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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. J04n(talk page) 00:40, 21 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Body earthing

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Body earthing (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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The article consists of original research by combining journal articles which are not about the topic, and as well as advertising and fringe health advice. Doesn't meet WP:GNG. IRWolfie- (talk) 23:43, 14 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Health and fitness-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 23:58, 14 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Medicine-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 23:58, 14 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, no. You just found a few (34) irrelevant articles where the words "body" and "earthing" occur in succession, and where the word "body" usually refers to the body of a vehicle. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 00:14, 16 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep This phenomenon is normally simply called Earthing or Grounding, but those words are too ambiguous. It might be more correct to rename the article Earthing (physiology) or Grounding (physiology). Futile attempts at searching for Body earthing are hence insignificant. The articles quoted may seem to not be about the topic, but the relevance of research papers mentioning simply Grounding or Earthing should now be clear.
In what way is the article written like an advertisement? It is not promoting any product or service.
The book Earthing establishes notability, even though it is not fully scientific.
Simple solutions may seem pseudoscientific in comparison with sophisticated solutions. OlavN (talk) 14:50, 16 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The existence of an unreliable pseudoscientific book does not help establish notability. IRWolfie- (talk) 15:33, 17 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep: Doesn't the use of a practice by millions of people deserve a mention in wikipedia? Are you saying that the peer-reviewed Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine and the Journal of Environmental and Public Health are unworthy sources? Go to PubMed and search for "Earthing" and you'll find many relevant articles. Finally, this isn't a reason to keep the article, but if you build this DIY device and test out Earthing for yourself, I think you'll be convinced it's something real. Jonathan108 (talk) 16:16, 16 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yes I think they are unworthy of showing notability because the papers are clearly unreliable. Also, pubmed shows exactly 4 articles (3 by the same group), not "many". IRWolfie- (talk) 15:26, 17 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The link to PubMed which I provided searched for "earthing+grounding". I just changed it to search for "earthing" alone and it turned up five more relevant papers (two of them by researchers not associated with the previous groups.) Here is the new PubMed link. I don't know on what basis you have deemed the papers "unreliable." Jonathan108 (talk) 16:00, 17 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
On reading the abstract and seeing they are nonsensical and published in unreliable journals. The concept that people need to be grounded by being wired up to a system with wires sticking into the ground outdoors is patently absurd and seemingly based off a child's conception of physics. Your pubmed search is a mixture of different topics. These aren't sources we can use to write an article. IRWolfie- (talk) 21:55, 17 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: NONE of the reliable sources provided by the keep voters above are at all relevant to the topic of this article. They are all coincidental occurences of the words used in articles on completely unrelated topics. NONE of the sources that mention this topic are reliable. None are on the National Institute of Health Core Clinical Journals list.[[1]]. The main source for this article, the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, isn't among the top 1000 medical journals on the SJR Medicine list.[[2]]Not surprisng, because it has an incredibly low JSR score of 0.56.[[3]]. They are all fringe or extreme minority publications with extremely little impact in the field. In short, I see no reliable sources whatsoever discussing the topic of this article, which is not surprising, at it is patent nonsense. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 22:15, 17 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete: I do not think that it is the job of the AfD discussion to determine the correctness of the article or how valid the science is. However, the sources for the article are not reliable enough for this article to be notable. The journal articles that exist are perhaps the strongest evidence for notability. They are from three journals: the Journal of Alternative Complementary Medicine, the Journal of Environmental and Public Health and Medical Hyopthesis. Neither of these journals are very reliable. All have very low impact factors (in fact the second one doesn't seem to be listed at all). The first two do not come from major publishing houses and are quite obscure and unreliable, and the third is perhaps one of the most notoriously pseudoscientific journals in existence.
The papers themselves seem unreliable as well. They all share the same few authors. In the paper "Earthing (grounding) the human body reduces blood viscosity-a major factor in cardiovascular disease," the authors disclose that they are "independent contractors for Earth FX, Inc., the company sponsoring earthing research, and own a small percentage of shares in the company." This combined with the low reputation of the journal itself seriously calls into question the reliability of the paper.
The authors of another paper, "Earthing the human organism influences bioelectrical processes" have no other papers ever published on PubMed except ones on Earthing. They have also written the paper "The neuromodulative role of earthing" published in Med. Hypotheses. A Google search for their names, Karol Sokal, and Pawel Sokal, turns up no mentions for anything other than Earthing. In fact, a search for the Department of Ambulatory Cardiology, Military Clinical Hospital, Bydgoszcz, Poland, (Karol Sokal's affiliation) turns up nothing other than more articles about Earthing. Their email addresses is hosted at wp.pl, what appears to be a Polish internet portal and not an academic institution.
I have looked into the topic thoroughly and have not found any evidence of any study in a notable, reliable journal by reliable third-party authors. I have only seen many articles of dubious source and reliability, as well as the typical array of news articles and blog posts advertising this so-called groundbreaking discovery. These sources are not NPOV and are advertisements, and I haven't even seen any reliable third-party sources that discredit or disprove grounding to balance the article out. Per WP:GNG, we need the article to be based on independent, neutral, third-party sources to ensure NPOV, which the topic lacks. I believe that there is really no real secondary source on the topic either -- the article cites wholly original sources which seem to be self-published ones in disguise. Per IRWolfie, the existence of a single book that bills earthing as the most important discovery ever does not help establish notability either. Note that the book shares an author, Stephen T. Sinatra, with the papers published in Journal of Environmental and Public Health, and is known to be a contractor of Earthing's sponsoring company, so the book is not a third-party secondary source either.
Overall, the sources available are neither reliable nor independent, and cannot be used to express a neutral point of view. They represent mostly original research, with third-party secondary sources non-existent. Thus, the article fails to meet WP:GNG, and thus should be deleted. Richard Yetalk 07:21, 18 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
So you haven't bothered to read down to the last paragraph of the article? It shows that earthing is practiced by perhaps billions - those going barefoot, swimming etc. (Their health benefits must of course be corrected for the other effects of poverty.) OlavN (talk) 06:20, 20 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
See WP:BOLLOCKS. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 07:06, 20 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That's got to be the most absurd thing that I have ever heard as an argument. The neutral, third-party, secondary sources backing up your assertion are non-existent, as I have summarized in my argument above. Without those, Wikipedia cannot have an article on the subject. Period. Even if you were somehow correct in your assertion and Earthing is somehow real, Wikipedia seeks verifiability, not truth. Richard Yetalk 19:24, 20 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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