Reflexology is an alternate form of medicine, which believes that locations on your feet correspond with parts of your body, and that massage and other forms of treatment for your feet can help with whole body health and detoxification. It has been used in medical practice for thousands of years in Eastern cultures and is today starting to gain a foothold in Western cultures as well. Reflexology methods applied to detoxification have proven to be particularly effective. It is common knowledge that toxins will build up in your body from food we eat, the air we breathe and from many other environmental sources. If you don't use some sort of detoxification procedure to get this bad stuff out of your system eventually it will cause health problems for you. Liver disease, cardiovascular complications, stomach problems and even infertility and impaired brain function can result from an excessive buildup of environmental toxins in your body. Traditional Western medicine, which relies heavily on surgical procedures and prescription medications, is often at a loss for how to deal with body detoxification. In fact, if you look at the extensive list of negative side effects for some prescription medications it makes you wonder if traditional Western medicine is helping with detoxification or simply making things worse. In the face of this gap in Western medicine, and the increasing danger in our culture from toxins, a whole host of alternate forms of medicine have surfaced to try and deal with detoxification. Special diets, fasting, colon cleansing, spa treatments and herbal applications and supplements have become more popular with health conscious people trying to deal with detoxification. Some are Western in origin, but most have Eastern roots. Some seem to be nothing more than common sense, but others seem to be a bit surreal and bizarre. Reflexology may be among the strangest of these concepts to our western way of thinking. How can parts of your foot correspond with organs in the rest of your body? How can doing something to your feet remove toxins from your heart, liver and kidneys? It may take the scientists hundreds of years to prove or disprove the claims of reflexology but if it works for you today isn't that all that matters? The list of negative side effects from reflexology is pretty much non-existent and the potential benefits are significant. So how exactly is reflexology used to remove toxins from our bodies? For thousands of years, Chinese and Japanese medical practitioners have known that certain tree root and trunk extracts can be placed on your body and be used to remove all kinds of ailments. Pain, infection, swelling, blood flow congestion and even toxins can be removed by applying a patch or plaster of herbs combined with these tree extracts. Taking this knowledge one step further, several companies have developed self-adhesive herbal foot patches. You apply a pair of these to the soles of your feet at night before you go to bed, remove them, and throw them away when you get up in the morning. When you put them on at night they will be white but when you remove them in the morning they will be dirty looking. No, this isn't dirt from your feet; it is toxins removed from your body. After a few weeks of doing this the patches you throw away in the morning will get cleaner and cleaner as there are less toxins to remove from your body. It is relatively cheap to try, easy to use, efficient, has no common negative side effects and if it works for you then that may be all that really matters.