Fueling false hopes

Q-Ray stands for quack, says suit over bracelet

January 22, 2003

By Jim Ritter Health Reporter

Hoping to relieve arthritic pain in his knees, elbows and back, Donald Casey bought a Q-Ray Ionized Bracelet that supposedly relieves pain by restoring the body "to its normal electrical balance."

Then Casey saw a Mayo Clinic study that found Q-Rays worked no better than inactive placebo bracelets

I live in pain.  Every day.  I have severe osteoarthritis in both knees from a condition I was born with, and am developing osteoarthritis in my hips.  I had tendonitis in one of my wrists, and had to have bone graft surgery done to repair the damage a cyst, caused by the tendonitis, had done to the bones.  I'm also prone to both tension and migraine headaches.

You'd think that'd be enough, but because of the severity of my arthritis, I've been homebound for the last 4 years, and cannot walk even a few feet without the aid of a walker.  As a result of my confinement, I've begun to develop pressure sores, which really don't feel very good.

To control my pain, I have to take narcotic pain-killers on a fairly regular basis, but even that is insufficient to eliminate it, though it does help some.  From the time I get up in the morning until I finally go to sleep, the subject of pain and pain management is never terribly far from my mind.

So,why am I telling you all this?  Because I want you to know that I truly understand how desperate for relief people who suffer from severe, chronic pain can be to find anything that might help make it even just a little bit better.  While I usually stay away from things like magnet therapy or "ionized" bracelets, which, to me anyway, don't even make much sense as a form of treatment, I have been known to try some of the different "remedies" that tend to get tossed around within the chronic-pain community.  I've tried MSM, Glucosamine, Chondritin, all three mixed together, Vioxx, heat therapy, cold therapy, and have even thought about trying accupuncture. And while I've not found anything that can truly relieve my pain, it is vital for me to hang on to any hope I can find - even if it's not entirely rational - in order for me to survive. 

One of the complications of living life with chronic pain is that it can make a normal person depressed, and it can make a depressed person significantly worse.  Since I've always been depressive by nature, there are times when the struggle to keep going, no matter how much it hurts, has been far harder than I like to admit - even to myself - and sometimes, the only thing that really keeps me going is the idea that maybe someday - maybe soon - they'll find something that can really help.

It is the importance of that hope - not just to me, but to many, if not most, pain sufferers - that makes me so outraged when I see stories like the one above that talk about companies selling expensive -- and bogus -- "remedies" for arthritis or other conditions. I'm sure that most of the people who are now putting together a class action suit against Q-Ray knew, at least in the back of their minds, that an "ionized" bracelet would be unlikely to work.  The company, however, plays on the hope of something -- anything -- that will make it easier to get through the day - and they know that huge numbers of people will set aside their rational thought and take a chance that maybe, just maybe, this time, this gizmo will work.

Sadly, with the boomer generation starting to age, senior citizens are going to become a large, and very important, demographic - and since most people develop arthritis as they grow older, such modern snake-oil is only going to become more popular. While I think that in this kind of a situation, where there is now a scientific study showing that the bracelet provides no real benefit, it would be better for the company to be prosecuted on fraud and false advertising charges than through a class action suit, I also hope that the suit being filed will result in a strong enough judgement against Q-Ray that other companies may think twice before trying to prey upon desperate people who are already suffering at the hands of a cruel disease.