Copper Bracelet Wearers
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A. C. Clarke: Any sufficiently advanced technology tends to look like magic ...
Feel for you on the tea front, totally devastating life change that, i was the same when it happened to me, cried for days lol, i actually struggle to hold a normal tea cup these days because of the arthritic deformation in my hands.
On a serious note go and see a doctor and insist on getting a referral to see a Rheumatologist, it will take months to get an appointment so get in early, because this disease cannot be cured, it just gets worse and the sooner you can start treating it the better, I was unlucky as mine was sudden onset and its devastated my life with deformed hands and wrecked hip and knee joints, although I'm now on the right road to getting it back with multiple surgeries and the use of some fairly powerful drugs.
One of the most important thing is diet, I had to discover what my trigger foods were and one of them was cheese (sadly), I can still eat it but I have to moderate my intake as the casein in the cheese is an inflammatory agent and if i eat too much cheese I get a massive flare up that can last for a day to a week, case in point was my sister cooked a great three cheese Macaroni Cheese, the next day I could hardly walk as the flare up was that bad due to the reaction I had to the casein.
I've always eaten healthy foods, I try to stay away from processed foods as much as I can and I don't eat takeaway food apart from Fish & Chips which we have perhaps two or three times a year, which is not a problem as I don't like burgers and carp like that, I and my family would much rather cook fresh using fresh ingredients, lots of fresh fruit and veg, I don't drink, I don't smoke, I also don't drink a lot of coffee as that too is an irritant.
It all sounds grim, but in reality its not a problem for me as I've eaten wholesome foods all my life, but for some people its a major life change.
If you can get to see a Rheumatologist they can run all sorts of tests and identify what type of arthritis you have and from there you may get referrals to see dieticians, occupational therapists and the like.
One funny thing that happened just a little while ago on the original subject of copper bracelets, was when I was just going into theatre to have my first total hip replacement, the anaesthetist remarked that she could see that I normally wore a copper bracelet, to which I said yes, she commented "didn't work did it", well it made me chuckle.
Just read through this thread again as it's re-surfaced.
One thing I didn't notice first time through was mention of iron as a trace element. In case anybody's doing anything based on that then think again. Iron is not even remotely a trace element, the human body typically contains 40mg to 50mg per kg of body weight and an intake of daily quantities of between about 5mg and 30mg is needed. The Blood Transfusion Service used to give me tablets of around 65mg iron to take daily for a couple of weeks after I gave blood, but they stopped doing that decades ago I guess to save money.
Copper is considered a trace element, but the World Health Organization sets a minimum intake of 1.3mg per day and the upper limit set in Europe is 5mg per day which to me is a lot more than a trace. Copper isn't normally considered magnetic, so if you're thinking magnetic effects then copper isn't going to help much. You could maybe wear an iron band but it will go rusty and it will leave marks on just about everything.
Anyway the point of all this is that you're already getting a lot more in food than you could ever possibly absorb through the skin - of more or less everything. If you don't believe me, accurately weigh your copper bracelet, wear it for a month, then weigh it again. If it's lost more than a tenth of a milligram I'll be very surprised. My mother's bracelet weighs 12g. She wore it for decades and yet it shows no real signs of loss of the metal. It would be a huge over-estimate to say it lost a gram in ten thousand days, yet that would put an upper limit on her absorption of copper at 0.1mg per day, which is less than ten percent of the WHO's take on the bare minimum you need in a healthy diet.
As for cures, I'm afraid there aren't any. For some joints there are replacements, but if you're anything like me and you have arthritis in most of your joints then you're just going to have to live with it. There are painkillers of course, but they all have side-effects to some extent. When it's really bad I take paracetamol, but after reading about the long-term adverse effects I no longer accept the advice that it's safe to take four one-gram doses every day. So I limit it to a couple of doses maybe every couple of months and the rest of the time grimace and bear it. Once upon a time I was prescribed something called Tramadol which is one of the opiates. Apart from giving me awful constipation it was really great at first, but other people started to notice and then I noticed that I was permanently high as a kite - so I stopped taking that, I didn't think I was safe using tools for example.
We just have to face that medical science has a long way to go. It will get there, unless our civilization does actually fail, but I fear in the case of arthritis not in time to benefit any of us.
One thing I didn't notice first time through was mention of iron as a trace element. In case anybody's doing anything based on that then think again. Iron is not even remotely a trace element, the human body typically contains 40mg to 50mg per kg of body weight and an intake of daily quantities of between about 5mg and 30mg is needed. The Blood Transfusion Service used to give me tablets of around 65mg iron to take daily for a couple of weeks after I gave blood, but they stopped doing that decades ago I guess to save money.
Copper is considered a trace element, but the World Health Organization sets a minimum intake of 1.3mg per day and the upper limit set in Europe is 5mg per day which to me is a lot more than a trace. Copper isn't normally considered magnetic, so if you're thinking magnetic effects then copper isn't going to help much. You could maybe wear an iron band but it will go rusty and it will leave marks on just about everything.
Anyway the point of all this is that you're already getting a lot more in food than you could ever possibly absorb through the skin - of more or less everything. If you don't believe me, accurately weigh your copper bracelet, wear it for a month, then weigh it again. If it's lost more than a tenth of a milligram I'll be very surprised. My mother's bracelet weighs 12g. She wore it for decades and yet it shows no real signs of loss of the metal. It would be a huge over-estimate to say it lost a gram in ten thousand days, yet that would put an upper limit on her absorption of copper at 0.1mg per day, which is less than ten percent of the WHO's take on the bare minimum you need in a healthy diet.
As for cures, I'm afraid there aren't any. For some joints there are replacements, but if you're anything like me and you have arthritis in most of your joints then you're just going to have to live with it. There are painkillers of course, but they all have side-effects to some extent. When it's really bad I take paracetamol, but after reading about the long-term adverse effects I no longer accept the advice that it's safe to take four one-gram doses every day. So I limit it to a couple of doses maybe every couple of months and the rest of the time grimace and bear it. Once upon a time I was prescribed something called Tramadol which is one of the opiates. Apart from giving me awful constipation it was really great at first, but other people started to notice and then I noticed that I was permanently high as a kite - so I stopped taking that, I didn't think I was safe using tools for example.
We just have to face that medical science has a long way to go. It will get there, unless our civilization does actually fail, but I fear in the case of arthritis not in time to benefit any of us.
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I'd agree with some of this but not all of it.
Symptom of too little Iron in the system - Overall fatigue
Symptom of too much Iron in the system - Overall fatigue.
So for those like me that have and continue to have regular blood test sampling can know if we are getting enough or too little of something because it reflects within the testing - and to be clear , I don't WANT to have blood tests - I'm not a wannabe hypochondriac - I need the testing I have to keep me in the Goldilocks zone.
Reference Copper - I have no idea if or if it doesn't improve arthritis - I take your point ref empirical weighing over a decade - in which case I'd ask why do so many people do it? If its a well placed of marketing psuedo-suggestion , its genius.
Why does your mum continue to wear it over the last two decades? Has she experienced / detected no improvement. Or is it purely dogmatic placebo effect that has so many people follow it? If so - again , Marketing Genius.
My original post was more pitched to if there was ANY scientific evidence to suggest if typical metals that we tend to intentionally ingest via oral supplements could be absorbed in a dermal manner.
Thanks for that - I do like my cheese... Maybe more than I like my little finger... Do I REALLY need my little finger???
The last comment does make me wonder where we have as a society ( Is it just the UK that believe this ? or adopted more globally broader??? ) created this founded belief about copper bangles. Make me think..
Sorry if my moaning , in perspective , pales in comparison to your own experience with arthritis. - Just trying to see if I can take some preventative measures.
When worn on some part of the body, I'm pretty sure it makes no difference.
She died in 2002. Her arthritis wasn't bad, and as far as I can remember she never actually claimed that the bangle had any effect at all. I think she wore it in the hope that one day it might.
Lots of people pray. Doesn't mean anybody's listening. Lots of people smoke. My brother-in-law always maintained that it kept the 'flu' bugs away. He died of a heart attack when he was 39.
Sure you can arrange for a lot of things to be absorbed through the skin, but mostly it's in really minute quantities. My point was that at least for something like copper, the quantities will be so tiny compared to what you get in food that it makes no sense, to me at least, to try to boost your intake by skin absorption.
There are things like gels which contain ibuprofen which you apply to the skin and which might or might not give some relief. I have such a (prescription) gel here in the medicine cupboard. It seems to have no more effect on me than my mum's bangle.
The only thing that's really going to work is pain killers. Unfortunately as I said they all come with side-effects and for many of them the side-effects of long-term use are worse than the thing that got you taking them in the first place. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. I wish it weren't this way - in fact I've wished that for several decades...
The consultant and I were looking at the NMR scan of my spine. I could see one of the discs looked very different from all the others. I said, "Is that the bad one?" "No," he said, "that's the good one."
After a while you sort of get used to it. But if you sometimes wonder why a lot of older people are sometimes a bit on the crotchety side, this is why.
And very achy wrists
I wear a copper bracelet, but it’s mainly because I like it. I go long periods of not wearing it and have mild to bad arthritic base of thumb/wrist pain. I’m not writing it off because the science doesn’t fit, but I’m not sure I get much benefit when I do wear it for a long period.
If any are after any decent thick copper wire, beating up 240-110v site transformer is a good source. Bit of a pain to unwind it from transformer core but as I say decent copper wire and well worth the effort. Approx 2mm in diameter and coated of which can be burned off if it's the raw copper folk seek
About 30% of Mesolithic died before the age of 1, 50% by age 15, which pulls down the average life expectancy dramatically. Once past that age a reasonable portion reached 40 and even some into the 50s. However, remains show that the older people had worn teeth and arthritis. They also had painkillers.
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