Erin McElhone: Preventing Blisters at a Low Cost

Blisters are the bane of weekend hikers and Olympic marathoners alike. Stanford researchers say they've found a simple, cheap method to help prevent them. That humble hero is paper surgical tape, which often costs less than a dollar and is sold at most any pharmacy.heir study, published Monday in the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine, found that the paper tape reduced the instance of blisters by 40 percent. Lead author Grant Lipman, an emergency medicine doctor at Stanford Health Care, says he was inspired by years of treating ultra-marathon runners. "I started noticing just how trashed people's feet will become. And over 10 years of races, you just see these amazing athletes who have trained for years and spent all this money and they keep telling me the same thing — 'Doc, I feel great, it's just my feet.' And they'd be dropping out, they'd be hurt," Lipman says. Decades of tests lacking a definite low cost option for preventing blisters left the doctor to test out a theory only proven though anecdotal evidence. Lipman enlists 128 runners to test the paper tape as a blister preventative. According to the study, 98 of the 128 runners did not develop blisters under the tape. At the same time, 81 of the 128 got blisters in un-taped areas.

This is an interesting test, but to fully test this theory I think that other sports would need to be played using this tape. How would this tape hold up against a dancer's feet, or a quarterback's?

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