Skeptoid #84: Magic Jewelry
All sorts of marvelous health claims are made for jewelry such as the Q-Ray bracelet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
All sorts of marvelous health claims are made for jewelry such as the Q-Ray bracelet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
|
Magic Jewelry and Energy Fields
00:07:26
|
|
| Ever see someone wearing a shimmering holographic wristband or a striped necklace or some odd magnetic looking jewelry and wondered what's going on? | |
| Well, you've just seen someone who believes that their body has some kind of energy field which governs their physical or mental ability and that can be somehow improved by wearing some trinket. | |
| Magic jewelry is up next on Skeptoid. | |
| Hi, I'm Alex Goldman. | |
| You may know me as the host of Reply All, but I'm done with that. | |
| I'm doing something else now. | |
| I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed. | |
| On every episode of HyperFixed, listeners write in with their problems and I try to solve them. | |
| Some massive and life-altering and some so minuscule it'll boggle your mind. | |
| No matter the problem, no matter the size, I'm here for you. | |
| That's HyperFixed, the new podcast for Radiotopia. | |
| Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com. | |
| You're listening to Skeptoid. | |
| I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com. | |
| Magic Jewelry. | |
| Today we're going to try to heal our bodies through one of the simplest methods imaginable. | |
| We're simply going to slip on an ionized bracelet. | |
| It's going to correct our body's natural electrical fields, and anything that's wrong with us will be healed, naturally. | |
| Does that sound a little suspicious to you? | |
| Well, it did to me too when I first heard it, but it sounds perfectly reasonable to a lot of people. | |
| Start paying attention and you'll notice that plenty of people still walk around wearing a Q-Ray bracelet. | |
| I have several friends who wear them. | |
| Once I asked one of them what it does, and he said he wasn't sure, but he felt better whenever he wore it. | |
| The Q-Ray bracelet is the best known and most popular of the so-called ionized bracelets on the market. | |
| It's actually a knockoff of the original called the Bio-Ray bracelet, developed in 1973 by Spanish chiropractor Manuel Polo. | |
| Polo's idea was based on his belief that general wellness could be achieved through proper balancing of positive and negative ions in the body. | |
| Now, a vague claim like this might sound reasonable to an uninformed person, but run it past any electrical engineer. | |
| There's no plausible way that any type of bracelet could have such an effect, unless it's grounded. | |
| Walking across a carpet and scuffing your feet will have a dramatic effect on your body's static electrical charge, which is the technically correct way to refer to your body's balance of positive and negative ions, and this is unaffected by any jewelry you might be wearing. | |
| Being indoors or outdoors during a thunderstorm will produce the same difference. | |
| People riding in a car have a different static charge than people outside the car who are grounded. | |
| None of these conditions have ever been shown to have an effect on a person's general well-being, nor can they be mitigated by jewelry. | |
| It's easy to poke holes in the technical claims made by the Q-Ray people, but their satisfied customers aren't interested. | |
| They feel better when they wear it, and that's all they need to know. | |
| Fortunately, that's a claim that someone finally decided to put to the test. | |
| The Mayo Clinic took 710 people and, in a fully blinded and randomized clinical trial, gave half of them Q-Ray ionized bracelets and half of them identical-looking placebo bracelets. | |
| As you can probably guess, there was no difference in the amount of pain reduction reported by either group. | |
| I was curious to see exactly what the makers of Q-Ray claim on their website. | |
| I went to QRay.com and found, quite anticlimactically, that they make no claims of any kind whatsoever. | |
| The bracelet's only characteristic that they discuss is its design. | |
| They don't even call it ionized anymore. | |
| They simply sell them as metal bracelets in various colors and styles ranging from $60 to $300. | |
| It turns out there's a very good reason for this. | |
| In 2003, the Federal Trade Commission nailed them for false advertising and ordered them to stop. | |
| Unfortunately, they didn't stop. | |
| And in 2006, the courts brought the hammer down hard. | |
| QT Inc., the makers of Q-Ray, were ordered to turn over $22.5 million in profits and also provide $64.5 million in refunds. | |
| This ruling was upheld by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in January 2008. | |
| I wanted to see what these false claims had been, so I turned to the internet researcher's favorite tool, the Wayback Machine at archive.org, which archives old versions of websites. | |
| But I was thwarted again. | |
| QT Inc. had had their site removed from the Wayback Machine's archives. | |
| Happily, there are even better archives out there. | |
| In this case, I found many of their claims preserved for the ages on Dr. Stephen Barrett's irreplaceable quackwatch.org. | |
| Let's hear some of them. | |
| Q the New Age Music The Q-Ray bracelet is designed to achieve many of the same goals as traditional Chinese acupuncture. | |
| Acupuncture was developed to balance the body's yin, negative ions, and yang, positive ions, the two inseparable complementary energies that permanently circulate in the human body. | |
| When these energies become unbalanced, the body's functioning is thought to be altered, which can be at least very annoying and at worst debilitating, depending on the size and nature of the energy imbalance. | |
| Oriental medicine, through acupuncture, is believed to regulate these two energies, discharging from the body excess positive ions and providing access to blocked negative ions by stimulating meridian acupuncture points. | |
| In the human body, which is electromagnetic by nature, biomagnetic alpha and beta waves circulate throughout the vital centers. | |
| When the flow is cut off and these alpha and beta waves become stagnant in one particular area of the body, bioelectrical alterations and ionic imbalances can result. | |
| Designed by Dr. Polo with polarized multi-metallic metals, the Q-ray bracelet's circular form and spherical terminals offer low resistance to the bioelectrical conductability of the alpha and beta waves, facilitating the discharge of excess positive ions or static electricity. | |
| Excess of positive ions is associated with poor nutrition, incorrect breathing, sedentary lifestyle, and the use of electrical instruments or exposure to EMF, electronic magnetic field. | |
| Loss of negative ions is associated with symptoms such as anxiety, stress, fear, hatred, and physical exhaustion. | |
|
Skepticism as the Best Medicine
00:07:28
|
|
| Hey everyone, I want to remind you about a truly unique and once-in-a-lifetime adventure. | |
| Join me and Mediterranean archaeologist Dr. Flint Dibble for a skeptoid sailing adventure through the Mediterranean Sea aboard the SV Royal Clipper, the world's largest full-rigged sailing ship. | |
| This is also the only opportunity you'll have to hear Flint and I talk about our experiences when we both went on Joe Rogan to represent the causes of science and reality against whatever it is that you get when you're thrown into that lion pit. | |
| We set sail from Málaga, Spain on April 18th, 2026 and finish the adventure in Nice, France on April 25th. | |
| You'll enjoy a fascinating, skeptical mini-conference at sea. | |
| You'll visit amazing ports along the Spanish and French coasts, and Flint will be our exclusive onboard expert sharing the real archaeology and history about every stop. | |
| We've got special side quests and extra skeptical content planned at each port. | |
| This is a true sailing ship. | |
| You can climb the rat lines to the crow's nest, handle the sails. | |
| You can even take the helm and steer. | |
| This is a real bucket list adventure you don't want to miss. | |
| But cabins are selling fast, and this ship does always sell out. | |
| Act now or you'll miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. | |
| Get the full details and book your cabin at skeptoid.com slash adventures. | |
| Hope to see you on board. | |
| That's skeptoid.com slash adventures. | |
| Judge Frank Easterbrook aptly described these claims as poppycock, techno-babble, and blather. | |
| He remarked that the defendants might as well have said, Beneficient creatures from the 17th dimension use this bracelet as a beacon to locate people who need pain relief and whisk them off to their home world every night to provide help in ways unknown to our science. | |
| Gotta love Judge Easterbrook. | |
| According to Dr. Barrett, one of QT Inc.'s owners testified in the 2006 trial that he could not define the term ionization, but picked it because it was simple and easy to remember. | |
| The court concluded that his testimony on ionization was contradictory and full of obfuscation. | |
| Did QT Inc. try to support their claims in court? | |
| No, they did not. | |
| Under oath, they testified that the only healthful effect produced by the Q-Ray was the placebo effect. | |
| That's right, sports fans, when under the gun, the Q-Ray manufacturers stated that all the claims they've ever made about positive healthful effects from using their product are bogus. | |
| At best, it is a placebo. | |
| Just not a very useful one, according to the Mayo Clinic. | |
| Dr. Barrett also archived claims from QT Inc. that the Q-Ray bracelets could restore health, relieve cancer pain, improve muscle flexibility, improve sports performance, restore energy, and provide other health benefits. | |
| A 2000 TV infomercial for Q-Ray stated, When you have a severe injury or a chronic injury or a chronic problem like arthritis, you have buildup of positive ions. | |
| Wherever that is, you are going to have pain. | |
| In order to remove this pain, Q-Ray bracelet rips it right out of the body. | |
| Needless to say, medical science has never found any correlation between pain or injuries and buildups of positive ions. | |
| Q-Ray has not been completely neutered, though. | |
| A Google search returns a number of third-party resellers of the bracelet, still making all kinds of meaningless techno-babble claims. | |
| WellnessMarketer.com, for example, still calls it ionized and backhandedly implies that the Q-Ray has extremely powerful effects by warning that you should contact your doctor before wearing one if you're pregnant, that you should not allow the ends of the bracelet to contact each other, and that you should not wear a Q-Ray if you use a pacemaker or other medical device. | |
| QBracelets.com says that the Q-Ray causes your body to realign and balance its energies and that it balances your body's yin and yang to flood your system with increased amounts of natural pain relief compounds. | |
| Valuehealth2000.com says these are the same bracelets you've seen in doctors' offices. | |
| But there's little need for these marketers to rely on the Q-Ray. | |
| Value Health 2000 also sells the Q-Link pendant, another knockoff that the FTC doesn't seem to have caught up with yet. | |
| They claim the Q-Link strengthens you against electromagnetic radiation and also make the following statement that Judge Easterbrook would really love. | |
| Doctors who tested the Q-Link pendant with sympathetic resonance technology found that it very quickly amplifies healthy energy states and decreases energy drains caused by a wide variety of stressors. | |
| The FTC has, however, caught up with yet another knockoff company. | |
| They have a suit similar to the one against QT Inc. pending against the makers of an identical so-called ionized bracelet, the Balance Bracelet. | |
| Unless you're trying to allege yet another pharmaceutical conspiracy, you have to think that any true healing powers of simple jewelry would have become a fundamental of medical science long ago and would be first on your doctor's prescription pad. | |
| Just remember what we always recommend here. | |
| When you hear any claim that sounds far-fetched or goes against your understanding of science or the natural world, you have very good reason to be skeptical. | |
| You're listening to Skeptoid, a listener-supported program. | |
| I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com. | |
| Hello, everyone. | |
| This is Adrienne Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and mousse. | |
| And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month. | |
| And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles. | |
| And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar. | |
| Why support Skeptoid? | |
| If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you. | |
| If you want to support a worthwhile non-profit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the Teacher's Toolkit, then sign up today. | |
| Remember that skepticism is the best medicine. | |
| Next to giggling, of course. | |
| Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill. | |
| From PRX | |