162 Hockey Tape
A little throwback to a comic published almost a year and a half ago.
This, is a real K-Tape advertising image:
You may have seen them on plenty of athletes during the last summer olympics where they were popular, especially in beach volleyball. Confused about how strips of tape can help? Just like a bird, I presume. There are many brands of this magic cloth tape, you can read about the health claims for yourself from KT Tape.
Note that this is very different from “taping” to stiffen ankles and joints for stability by sports trainers. K-Tape is the superficial application of tape to the skin in fancy patterns.
They provide as much pain relief as a brightly colored bandaid.
↓ Transcript
ROB
What is that on your arm?
MITCH
K-Tape, for athletic pain relief.
ROB
Kinesiology tape? How is this any different than normal hockey tape?
-Besides the cost, I mean.
MITCH
That's right, kids. Look like the Pros with Mitch's discount K-Tape!
KID
I hope it works better than those balance bracelets.
What is that on your arm?
MITCH
K-Tape, for athletic pain relief.
ROB
Kinesiology tape? How is this any different than normal hockey tape?
-Besides the cost, I mean.
MITCH
That's right, kids. Look like the Pros with Mitch's discount K-Tape!
KID
I hope it works better than those balance bracelets.
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So, what studies are there that measure how much pain-relief brightly colored bandaids give compared to more drab ones? Given the amount of placebo effect in pain management, and the correlation of bright colors with happiness, I’d expect a very mild but detectable effect.
Batman tattoo bandaids every time.
YES.
Well, I’ve tried taping in patterns over injuries and strains. It’s one if those fashions that comes and goes in sport. Whether it really has any effect beyond a placebo, I doubt; but there’s a lot of mind games in sports medicine, including ones that you play on yourself.
Never used anything other than common-or-garden tape, though; that or Deep Heat or Ralgex which costs a couple of quid a tube from any chemist and most supermarkets and lasts half a season.
As someone who has done plenty of long distance running, I can actually see how this might be useful.. not k-tape in particular, but just tape that can stick through sweat. After a few miles, I use to get pains in my side. I would just run through them, but while it was hurting, I could ease the pain by simply pulling my skin together towards the pain. I have no idea why this worked, but it did, and tape could be useful in helping with that. However, “24 hours of pain relief per application for days at a time” is obviously just a marketing scam. They are definitely trying to sell it as a cure-all when it really might only have that one, simple purpose that I described above.
Relying on intuition is how a lot of athletes are suckered into these “performance enhancing” fads, who definitely target athletes.
How… how does that… What? Can they not math? Does it mean “use it for four days for an hour of pain a day, use it for four days for six hours of pain a day, but if you try to use it for eight hours of pain a day it only lasts for three days, and twelve hours of pain per day only lasts for two”?
Hey Kyle, I just found a new woo I’d never come across before.
Ever hear of LaserPuncture? It’s acupuncture, but with lasers! Seriously!
And, as a parent, I can testify that brightly colored Band-Aids work better than plain ones.
Princess ones are the best. At least, that’s what my daughter thought when she was younger.
The paleontologist somewhat agrees that the more colorful ones are better, but she says dinosaurs work better because they can eat princesses and harmful germs. Kitties are also good because they can snuggle a wound.
Now as a starker contrast I do have to say that from personal experience electrical tape is not a good substitute for band-aids. Admittedly, I only used it as a staunch for the bleeding I was doing, not in fancy patterns like some shit henna tattoo, so maybe I didn’t get to unblock my chakras or whatever the magic terminology goes for how K-Tape is supposed to heal.
As someone who’s actually used the stuff (had it applied on me by a chiropractor), I can say absolutely that it works. Now, how much of that was placebo effect I couldn’t say. All I can say, is this:
About a year ago, I was suffering from HORRIBLE pains in my right arm and shoulder. I asked a friend of mine (a chiropractor who had moved out of state) about it and he pointed me to a local guy who’d gone to school with him.
Before getting adjusted, I could hold my right arm straight down or move it forward about 30-40 degrees before the pain became so bad I could barely breathe. Afterwards (but before application of the tape), my range had roughly doubled. After application of the tape, however, I had virtually full range of forward motion in my arm and absolutely no pain. I remember this because the chiropractor actually had me test my motion/pain both before and after the application of the tape.
I don’t know how it worked, or why, but I know that it happened. And, what’s more the pain stayed away almost completely for another two days (after that it came back, but was far more manageable).
“I don’t know how it worked, or why” is exactly the point. You experienced something at the hands of your chiropractor, but giving credit to the tape is the “post hoc ergo proctor hoc” logical fallacy. Without any mechanism of action, it is unlikely that the tape was relevant.
When applied correctly, taping up actually does work for diarrhea, though removing it afterwards can prove somewhat messy and it isn’t to be recommended for the faint hearted or those not close to a bucket.
Don’t forget that if you apply it to someone else, you can spend a day unsupervised in a school library and date Ally Sheedy!
I used something like this in physical therapy once. I injured my shoulder in a car accident. The injury weakened my shoulder and back muscles, so my shoulder was hanging too low in its socket, causing pain. My physical therapist used a very elastic tape to support the weight of my arm, giving my injured muscles a chance to heal. The elastic tape worked sort of like a rubber band helping hold the joint in place. Is it a magic bandaid that will cure all pain? Of course not. But I wonder if there are some legitimate uses for it, when used by people who know how to use it.
I think it works great as a substitute for tensor banadages. It’s easier to put on, and it has flext that medical tape doesn’t. It’s realy frikken hard to tape for plantar faciatis. KT tape is easy to put on myself and it works.
I’m afraid that my opinion is baced only on personal experiance, and high school sports medicine. I’d like to see some actual studies. But I love the stuff
The idea behind that kind of tape is to apply pressure on the skin in a manner that supports an injured muscle, tendon, or ligament without restricting range of motion for unaffected connective tissues, which is something that can’t typically be done by fully taping a joint. To put it in simpler terms, you’d use this kind of tape for “it only hurts when I do ‘this'” injuries. Kimberly Martin’s use of the tape for plantar faciatis is a classic example of how this kind of tape is intended to be used.
That said, I agree that there’s more than a fair share of people who swear by k-tape for little more than the placebo effect, and product ads like the one you’ve shown certainly don’t help. I doubt, for instance, that you would get much support from taping a shin, a small length of thigh, or in parallel with ribs.