A technique in which different parts of the feet (or palms) are massaged to relieve conditions in different parts of the body with which they are held to be associated.
1915
Dr. James A. Lawton will attend a meeting of the New England Osteopathic Association in Boston today, and will conduct a clinic in ‘Zone Therapy’.
Hartford (Connecticut) Courant 14 May 12/1
1917
Dr. Roemer..examined him in a characteristic zone therapy way. He searched the patient's fingers with a metal comb to find out what was the matter with his teeth.
W. H. FitzGerald, Zone Therapy xvi. 157
1971
Zone Therapy is based on the premise that one zone of the body acts as a microcosm of the whole.
N. Saunders, Alternative London (ed. 2) xv. 123
1979
The origin of the reflex method is obscure. It is said that it came from China to the West... It is known to have been used by the natives of Kenya, and also by some American Indian tribes. At the beginning of this century it was called zone therapy by one Dr Fitzgerald [sic] in America who used it as a form of anaesthesia to render the patient insensible to pain when performing small operations, and to ease childbirth.
D. E. Bayly in A. Hill, Visual Encycl. of Unconventional Medicine 61
A therapeutic programme involving deep tissue massage and exercise, designed to correct posture, improve mobility, relieve emotional stress, etc. A proprietary name in the United States.
zone therapy typically occurs fewer than 0.01 times per million words in modern written English.
zone therapy is in frequency band 2, which contains words occurring between 0.001 and 0.01 times per million words in modern written English. More about OED's frequency bands
Frequency data is computed programmatically, and should be regarded as an estimate.
Frequency of zone therapy, n., 1910–2010
* Occurrences per million words in written English
Historical frequency series are derived from Google Books Ngrams (version 2), a data set based on the Google Books corpus of several million books printed in English between 1500 and 2010.
The overall frequency for a given word is calculated by summing frequencies for the main form of the word, any plural or inflected forms, and any major spelling variations.
For sets of homographs (distinct entries that share the same word-form, e.g. mole, n.¹, mole, n.², mole, n.³, etc.), we have estimated the frequency of each homograph entry as a fraction of the total Ngrams frequency for the word-form. This may result in inaccuracies.
Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the Google Books corpus.
Decade
Frequency per million words
1910
0.0063
1920
0.0063
1930
0.0061
1940
0.0065
1950
0.0049
1960
0.0059
1970
0.0073
1980
0.0086
1990
0.009
2000
0.0098
2010
0.01
Originally published as part of the entry for zone, n.
zone, n. was first published in 1921; not fully revised.