My foot cracks came from poor blood circulation to the bottom of my feet. This post details my 30 year quest to figure this out. I knew it had to be related to stress - because stress made it worse, and vacation made it better. And I also knew it couldn't be an insufficiency of some ointment.
Skin O2 Protocol
Super glue tube. Vector image isolated on white background
My name is Mark, and I was a super glue junkie for about 30 years.
I tried many creams and lots of scrubbing but always ended up back in the bathroom with my tube of super-glue. I was a Cyanoacrylate junkie.
My first fix was most mornings about 6:00 a.m. -- it stopped the pain in my feet for most of the day...
My feet hurt for a lot of days of my life. Heel fissures were a painful puzzle. The popular press on the topic was a biased and in-actionable monologue on dry skin, hygiene, that always ended up with a miracle cream, or told me I didn't wash my feet enough. Nonsense.
A great, nearly lifelong mystery, governed the grimace of about one in four of the steps I took my whole life.
What caused my foot cracks? I could see they came and went -- but why? They didn't seem to correlate to anything I did or ate.
Diet didn't matter much but stress events always seemed precede cracks by a couple of weeks - they were brought on work binges, and life's normal un-pleasantries etc.
Curiously, the cracks would always heal after a nice vacation. Another mystery. Things got strange when I took a trip to Cleveland.
My big toe callus often cracked. This hurt a lot.
This is what my feet looked like after I returned from a few days at low altitude.
I had taken two oral Myers Cocktails, and spent about a week at low altitude. When I returned home, the cracks were all gone - replaced with nice healthy pink skin, underneath the peeling ugly cracked stuff.
What? Now this was interesting. I had finally observed a correlation that I could reproduce. But why did the fissures go away?.
- What was really the difference between Cleveland and Colorado? Some say that Cleveland is strange, but... For me, the answer was easy... Altitude - I live at 7500 feet, which is about 1/3 less atmosphere than in Cleveland. My visit to Cleveland was like spending a week in a hyperbaric chamber.
- What did a Myer's Cocktail Do? Easy... Oxygen transport nutrients & Detox.
Whoa... Was this really an oxygen problem? So I looked close at my feet. Of course, my heels always had a red-zone of inflammation around them when I had the cracks. Now that was interesting - the red zone was also gone.
It started to make sense... The skin on my feet that grew in response to hypoxic inflammation. Stress triggered inflammation, that caused my skin to grow fast and thick with poor quality. The poor skin cracked. When they cracks went deep, they hurt - and I reached for the super glue.
Inflammation caused me to grow poor quality skin on my feet. It was that simple.
Whoa... Was this really an oxygen problem? So I looked close at my feet. Of course, my heels always had a red-zone of inflammation around them when I had the cracks. Now that was interesting - the red zone was also gone.
Ardenne was right, again, and I had discovered what I now call the callus reflex -- where stressed tissue proliferates a large quantity of poor quality cells. These poor quality cells are the basis of foot cracks - and likely suspects in a wide range of degenerative conditions.
I am a little embarrassed that it took me 30 years to figure that one out.
I had been working with oxygen systems focusing on Manfred von Ardenne's research at the time. It would be easy enough to simulate oxygen rich low altitude.
So, I returned to my normal routine of too much desk work, and sure enough about two weeks later, my feet cracked again.
My feet after LiveO2. A thick but disappearing layer of poor quality skin over normal skin with minimal red-inflammation
This time I was ready. I had setup the first LiveO2 system. I let my feet crack enough to break out the super-glue. After the super glue, I hopped on the LiveO2 system for 15 minutes. The next morning, the red zone around my feet was gone, and the poor quality skin eroded over the next several days.
Problem solved. My foot cracks have totally disappeared for about six months now. When I note the telltale redness on the bottom of my feet - it's time for another LiveO2 session. That fixes it every time - along with a handful of other nagging issues in my hips, neck and back.
I have happy feet all the time now. And sadly, for the faithful manufacturers of my 30 year vice, super glue only serves to repair household items.
10 Years Later... The problem remains solved. I periodically get distracted and within about 4 days the inflammation which comes before foot cracks return.
I now understand this means it's time to get back to LiveO2. Now I use 500 mg of niacin before the workout. It really helps to open up the capillaries before I workout.
A decade later - still no foot cracks. 2 days since my last LiveO2 workout