, he tried reflexology when patient Kory was not doing well following a heart operation.
“… Kory’s vitals were playing the ominous notes of Beethoven’s Fifth (on monitors at his hospital bedside). He looked as if her were about to die. …
Suddenly I remembered my father-in-law’s notions about lymphatics and foot massage. If it works for dogs (research showed influence on the lymphatic system from working on dogs’ paws), I thought, maybe it’ll work for humans.
So I moved around to the foot of Kory’s bed, and uncovered his feet, and without a word of explanation started to rub and squeeze them. Everybody stared—the other doctors, nurses, the whole team—wondering what on earth I was doing.
But in a few minutes Kory’s blood flows started rising from 21. liters per minute to 2.3 then up to 2.5, up and up. Whenever I quit squeezing, the blood flow would drop; when I started again they’d rise. So I kept it up for about forty-five minutes, squeezing, rubbing, kneading the soles of his feet, miking the lymphatics until his flows stayed up at a healthy level. Kory had just needed to be jump-started toward recovery.…
“Can I prove my amateur reflexology caused his turnaround? No, not on the basis of one case. But unless the trials we do in the future on reflexology prove otherwise, I believe what happened to Kory was not a coincidence.” (Oz, Mehmet, Healing from the Heart, Dutton, New York, 1998, pp 108-109)
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