The physics doesn't reach the joint. A therapy wrist magnet's field drops off with roughly the cube of distance, so a centimetre into the wrist it's a few thousandths of its surface strength, and at the knee or hip it's effectively zero ¹. An MRI puts your whole body in a field ten to twenty times stronger for an hour, and nobody walks out with their arthritis fixed.

The copper story is backwards. Arthritis patients test higher than normal on blood copper, not lower — the body raises it during inflammation ². Skin is a barrier, and any trace that crosses is nothing next to the milligram a normal diet already gives you. The green stain is the metal corroding in your sweat, not copper getting in.

Every clean test lands the same place. A five-week crossover in seventy rheumatoid-arthritis patients rotated each person through a copper bracelet, magnetic straps, and a demagnetised fake; pain, swollen joints, and blood inflammation moved the same whether the device was real or not ². The osteoarthritis version, in knees and hips, found no difference either ³. The Q-Ray "ionized" bracelet tied its placebo on every measure, and the FTC later ordered up to $87 million in refunds ^{4 5}. Two meta-analyses reached the same verdict ^{6 7}.

Take the bracelet off and put the slot to work.

The cost isn't the twenty dollars. Wearing a bracelet feels like doing something, so the urgency softens and the gel, the shoes, the GP call get put off. A year on, the stairs are still hard. With rheumatoid arthritis the clock is harsher: the months on the wrist are months the joint erosions get to happen, and those don't come back.