TUESDAY, Nov. 12, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- A controversial bracelet that supposedly sends out special electrical waves to relieve pain provides no more relief than an ordinary bracelet, a new study finds.
A lot of the people who wore the "ionized" bracelets reported relief from their pain during the four weeks of the study, says a report in the new issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
However, so did a lot of the people who wore the ordinary bracelets.
In fact, the percentage of people reporting pain relief was strikingly similar in both groups, a finding that the doctors who did the study attribute to the placebo effect.
It's an important finding, the study says, because "increasingly, patients are trying unconventional treatments in place of traditional, evidence-based treatments." The researchers cite a survey that found Americans made almost twice as many visits to practitioners of alternative medicine as to primary-care physicians in 1997.
Someone suffering the musculoskeletal pains of arthritis or a similar condition doesn't have to go to a medical practitioner to get the ionized bracelet used in the study. It's available by mail for about $100 from QT Inc., of Elk Grove Village, Ill. The company provided both the ionized and plain bracelets used in the study. It also settled a recent lawsuit in which it was accused of quackery.
The company did not make a spokesperson available for comment on the Mayo Clinic study and the lawsuit. However, it issued this statement: "Since we began marketing the Q-Ray Ionized Bracelet nine years ago, many thousands of people have expressed to us their relief through using our product. Their experiences provide powerful evidence of the very real benefits our bracelets provide. We are proud of our contribution to the improved quality of life enjoyed by satisfied Q-Ray Ionized Bracelet wearers across the country."
In the study, Dr. Robert Bratton and colleagues from the department of family medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., recruited 610 adults who reported having persistent pain. Half wore the ionized bracelets, half the ordinary bracelets. They gave assessments of their pain after one, three, seven, 14, 21 and 28 days, reporting not only on the area of greatest pain but also their overall feeling.
The results were strikingly similar for both groups. For example, 75.1 percent of those in the placebo group reported an improved maximum pain score after seven days, compared to 75.7 percent in the ionized bracelet group. The pain relief score after 14 days was 77.7 percent for the placebo group, 76.7 percent for the ionized bracelet wearers. After 28 days, it was 76.7 percent for the placebo group and 77.4 percent for the ionized bracelet group.
Dr. Stephen Barrett, a recognized expert on fraudulent health claims and a consultant for a number of consumer and medical organizations, says he sees just one thing wrong with the study: It let QT Inc. say truthfully that three-quarters of the people wearing its bracelets reported pain relief.
"It would have been much better if they had a third group," says Barrett, who runs a Web site called Quackwatch. "What we don't know is what would happen if there was a group to which nothing was done."
Barrett was involved in the lawsuit brought against QT Inc. by the Consumer Justice Center, a California nonprofit corporation run by a lawyer named Mark Boling. In December 2000, Barrett submitted a statement to the court, saying the claims made for the ionized bracelet were "misleading, deceptive, and/or false."
"There is no such thing as an 'ionized bracelet' because solid objects are not ionized," the statement said. "There is no such thing as an ionic imbalance of the body, and no scientifically recognized connection between allegedly 'ionized' objects and pain relief."
Boling says the Consumer Justice Center's lawsuit against QT Inc. was resolved in a settlement that forbids him from making any comment on the terms.
Bratton says he did the study because not only patients but also golfing partners were asking him about the value of the bracelet. His conclusion: It's all a placebo effect and "based on the study results, you may be just as well off wearing a rubber band around your wrist and saving the money spent on the bracelet."
What To Do
Learn more about alternative medical treatments for painful conditions such as arthritis from the Arthritis Foundation. For more information about pain, visit the American Pain Foundation.
