Miss Calico of Dominatrix Next Door put on her BDSM submissive hat and conducted an alternative-medicine experiment.

Arnica cream: Last summer, I put my body on the line for science: I wanted to test the efficacy of topical arnica montana.  We’ve all heard that arnica makes bruises go away faster.  I wanted to believe it, because I could really use it, but I am an enormous skeptic when it comes to alternative medicine. Actually, you could end that sentence after “skeptic”.

The effective methods I know are preventative: ice, elevate, and avoid aspirin. Bruises go away on their own, and much faster if you have been bruised repeatedly in the same place. If there were a miracle bruise cure, I’m pretty sure it would be under patent by Pfizer or Merck and cost much more than six or eight dollars a tube.  Blindly applying sticky herbal-smelling bruise cream three times a day to no effect was not doing it for me.

I would have just ignored the stuff, save my rampant annoyance at being assured it works and would solve all my problems. Anecdotal evidence, psssh. How do you actually know it works? How do you know your bruises wouldn’t have gone away that fast anyway?  Have you heard, by any chance, that homeopathy is an utter crock of shit?

I decided I’d conduct my own experiment: I’d make two identical bruises and use arnica on one. I admit this experiment was, perhaps, lacking in scientific rigor, but not devoid of entertainment value.

Unless BDSM triggers you (she gave herself big bruises) you can read about her methodology and conclusions here.

Bottom line: she got her associates to thump the tops of each leg until they were equally bruised and then for a week she put arnica on one bruise but not the other. Both bruises faded at the same rate, although both possibly faded faster than usual. Her conclusion

...after a week of using arnica three times a day, the results were unimpressive. I couldn’t tell any difference at all. They faded out after a week and a half, looking identical to the end.

Ten days is fast for a bruise of that gruesomeness. I’m sure if I’d used arnica on both, I’d have wholly credited the healing time to the stuff.

Technically, this doesn’t prove that arnica doesn’t work. But it fails to prove that it does work, either.

That’s a great conclusion to draw by the way. Arnica is supposed to be local and topical: you get a bruise on your elbow you’re supposed to rub it on your elbow. Calico’s experiment clearly shows that rubbing it on one of two equal bruises doesn’t make the treated bruise go away faster. But without surrendering her skepticism she correctly states that her experiment neither proves nor rules out the possibility that arnica might offer systemic instead of local benefit. You’d need a different experiment for that… but without Calico’s prior experiment you might not have imagined such an experiment would be needed to prove whether arnica is good for bruises.

Pretty cool.

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I mention this in part because I’ve been thinking a lot about how easy and how common it is to “other” each other. The fact of Calico’s experiment challenges all manner of such “othering.” What we “know” about BDSM and masochism practitioners as others, what we “know” about women as others, what we “know” about sex workers as others, even what we “know” about skeptics and scientists as others…

and, especially, what we “know” about bloggers as others who… never do original reporting.