You may have seen the commercials on late-night television for copper bracelets that is the miracle treatment for those with RA or other painful ailments.
Supporters of copper bracelets often use the research of Werner Hangarter (1904–1982), a German doctor of internal medicine.
Hangarter preached copper’s therapeutic possibilities after hearing that copper miners in Finland seldom developed rheumatism while laboring in the copper-rich environment of the mines.
There are several problems in Hangarter’s research. Based on presumption and narrative, he assumed a chain of causation, that exposure to environmental copper helped miners ward off RA, where the reverse is actually far more likely. No active miners had RA because those who developed the condition quit the profession.
The effectiveness of wearing copper, rather than ingesting it, is based on the idea that trace amounts of the metal can be effectively absorbed through the skin. However, there’s little evidence for this claim.
A 2013 study of 70 rheumatoid arthritis patients provides the most thorough debunking. Under double-blind conditions, patients who wore copper bracelets for five weeks saw no statistically significant reduction in pain or inflammation when compared to those who wore lookalike placebo bracelets.
