Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Oct. 4, 2010
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Magnetic medallions, ionic bracelets, and
moronic ads DEFINITION-Quack medical devices: 1. Medical devices designed to help ducks vocalize. 2, Most of the junk you see advertised on TV infomercials. I thought that, with the realities of National Health Care slowly settling into our collective consciousness, it might be time to discuss the vast array of quack medical products marketed to an unsuspecting public. Products like “All natural Colon Flow,” which can cleanse, renew, refurnish, and completely redecorate your old colon and make you feel just like you did when you were a ten-year-old ... unless you happened to be a ten-year-old all humped over with Childhood Spastic Colon Syndrome. This stuff is so good that they’ll send a month’s supply for free. It’s miraculous, and there are thousands of products just like it at your disposal. But since it is already 9 p.m., and this column is due tomorrow morning (by which time I fully intend to have had eight hours of sleep) I won’t chronicle the thousands of quack medical products sold over the past 130 years. No, two will have to suffice. And since they are basically the same product, with the only difference being that one was patented in 1878, and the other in the early 21st Century, they should prove that when it comes to human intelligence, industry, and creativity, nobody ever really learns anything. PRODUCT NO. 1: BOYD’S BATTERY® When we were kids back in the mid-20th Century, my friend Scott Perkins and I discovered a little medallion while looking for spacecraft debris in an old barn loft. Neither of us knew what the medallion was, but it said “Boyd’s Battery" on one side. We entertained the notion, for a little while, anyway, that somewhere in that loft old Boyd had been abandoned by the rest of his spacecraft crew, and left all rusted and useless due to a critical battery malfunction. What I would learn, long after 21st Century computers had reared their ugly monitors, was that Boyd’s Battery was actually an old quack medical device–a galvanic battery composed of “twelve disks of copper, brass, and white metal, surrounding a copper rosette,” designed to be suspended by a silk thread and worn over the heart for “magnetic healing.” It was patented in 1878, and touted as a cure for a whole variety of ailments, ranging from rheumatic heart disease to impotence to St. Vitus Dance. The theory was that certain metals mounted next to each other would emit electrical impulses, which would draw corrupted moisture from the human body and replace it with healthful electrons. Other battery pendants would follow, including the Sagendorph Battery, and models by people like Richardson and Downing, who were not above stealing medical technology as long as the public thought the idea was a good one. Later, as the 20th Century loomed, devices like electric belts, galvanic shoe inserts, and magnetic ear muffs would appear. But that was over a century ago, when the general public was relatively unsophisticated when it came to medical quackery. Now, in the year 2010, a time of technological achievement like mankind has never known, a time of startling electronic and medical advancement, we know better. Now we have: PRODUCT NO. 2: THE iRENEW® BRACELET Unlike that old-fashioned, childish piece of medical hocus pocus known as Boyd’s Battery, there is now a brand new, modern, technologically advanced piece of medical hocus pocus known as the iRenew® bracelet. To quote one of their ads, the iRenew bracelet will “harness natural frequencies that occur in your immediate environment to help tune and rebalance your biofield to a more natural state.” And if you are not a trained medical person, but are still curious about things like natural frequencies and biofields, not to worry. The ad explains: “Your biofield is an integral part of your whole being, not just your body. It is in close balance with every aspect of your self and can become easily unbalanced due to electromagnetic radiation surrounding you at any given moment. When you pop on the iRenew bracelet, you are restoring your biofield’s natural balance with biofield technology that works to balance the frequencies of energy surrounding you.” So there! According to the TV commercial, this amazing product will help restore your strength, wellness, and balance. There is actual video footage of real, live unbalanced persons who are not trained actors. They appear to be in a shopping mall somewhere, and before donning their stylish iRenew® bracelets they stumble around a lot and lurch into each other. If we hadn’t already been advised that their natural biofields were unbalanced due to electromagnetic radiation coming from that shoe store behind them, we would probably think they were drunk. But after placing their bracelets on their wrists, they are no longer unbalanced, and dance gracefully around the food court like members of the Bolshoi Ballet. The product is endorsed by no less a medical authority than Mike Bell, former running back for the Super Bowl Champion New Orleans Saints, who now wears his iRenew® bracelet while playing for the Philadelphia Eagles. He says he is very balanced, this season. This piece of state-of-the-art medical technology can be acquired for a mere $19.99 plus shipping and handling. NO, WAIT, due to some overwhelming humanitarian impulse, the iRenew® CEO has agreed to generously give away, at no extra cost, another whole, entire biofield frequency balancing bracelet for the same ridiculously low price. Plus shipping and handling, of course. And the cynics try to tell us that we, the American public haven’t learned anything in the last 130 years. |