Every decade seems to come with its own wellness fads, and one that keeps popping back up is the topic of grounding and fibromyalgia. The problem, however, is that most of the claims surrounding grounding, often known simply as earthing, massively overreach in terms of the evidence that’s supposed to support them. The same was true for the core stability fad, the fascia fad, and the crystal fad (I really do miss the 90’s). I’ll stand by anyone who wants to continue doing absolutely anything that helps them with chronic pain conditions like fibromyalgia. If something helps you live a better life and it’s safe, then 100% carry on, no objections from me. Plenty of people find that crystals help to ease their pain, despite no real evidence that they do anything other than lighten your wallet, and if some people genuinely do find them helpful, then what’s the harm.
When it comes to fads, and grounding fits the bill, most of the time any benefits that they do seem to yield aren’t actually coming from the proposed mechanisms of the product or method, but from a much more complicated matrix that encompasses the complexities of both people and pain. So, in this article, let’s properly dig into grounding and fibromyalgia, and this time really go after the research, because as the original post made the case, a lot of it is misleading at best and conflicted at worst.
What is grounding?
Grounding (also known as earthing) is where you connect to the Earth by barefoot contact with the ground or using conductive systems such as grounding mats or sheets. The concept is based on the idea that the Earth has an abundant supply of electrons and that connecting to it can help balance the positively charged ions in our bodies and reduce oxidative stress. People who practice grounding believe that it can have an array of health benefits: reducing inflammation, reducing stress, improving sleep, and boosting immunity. Keep in mind though, not to confuse grounding/earthing in this context with grounding techniques found in the mental health world, which is a completely different thing about staying in the present moment.
When it comes to fibromyalgia specifically, the pitch is that grounding addresses the chronic low-grade inflammation and the disrupted cortisol rhythm that often turn up in the condition, and that just by sleeping on a conductive sheet, both mechanisms quietly get corrected overnight. It’s a tidy story. The trouble is that almost nothing about it survives a proper look at the research.
The evidence behind grounding (and the bit nobody mentions)
I’m going to start by saying, again, that I have no real interest in whether grounding works or doesn’t work. It makes zero difference to me commercially, so I can be pretty objective here. Let’s start with anecdotal evidence, which isn’t very scientific, however it’s a fair starting point to see how people view it.
There is some anecdotal evidence from people who practice grounding, reporting that it’s the best thing since sliced bread. This also includes a fairly small group of people in the fibromyalgia and hypermobility communities. But at first glance, more people seem to report that it makes no difference than report any meaningful effect. Let’s look at the claims that grounding advocates routinely make:
– Improves sleep and energy levels – Lowers stress and promotes calmness – Increases melatonin and regulates biological rhythms – Normalises hormones and biological functions – Improves mood and nervous system function – Enhances immune response to injury and trauma – Regulates blood sugar and glucose – Reduces inflammation and pain – Speeds recovery from injury or athletic activity – Improves kidney function and regulates blood pressure – Neutralises free radicals and prevents ageing effects – Reduces risk factors of cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis – Regulates cortisol – Relieves muscle tension, headaches, and reduces snoring – Reduces PMS symptoms, hot flushes, and jet lag – Shifts the body from sympathetic to parasympathetic dominance
Some pretty bold claims there, and unfortunately, after a fair bit of digging into the actual studies, not much in the way of hard evidence to support most of them. Which is a shame really, because a lot of those are on most people’s to-do list when it comes to chronic pain. So let’s look at the whole electron concept first, to see what’s actually going on with these claims.
The electron thing doesn’t really work, even on its own terms
Firstly, the Earth is generally considered to be electrically neutral, even though there may be small imbalances that naturally self-correct. Just shuffle your feet along the carpet and touch your friend’s arm to see what I mean. This occurs because the Earth is constantly exposed to the solar wind, containing both positively and negatively charged particles, and if the Earth ends up with a small positive or negative charge, it will attract particles of the opposite charge and restore its neutrality. The Earth’s net charge is maintained in a state of balance, with only minor fluctuations, which already starts to make the whole rationale for earthing not quite stack up.
Additionally, the entire “beneficial electrons from the Earth” framing is completely baseless and goes against our understanding of basic physics. Electrons are indistinguishable, regardless of where they come from, whether that’s the Earth, synthetic materials, a battery, or outer space. This is built into the foundations of chemistry. The arrangement of electrons within atoms determines the composition of the elements in the periodic table and their bonding properties, and the Pauli Exclusion Principle states that no two electrons can occupy the same energy state, and this is due to the indistinguishability of electrons. If there were a meaningful difference between electrons from different sources, the basic principles of chemistry would simply break down and we’d see inconsistencies everywhere. The fact that we don’t see those anomalies is itself confirmation that all electrons are indistinguishable.
There’s also the small matter of arithmetic. Your body contains roughly 1028 electrons (a 1 followed by twenty-eight zeros). The idea that a few extra electrons drifting in through your heel could meaningfully shift your inflammatory state runs into the simple problem that the dose is, frankly, nothing[10]. The science journalist Norman Swan, asked about grounding on Australian national broadcast, called it “complete bloody bullshit”, which is admirably economical[10].
Then we have the grounding equipment’s own safety features, which call the whole concept into question again. The grounding/earthing mats claim that they are safe from electric shock due to the presence of a 100,000 Ω resistor in the cord, which connects the “Earthing” mats to your house’s electrical ground system. The trouble is, that statement doesn’t really make sense, because a resistor resists the flow of current. The ground connection in an electrical system typically has a resistance of a few ohms, but the addition of a 100,000 Ω resistor increases the resistance by nearly 100,000 times, reducing the flow of electrons from the Earth by the same amount. To achieve the proposed health benefits of one second of direct contact with the ground, you would need to spend 100,000 seconds on the mat, which is equivalent to over 11 years, and frankly, I just don’t have the time for that[1]. The fact that the resistor is advertised as a safety feature is itself a fairly clear admission that the rest of the concept doesn’t really hold up.
The evidence base is honestly embarrassingly thin
So, if the actual theory around grounding doesn’t really make sense, the evidence is probably going to be a bit of a mess too. Well, this is a weird one, because at a glance it looks reasonable, at least until you actually start reading the studies.
If you do take a little gander through public access databases like PubMed, you’ll eventually come across only 2 or 3 studies that genuinely try to promote the use of grounding based on its claims, plus a small group of pilot papers that repeatedly get recycled[2][3][5][6]. These studies, at first glance, look fairly reputable. However, the more time you spend with them, the less reputable they look.
The first thing you notice is that the author list barely changes. A small group of researchers (Chevalier, Sinatra, Oschman, Sokal, Brown, and a few others) accounts for the bulk of the published grounding literature. One independent audit in 2023 noted that the physicist Gaétan Chevalier alone had authored or co-authored roughly 45% of the grounding papers in print at that point[1]. That isn’t a field of inquiry. That’s a small club, and most of the members have something to sell.
The 2015 review that gets cited everywhere when people claim grounding reduces inflammation is authored by Oschman, Chevalier, and Brown[2]. Now, in that 2015 paper, Chevalier’s listed institutional affiliation is the University of California at Irvine, however the paper’s own conflict-of-interest disclosure makes it pretty clear that both Oschman and Chevalier work as independent contractors for Earth FX Inc. and own shares in the company, which is a company that sells grounding products. Brown lists similar commercial connections in subsequent papers. The peer-reviewed pilot on delayed-onset muscle soreness lists Chevalier’s affiliation right there on the title page as “Earth FX Inc., Palm Springs, CA”[3]. None of this is hidden. It just rarely gets mentioned when these studies get reposted with the caption “the science says”. A structured literature review in 2021 took 15 earthing papers and ran them through the Cochrane Risk of Bias tool and the Jadad scale[4]. Its bottom line was that the evidence base is poor quality, riddled with unclear or high risk of bias, tangled with confounders, and weighed down by undisclosed or under-disclosed financial conflicts. The author’s verdict, in plain English, was that the validity of the evidence to support earthing is questionable. That’s the polite academic version.
The famous pilot on delayed-onset muscle soreness, the one wellness pages drag out whenever they want to argue grounding speeds up recovery from exercise, enrolled eight men in total[3]. Eight. Four were grounded, four were sham grounded, and the researchers then measured 48 different markers across blood chemistry, muscle MRI, and pain ratings over three days after exercise. With that few people and that many outcomes, you will always find ten or twenty markers that drift apart between the groups, even if nothing real is going on, just from chance. That isn’t me being unkind, that’s how statistics work. A pilot of eight people generates hypotheses for a bigger trial. It cannot tell you whether grounding does anything. And the larger, properly powered trial that the authors said was needed back in 2010? Still hasn’t been published.
The Ghaly and Teplitz 2004 sleep and cortisol paper, the one nearly every grounding blog leans on for “grounding normalises your cortisol”, was a prospective cohort of twelve people[5]. Twelve, no randomisation, no sham control, no blinding, just a small self-selected group who slept on conductive mats in their own beds for eight weeks and reported back on how they slept. Saliva cortisol was sampled at baseline and again at week six. Calling that “evidence that grounding normalises cortisol” is, honestly, embarrassingly thin.
The Sokal and Sokal 2011 paper gets quoted for everything from glucose regulation to thyroid function to immune response, but when you actually open it, you find five separate sub-experiments with samples ranging from twelve to eighty-four people, each one looking at something different[6]. It’s a buffet of small effects on a salad bar of biomarkers. That isn’t a study, that’s a hypothesis-generating fishing trip in a smart suit.
Likewise, another study is often pointed at to bolster the claims of earthing, this time at its ability to prevent and treat Covid-19 (no, you read that right, I was pretty shocked too)[7]. Obviously, such a huge claim comes with a very high standard of evidence required to back it up. It needs control groups, high validity, mechanistic data, peer-reviewed research, and results that can be repeated. As you’ve probably already guessed, this study had none of it. This was effectively a case series, with seventy-one patients, no randomisation, no control arm, no blinding, and outcomes recorded mostly by phone follow-up. The author himself describes it as “observational and interventional”, which is a polite way of saying “I told some people to do a thing and asked them later if they felt better”. During a pandemic. Really, when you think about it, it’s a bit bonkers that this slipped through the net at all. The study just lacks everything needed for good science, and its validity and reliability as a proper research study are simply not there. Quite frankly it gives me concerns about people reading it and then walking around thinking they’re immune to Covid because of being barefooted.
So, the pattern repeats. Every grounding study, when you look past the abstract, has at least one of: a sample size that wouldn’t pass a high school science fair, a missing or broken control arm, an outcome that was self-reported on a paper diary, an author with shares in the company that makes the mats, or a journal that doesn’t put papers through rigorous peer review. Quite often it has more than one.
The sham control problem nobody really addresses
Even when a grounding study does technically use a sham mat (one that looks identical but isn’t actually wired to ground), there’s a problem the authors mostly don’t address. Subjects can often tell the difference. A live grounding mat behaves slightly differently to the touch, you sometimes feel a faint tingling at the electrode contacts, you occasionally get small static discharges if you brush against something nearby, and the temperature at the contact points can shift in a way the sham mat doesn’t. Once subjects can guess which group they’re in, the blinding has effectively broken, expectation effects flood in, and you can’t really separate the proposed “electron pathway” from a perfectly ordinary placebo response.
And the placebo response in chronic pain trials is not small, it’s not a rounding error, it’s real, neurally measurable, and clinically meaningful, especially in conditions where the nervous system itself is the main organ doing the suffering[8][9]. Even open-label placebos, where people are told they’re getting sugar pills, can shift pain scores in chronic conditions. So can being handed a fancy-looking mat by a researcher in a lab coat who’s just spent ten minutes telling you all the good things it might do.
But what about the newer studies?
Since the original write up, a few newer papers have surfaced in the grounding literature, and it’s only right we go through them properly. Three of them keep getting wheeled out in 2025 and 2026, a mitochondrial cell study, a post-spinal surgery trial, and a sleep mat study. Let’s properly dig into each one, because they don’t quite say what the wellness pages are saying they say.
The first one is a paper out of UC Davis, published in FEBS Open Bio in June 2025[20]. It found that isolated mitochondria, under grounded conditions, produced 5 to 11% more ATP, generated 22 to 33% fewer reactive oxygen species, and showed a small drop in mitochondrial membrane potential of around 5 to 6%, compared to sham and naïve controls[20]. On the surface, this looks like the mechanistic smoking gun the field has been waiting for, and you can already see it being recycled across wellness pages with breathless captions about grounding boosting ATP. However, this study was done on isolated mitochondria sat in a solution, not on a human being. Isolated mitochondria have no cellular architecture, no cytosolic buffering, no competing redox pathways from nearby organelles, and no systemic hormonal context. So, a finding in that setting tells us something potentially interesting about mitochondria on a bench, but very little about you sleeping on a mat. The authors themselves explicitly call for “future research to explore broader implications of grounding over time on mitochondrial health” and make no human efficacy claim[20]. There’s also no independent replication of this finding yet. So that’s something to sit with. A scientifically interesting mechanistic signal, but not really evidence that humans benefit.
The second one is a 2025 paper from the Sokal group in Poland, published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine[21]. It enrolled 84 patients recovering from lumbar spinal surgery, split between an earthing group, grounded via an ankle electrode during overnight rest, and a control group. The earthing group showed a slightly greater pain reduction on the VAS scale, a median 2.0 point drop versus 1.0 in controls, plus a much larger difference in C-reactive protein, with the earthing group showing a median CRP difference of 0.05 mg/dL compared to 17.2 mg/dL in controls[21]. That CRP gap is the bit getting passed around as proof, and honestly, that figure is the reason we have to look at this study very carefully. A 340-fold difference in post-surgical inflammatory response would be one of the most powerful anti-inflammatory effects ever recorded in a clinical trial, more potent than most pharmaceutical agents we have. That’s exactly the kind of finding that needs to be replicated independently by an unrelated research group before we take it at face value. There are a fair few plausible alternative explanations the paper doesn’t really address, baseline imbalance between groups, outlier contamination skewing the median, measurement timing differences, or just plain old unblinding. The pain reduction itself, although statistically significant, was clinically pretty modest, a roughly 1 point difference on a 10-point scale.
There’s also a structural issue worth flagging here. The Sokal research group in Poland has published multiple pro-earthing papers over more than a decade, and is part of the same small network of investigators that authored most of the older literature. Repeated publication from a single investigator group with a pre-existing commitment to a hypothesis is a recognised form of non-financial conflict of interest, even when no money is changing hands. The study is also single centre with no multi-site replication, and there’s no long-term follow-up either. So in summary, it’s the best designed grounding trial in the recent literature, with a CRP result that’s just too extreme to accept on its own, from a research group that already has its colours nailed to the mast.
The third one is a sleep mat study from Kyung Hee University in South Korea, published in Advances in Integrative Medicine[22]. This was a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial in 60 adults, using either a real grounding mat or an identical-looking sham mat for six hours a day across 31 days. The grounded group showed statistically significant improvements in PSQI (sleep quality), ISI (insomnia severity), ESS (daytime sleepiness), BEPSI (stress), and total sleep time measured by actigraph[22]. Better methodology than most of what came before, and the actigraph data is a nice touch, because it isn’t purely self-report. However, the same old blinding problem from the older sham studies is still sitting right there, and the authors didn’t include a blinding integrity check. A grounding mat is not an identical placebo pill, it can produce subtle perceptual differences like warmth, mild tingling, or texture, and if active-group participants picked up on any of that, the blinding is broken and the four self-report outcomes are wide open to expectation effects. Running five outcome tests on correlated measures at p less than 0.05 without a formal correction also inflates the false positive rate. With five tests, you would expect roughly one spurious positive even with no real effect at all. And at the day-38 follow-up, only the ISI score sustained significance, not the PSQI[22]. If the effect was robust, you’d expect most measures to hold up. The sample of 60 is also underpowered for a multi-outcome design. So that’s a decent study, structurally problematic, with results that can’t really be accepted at face value.
There’s also a 2024 rat paper in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, using EEG to measure sleep in rodents on earthing mats, and finding increased REM and NREM sleep alongside changes in orexin and superoxide dismutase activity in the brain[23]. Rats are not people, rodent sleep architecture is fundamentally different to human sleep biology, and translational failure rates from rodent sleep models to human sleep medicine are notoriously high. This is mechanistic background at best, it generates hypotheses, it doesn’t really constitute evidence of human benefit. At least, that is what the evidence currently suggests.
So, where does that actually leave us when you put it all together? The newer evidence has done two things at once. It has narrowed the mechanistic story a little, in that the electron-transfer to ROS-reduction pathway now has a preliminary cell-level signal, and it has provided two slightly better designed human trials than anything that came before. At the same time, every one of those studies sits on top of structural problems the field has never fixed, no truly independent replication outside the original networks, no resolved blinding-integrity problem, no dose-response work, no consensus primary outcome, and a continued concentration of authorship in a small group of researchers with longstanding commitments to the hypothesis. The defensible position hasn’t really changed all that much. The mechanistic rationale has become a little more specific, not more proven. The clinical signals are interesting and small. Grounding remains low-risk and low-cost, particularly when grounding just means walking barefoot in the garden, which is sensible regardless of the mechanism. However, none of this gets us anywhere close to “proven treatment for fibromyalgia”. So that’s something.
What the mainstream actually says
If grounding genuinely produced the effects it claims, you’d expect at least one major medical body to have noticed and recommended it by now. None of them have. The NHS doesn’t mention it. The American Heart Association doesn’t list it. NICE has no guidance on it. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, which would be the obvious home in the US for any low-cost, low-risk intervention with a plausible signal, doesn’t endorse grounding for any condition. The Cleveland Clinic published an explainer that’s about as gentle as you can be while still saying the quiet part out loud, namely that any benefits people experience are most plausibly explained by being outdoors, being relaxed, and being away from screens, and that grounding equipment should be a complement to, not a replacement for, evidence-based medicine[11]. They also flagged a real safety caveat for people with pacemakers and other implanted devices, which is worth keeping in mind before you start wiring yourself to anything.
That, more or less, is the actual scientific consensus on grounding. Not “it’s dangerous”, not “it’s impossible”. Just “the evidence is thin, the proposed mechanism doesn’t really survive scrutiny, and you can almost certainly get the actual benefit for free”.
Potential reasons why grounding helps some people with fibromyalgia
It’s well established that pain is multifactorial, it’s mediated and caused by an almost limitless number of factors. Fibromyalgia, at its core, is a condition of central sensitisation, where the pain system runs too loud, the threat threshold is dropped, the stress response is sticky, sleep is wrecked, and the autonomic nervous system runs hot[12][13]. Anything that turns the volume on that system down, even slightly, can feel like a small revelation. And grounding, as people actually do it day to day, packages together a stack of things we already know turn the volume down.
Science already shows that spending time outdoors, like people do when they ground (see our piece on outdoor exercise for fibromyalgia), may be a large factor contributing to things such as better sleep, less pain catastrophising (common in fibromyalgia and hypermobility), and many of the other benefits that likely come from exposure to both sun and nature[14][15][16][17]. Likewise, there’s compelling evidence that mindfulness, meditation, or simply relaxing helps to achieve some of the claimed benefits of grounding like lifting mood and lowering depression, especially when done regularly and combined with other interventions[18]. In fact, sleep is a big one, lack of sleep or sleep disturbance means almost certainly an increase in pain will be seen the next day, the science on that is pretty clear[19]. So anything that promotes better sleep is going to ripple out and positively affect other areas of your life.
Standing or sitting outside when grounding exposes you to sunlight, distracts you from yourself, and ultimately gives you time away from the stress of contemporary life. Keep in mind also that one study of nearly 20,000 people, across different ethnicities, work situations, and disabilities, found that just 2 hours spent in nature per week were substantially more likely to report good health and psychological wellbeing than those who don’t[14]. So then, what seems more likely: a large array of biological, psychological, and social factors all combine to make people feel better when grounding, just like an extensive evidence base already suggests, or it’s the electrons, with no real scientific basis behind them? I’ll let you decide, however remember what I said earlier, just because something doesn’t have evidence to say it works the way you think, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad.
And then there’s the placebo response, which is real and worth respecting rather than waving away[8][9]. Believing a thing will help genuinely changes pain processing, that isn’t magical thinking, that’s how the descending pain modulation system actually works in the brainstem. The act of being told a special mat will help, paying for it, unwrapping it, putting it on the bed, lying down on it and expecting relief, all of that engages real biological pathways. Just none of them have anything to do with electrons.
So we’ve got: time outdoors, slower pace, mindful attention, gentle movement, improved sleep, and a meaningful placebo response. Of course people feel better. That’s one of the most evidence-backed stacks of behaviours in the entire pain literature. The mat is the least important ingredient in the recipe, and probably the most expensive one. So that’s something.
So what should you actually do?
Think of grounding like stretching. Most people do it and enjoy it, but most of the time it isn’t doing what they think it is. People feel better when they are outside, when they are out in nature, or when they are distracted from themselves and the day they’re having. Whilst there isn’t really any strong evidence to even remotely suggest that grounding does anything it says it does, we can fairly comfortably guess that its effects come from what would happen to you anyway when you went out into nature. So go with the evidence, don’t worry so much about your grounding, just get out into nature, she doesn’t need you to buy a mat to enjoy her or the benefits.
If grounding helps you and you enjoy it, keep going. I genuinely mean that. If standing barefoot on the grass for fifteen minutes a day is part of how you manage your fibromyalgia, that’s a perfectly sensible thing to do. It’s free, it’s safe for almost everyone (with the pacemaker caveat noted earlier), and it’ll get you outside, which is the bit doing the actual work. Same goes for sitting on the back step with bare feet on the soil after work. The barefoot bit is fine, the outdoors bit is genuinely useful, and you don’t need anyone’s permission to enjoy your own garden.
What I’d push back on, hard, is spending serious money on grounding mats, sheets, patches, wristbands, sleep systems, conductive bed setups, or any of the subscription-style products being marketed with claims about electrons, free radicals, inflammation, cortisol, or Covid. The evidence isn’t there. The studies are small, repeatedly authored by the same financially conflicted handful of researchers, often published in journals that don’t put papers through proper peer review, and dressed up in mechanistic language that doesn’t really survive a basic physics conversation.
If a wellness product needs you to ignore the methods sections, the conflicts of interest, the sample sizes, the absence of mainstream medical endorsement, and the laws of physics in order to keep believing in it, that isn’t a product that respects you. That’s a shrug dressed up in a lab coat, with a price tag attached.
You don’t really need a mat, you need a garden, or a park, or a beach, or just a patch of grass within walking distance, ten minutes of stillness, and a nervous system that’s allowed to come down for once. That last bit is the actual treatment plan. The rest is decoration. If you want to work out where something like grounding fits into the wider picture of fibromyalgia self-management, alongside graded movement, pacing, sleep work, proper pain education, and the rest, our Full-Body Fibromyalgia Toolbox walks through the actual evidence-based building blocks. The point isn’t to swap one fad for another, the point is to stop paying for the wrapper and start working on what’s inside.
— The Fibro Guy Team —
References
[1] Lipman, H. (n.d.). Barefoot in Sedona: Bogus Claims About Grounding Your Feet to Earth Promote Medical Pseudoscience. Skeptic. https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/bogus-claims-grounding-bare-feet-to-earth/
[2] Oschman, J.L., Chevalier, G. and Brown, R. (2015). The effects of grounding (earthing) on inflammation, the immune response, wound healing, and prevention and treatment of chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. Journal of Inflammation Research, 8, p.83. doi: 10.2147/JIR.S69656
[3] Brown, D., Chevalier, G. and Hill, M. (2010). Pilot Study on the Effect of Grounding on Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 16(3), pp.265-273. doi: 10.1089/acm.2009.0399
[4] Goldsmith, M. (2021). An analysis of the quality of evidence to support the clinical use of earthing, and the relative efficacy of two commonly used assessment tools within a structured literature review process. Osteopathic Research Web. https://osteopathicresearch.org/s/orw/item/588
[5] Ghaly, M. and Teplitz, D. (2004). The Biologic Effects of Grounding the Human Body During Sleep as Measured by Cortisol Levels and Subjective Reporting of Sleep, Pain, and Stress. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 10(5), pp.767-776. doi: 10.1089/acm.2004.10.767
[6] Sokal, K. and Sokal, P. (2011). Earthing the Human Body Influences Physiologic Processes. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 17(4), pp.301-308. doi: 10.1089/acm.2010.0687
[7] Mousa, H.A.-L. (2023). Prevention and treatment of COVID-19 infection by earthing. Biomedical Journal, 46(1), pp.60-69. doi: 10.1016/j.bj.2022.08.002
[8] Kaptchuk, T.J., Kelley, J.M., Conboy, L.A., Davis, R.B., Kerr, C.E., Jacobson, E.E., Kirsch, I., Schyner, R.N. et al. (2008). Components of placebo effect: randomised controlled trial in patients with irritable bowel syndrome. BMJ, 336(7651), pp.999-1003. doi: 10.1136/bmj.39524.439618.25
[9] Wager, T.D. and Atlas, L.Y. (2015). The neuroscience of placebo effects: connecting context, learning and health. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(7), pp.403-418. doi: 10.1038/nrn3976
[10] Hermant, N. (2024). Why scientists say grounding or ‘earthing’ has little hard evidence. ABC News (Australia). https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-11-10/grounding-earthing-science-electrons-physics-trend/104501634
[11] Cleveland Clinic. (2022). Does Grounding Have Real Health Benefits? Cleveland Clinic Health Essentials. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/grounding
[12] Sluka, K.A. and Clauw, D.J. (2016). Neurobiology of fibromyalgia and chronic widespread pain. Neuroscience, 338, pp.114-129. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2016.06.006
[13] Häuser, W., Ablin, J., Fitzcharles, M.-A., Littlejohn, G., Luciano, J.V., Usui, C. and Walitt, B. (2015). Fibromyalgia. Nature Reviews Disease Primers, 1, p.15022. doi: 10.1038/nrdp.2015.22
[14] White, M.P., Alcock, I., Grellier, J., Wheeler, B.W., Hartig, T., Warber, S.L., Bone, A., Depledge, M.H. and Fleming, L.E. (2019). Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing. Scientific Reports, 9(1), p.7730. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-44097-3
[15] Murray, K., Godbole, S., Natarajan, L., Full, K., Hipp, J.A., Glanz, K., Mitchell, J., Laden, F., James, P., Quante, M. and Kerr, J. (2017). The relations between sleep, time of physical activity, and time outdoors among adult women. PLOS ONE, 12(9), p.e0182013. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0182013
[16] van der Rhee, H.J., de Vries, E. and Coebergh, J.W. (2016). Regular sun exposure benefits health. Medical Hypotheses, 97, pp.34-37. doi: 10.1016/j.mehy.2016.10.011
[17] Wells, N.M., Rollings, K.A., Ong, A.D. and Reid, M.C. (2019). Nearby Nature Buffers the Pain Catastrophizing–Pain Intensity Relation Among Urban Residents With Chronic Pain. Frontiers in Built Environment, 5, p.142. doi: 10.3389/fbuil.2019.00142
[18] Sephton, S.E., Salmon, P., Weissbecker, I., Ulmer, C., Floyd, A., Hoover, K. and Studts, J.L. (2007). Mindfulness meditation alleviates depressive symptoms in women with fibromyalgia: Results of a randomized clinical trial. Arthritis & Rheumatism, 57(1), pp.77-85. doi: 10.1002/art.22478
[19] Finan, P.H., Goodin, B.R. and Smith, M.T. (2013). The Association of Sleep and Pain: An Update and a Path Forward. The Journal of Pain, 14(12), pp.1539-1552. doi: 10.1016/j.jpain.2013.08.007
[20] Giulivi, C. and Kotz, R. (2025). Earthing effects on mitochondrial function: ATP production and ROS generation. FEBS Open Bio, 15(9), pp.1459-1470. doi: 10.1002/2211-5463.70062
[21] Sokal, P., Jurkowska, M., Sokal, K. and Mosiejczuk-Sokal, A. (2025). Earthing as a Supportive Therapy for Post-Spinal Surgery Recovery: A Randomized Controlled Study. Journal of Clinical Medicine, 14(11), p.3844. doi: 10.3390/jcm14113844
[22] Jin, S.S., Lee, J.H., Park, J.H. et al. (2025). A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study on the improvement of sleep quality with Earthing mat. Advances in Integrative Medicine. Elsevier. https://khu.elsevierpure.com/en/publications/a-randomized-double-blind-placebo-controlled-study-on-the-improve/
[23] Kim, Y.M., Jin, S.S. et al. (2024). Effect of Earthing Mats on Sleep Quality in Rats. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 25(18), p.9791. doi: 10.3390/ijms25189791
