magic magnetic bracelet improves health and stuff....

[Space]

I recently saw an ad about a magnetic bracelet that is meant to improve health and well-being...
There wasnt any convincing scientific explanation with it...
So I suppose it is a placebo that makes you feel good just because you expect it to,
but is it legal to advertise that kind of thing??

[Hammer]

I agree with andy as usual.

The ad probably says something along the lines of 'may help with ... ' or 'many people benefit from...' in which case they're not actually promising anything.

[graemer]

Hi Space. Where I live there is a huge Magnet industry, pillows, underlays, bracelets etc supported by ads with personal endorsements by people who swear it helps/helped them. As to scientific proof, the jury seems to still be out but there are a lot of people who swear by it so I guess it's legal. Our consumer watchdog magazine has investigated, if you're interested. http://www.choice.com.au/viewArticle.aspx?id=104440& catId=100232&tid=100008&p=1

[jake-the-peg]

Well because it's a Tuesday and I'm a little bored I thought I'd look into this - I'm a bit cynical on this as I cant see how we'd not notice any effect from putting people into MR scanners with Gigantic magnetic fields.

Now I couldn't get a copy of the precise abstract quoted but I found this one

http://www.healthandwellnessliving.com/library/Weintraub_Study.pdf

Now at first it all seems straight and above board - It's funded by magnetic device manufacturers which is worrying but that seems the norm in the US.

I started reading the tabulated results but they seemed at odds with the graphs and the conclusions. The conclusions and graphs seemed to show a definate effect but the tabulated results showed that whilst patients rated that their pain had decreased that drop was mostly within the margin of error.

In one of the better cases the treatment group rated their pain drop from 5.1 to 3.6 as opposed to the pacebo group drop of 5.3 to 4.

Sounds impressive until you realise that the variance in the score is typically plus or minus 2.5.

Personally I don't think you could hail these results with quite the enthusiasm that is claimed and whether this is due to the natural desire to produce an important result of whether funing is an element - well you can start to see how people can make the claims they do and draw on questionable research to keep themselves out of court.

Moral of the story? Ask who paid for the research! 

[Tim Baxter]

I think it's the same with all fringe medecine, if it works for you then fine.