Copper Bracelets – Do They Work? The Best Reason for Using Copper Therapy

You’ll see a lot of people wearing copper bangles. Why? For some, it’s simply fashion – they like them. But many people wear copper bracelets because they’ve heard that they help a lot with arthritis and rheumatic pain. I’ve met people who swear that they help and others – most – who haven’t found any benefit at all.

So who’s right? The ‘sceptical’ majority or the ‘gullible’ few? The answer’s not what you’d expect, because they’re both right! Let me explain…

Why Copper Bracelets Don’t Work

I’m setting aside all the arguments that copper bracelets have some magical influence on your body, either from a connection with ancient deities, or their ‘aura’, or any other metaphysical reason – because it’s essentially not provable either way. Instead, in this article, I’m sticking to the science. And according to the science, the majority of people get no benefit whatsoever from wearing a copper bracelet, unless you consider a dirty wrist a benefit!

Let me explain. What a copper bangle does for you is to provide a film of copper salts on the skin of your wrist. How much of the salts you get depends on how sweaty your wrist is and how acid the sweat is – people vary a lot. The salts are usually a dirty greenish black in colour and they’re of no therapeutic value at all – unless you’re copper deficient.

Now, most people get plenty of copper in their diet, so won’t need more. So the bangle does nothing for them – as they find out when they wear one. Of course, the ‘placebo effect’ works here, as it always does. Some people will feel a benefit when it’s got nothing to do with the bracelet. A proof of this is that many buy bangles which ‘won’t make your wrist black’ – in other words, they are varnished or silver-plated on the inside, where the raw copper should touch your skin. Any action these might have will be in your mind, whether imaginary or metaphysical.

When Copper Bracelets are REAL Magic

But there is a minority of people who quite clearly get benefits from wearing copper. They will put on a bangle and within a week will feel much better: less pain and less inflammation in their joints. Why?

• They are copper deficient – they can’t extract enough from their food (or they have a copper-poor diet, not likely in the West), and
• They have joint problems, which show as a rheumatic disorder like rheumatism or arthritis, and it’s caused by copper deficiency.

These people will be calling copper treatment a ‘magical experience’, because their pain and swelling just go away, or at least, lessen, while they’re wearing a copper bracelet. For them, it works!

The reason is simple – their bodies need copper and they can’t get it from their food, so the copper they need for health is absorbed through their skin. The bracelet is acting as a skin patch, in the same way as a drugs patch is used by your doctor. In fact, you don’t need a bangle – any bare copper item pressed against your skin will work. An old remedy was to wind copper wire round your knuckles.

Let’s be clear about this – if you’re not in need of copper, there’s no benefit. But if your body craves copper, the bangle will provide it as long as the inside of the bracelet, against your skin, is bare copper. And the result is magic!

It doesn’t need to be pure copper – a copper-containing coin or brass item will work. In fact, most copper bracelets are a copper-zinc alloy, for strength and because zinc doesn’t give the allergic reaction that some people get from nickel, the other common alloying metal – think cupro-nickel coins, that we usually call ‘silver’.

The Best Reason to Try a Copper Bracelet

So if you have some kind of rheumatic complaint, it must be worthwhile trying this simple and harmless therapy alongside anything else. Just a week with a cheap copper bangle (or borrow one!) will tell you whether it’s going to be useful – the results kick in that fast if you need the copper, but there’ll be no result if you don’t, other than having to wash off the black deposits from your wrist.

I use and sell the best magnetic bracelets on the market, Bioflow (because they use the hospital-type flux-changing method) – and people often buy them for arthritis or rheumatism. When people ask me whether copper is better, I always give the same answer:

“Try a cheap copper bangle for a week and see if it relieves your pain. If it does, it may not give you all the help you need – there are many other kinds of arthritis than copper-deficiency, and you can have more than one at the same time. So if you’re still in pain after the week’s trial, come back to me.”