It's said cats purr to strenghten their bones. Perhaps the mechanism is related. It would be interesting to see if besides exercise, vibration can trigger it in humans as well, perhaps checking people that worked with pneumatic hammers or other vibration exposed workplaces.
The feline purring for healing is in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and I just blew it off as too fantastical, but I’m prepared to eat my words metaphorically speaking.
>In 1995, Metcalfe argued that the Internet would suffer a "catastrophic collapse" in the following year; he promised to eat his words if it did not. During his keynote speech at the sixth International World Wide Web Conference in 1997, he took a printed copy of his column that predicted the collapse, put it in a blender with some liquid and then consumed the pulpy mass.[26][27] He had suggested having his words printed on a very large cake, but the audience would not accept this form of "eating his words."
> perhaps checking people that worked with pneumatic hammers or other vibration exposed workplaces.
Those probably add too much variance. For example, someone working with pneumatic hammers likely works in construction and has a likelier chance to also be exposed to harmful dust, or being in the sun a lot, or getting injured on the job. It may also be that too much vibration (too long and/or too strong) would be harmful.
A lot of space research has also worked for geriatric medicine. One I recall was putting confined sheep on a vibrating platform and showing several percent increase in bone density rather than loss. Shake a sheep for science!
It does not have to have a positive effect. A placebo can have no affect at all, perceived or otherwise. It must have no active mechanism to improve the specific condition being treated.
Unlike e.g. French, English does not have an authoritative language-directing body. Anybody is free to coin a word, and anybody is free to interpret that word. The only guides we have are context, stated author intent, and etymology. Etymology is very relevant when discussing the meaning of English words.
It is somewhat relevant, but what matter most when discussing the current meaning - is the current meaning. Not what a word meant hundreds or thousands of years ago. Your comment above read to me as a final argument what the word means, because of it's roots. And this was probably what got you the downvotes.
Maybe it's just a TV shopping gimmick that only has a negligible effect. My bet would be that it does much less than any actual loading of bones and muscles.
Edit: I missed that it was prescribed, so maybe it does have a serious effect after all.
"In general, everything that moves/activates the body in a non damaging way"
So sure, some injuries require not moving to heal. But at the cost of degradation of everything else. And also there activation of the tissue around to keep the blood and lymph flowing is beneficial or rather crucial.
Also since I like extreme sports, I kind of was made an expert in recovery by life.
