Although peopleย haveย adorned themselves withย copper since prehistory, theย marketing of copper bracelets as aย treatmentย for arthritis pain appears to date back only to the 1970s.
Proponents of copper bracelets often cite the research of Werner Hangarter (1904โ1982), a German doctor of internal medicine. Hangarter evangelized for copperโs therapeutic possibilities after hearing that copper miners in Finland seldom developed rheumatism while laboring in the copper-rich environment of the mines.
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Hindsight reveals several problems in Hangarterโs research. Based on inference and anecdote, he assumed a chain of causation โ that exposure to environmental copper helped miners ward off RA โ where the reverse is actually far more likely: No active miners had RA because individuals who developed the condition quit the profession.
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So even the effects of copper in solution are ambiguous: What aboutย topicalย copper? The effectiveness of wearing copper, rather than ingesting it, is based on the idea that trace amounts ofย the metalย can be effectively absorbed through the skin. But thereโs little evidence for this claim, and in any case the occasional peanut-butter sandwich or chocolate bar wouldย be a more efficient way to get the stuff into your systemย than a $25 bangle.
