Bullshit Market

Your magnetic therapy bracelets and necklaces don’t actually relive pain, you know this right? Anyone with a basic understanding of biology and magnetism knows this. I’ll give you this, magnetism CAN have an effect on the body (NOT pain relief though) in extremely strong currents, I’m talking Wiley Coyote strong, but the tiny beads you’re selling aren’t even strong enough to influence a cell it’s right next to much less go through skin. If your tiny necklaces have the effect you claim, then MRI scans should be able to do serious harm (actual biological harm, not harm because of shrapnel or a piercing). But just like sugar pills and homeopathy, you can’t overdose on magnetic therapy because it doesn’t actually work in the first place.

No controlled double blinded study has ever shown that magnetic therapy has any significant influence on pain beyond placebo. In fact, lots of credible studies show just the opposite. If they showed otherwise you wouldn’t be selling your magnetic therapy products at a market, you’d be selling them to hospitals and making millions. No, actually, if magnetic therapy worked, it would have been a staple in health care and recovery ages before you were even born.

Magnet therapy is pseudoscience, and you are a charlatan. At best you are tricking people with false claims and scientific sounding gibberish into wasting their money on junk. At worst you are selling a bullshit therapy to people who might actually need real medicine, medicine they might not seek out after having bought a “magic bracelet” instead. For Shame! —This duck says QUACK

This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2011.