I was at a holiday party recently where some children and a few adults were showing off a Power Balance Bracelet; I had never heard of this particular magic amulet, so I agreed to a demonstration. A young teenager gave me a “push test”. I was asked to stand on only one leg while a relatively gentle push to my shoulders was administered. I was given the bracelet, and the test was repeated.

“See?” The proponent argued. “Don’t you feel more balanced?”

I admit I did feel more balanced during the admittedly unscientific push test while wearing the bracelet. And so I proverbially put on my critical thinking hat and pondered the result. Could it be the weight of the object like a tight rope walker and his pole? Was I unintentionally pushed lighter as the pusher knew I was wearing the bracelet? Was it all, so to speak, “in my head”?

There was no shortage of explanations from its users. One believer proffered the hypothesis he recollected: the bracelets gather the negative ions from your body and send them out to the environment in discrete pulses. Another insisted they worked by balancing the human body’s “natural energy field” (the words “chi” and “chakra” came to mind but were never mentioned). And another did not know how it worked but was sure it did as he heard NASA gives these bracelets to its astronauts before rocketing above Earth.

Investigating

As these explanations were hardly satisfactory, I retreated to a quiet corner of the room during a break in conversation and frantically searched the web from my phone for anything about these bracelets. Other than the endless stream of celebrity endorsements, there were few-to-no sites that expressed praise for the magic bracelets. I did find quite a few skeptic sites describing double-blind experiments performed on these devices, all of which demonstrated no benefit. But let’s go to the source.

According to the Power Balance website, the bracelets contain a Mylar hologram. For those who are unaware, Mylar is a trade name of the human-engineered biaxially-oriented polyethylene terephthalate, or BoPET. BoPET is the polyester film out of which those grocery store balloons are made; it is also what covers standard tape measures, seals yoghurt containers, and packages convenience foods. So, why Mylar? I searched around a few days later and was unable to find any reason why a Mylar hologram was essential to their process.

These “Mylar holograms”, according to their website, are “embedded with frequencies”. What? A “frequency” is a measurement of the count of something per unit time. “Frequency” is how often something occurs; to “embed a frequency” is as meaningless as “embedding a velocity” - nothing has been communicated because, though the words are all real, they are meaningless within the context they were used. To put it another way, automobile print artichoke - got it?

But they were not alone in making such silly claims. As it turns out, a few days later, I happened upon a television commercial for the “iRenew” bracelet, which, though it looks different, seems to promise fundamentally similar results. According to their website, the iRenew bracelet works by “bringing your BioField to a more balanced state”. What’s a BioField? Beats me. But according to them, a BioField “is an integral part of your whole being” and “is in close balance with every aspect of your self”, but they provide no further detail. As silly as the claim “although it seems like magic, it is actually science!” may be, my favorite claim on their website is that electromagnetic radiation and electromagnetic fields are “unnatural”.

Testing

After completing my research, I re-entered the party floor and navigated to the group discussing the bracelets. Being a skeptic and a scientist, my first instinct was not to miss the so-called “teachable moment” - and with a dozen children and teenagers present I believe passing such an opportunity would nearly be criminal.

My proposal to the group was to do some quick and dirty double-blind tests of the effect by which the group was most impressed: as one believer put it, “you become like a pillar”. It was my hope that the results of these tests, while certainly not well-designed and the results of which would not be statistically significant, would provide some room for doubt about the bracelet’s efficacy.

To test the balance gains, a minor girl named Rebecca was blindfolded and one person placed the bracelet (or a similar Live Strong bracelet) over Rebecca’s long sleeve while another administered the (very unscientific) push test.

During the first round, Rebecca could not determine which was the Power Bracelet. The group of believers then objected, proffering the theory that the bracelet must touch the skin to be effective, though they didn’t know why. After initial resistance due to the slightly different shapes of the two bracelets and the subjects’ familiarity with the device, I relented and Rebecca was again blindfolded.

And again, she could not determine which was the Power Bracelet.

The tests did not yield the results I so naively expected; instead of the group finding curiosity in the powerful effects of placebo and confirmation bias, the tests only led to polarization of the groups’ attitudes. The minority who believed the magic bracelets did not work as described walked away more firm in their belief and with a small smile on their faces while the majority left not only firmer in their conviction but also with contempt for the arrogance of those who disbelieved.

What’s Going on Here?

I was not surprised by the group’s lack of critical thinking. We are all familiar with Americans’ scary lack of knowledge when it comes to the big ticket science items like the 68% of Americans who reject evolution by natural selection or the 49% who doubt anthropogenic climate change; I believe these are begat from the general lack of awareness of the insanely high percentage of scientists across all disciplines who accept these two ideas - 84% and 98%, respectively (Pew 2009). My real fear comes from the less discussed statistics, like 25% of Americans believe in the predictive power of astrology, 18% have seen a ghost (Pew 2009), and other statistics of interest that are not from ignorance but rather from a lack of critical thinking.

So I was not surprised that the group as a whole thought neither critically nor skeptically about the magic bracelets. I was however surprised by the ferocity of their belief. All things being equal, these bracelets are either an athletic tool or a fashion statement and which is the correct perspective is ultimately trivial and totally irrelevant to the average person’s life. Yet when challenged, the group’s brains largely shut down and I was suddenly challenging the existence of the dragon in their garage. If we cannot openly listen to someone proposing tests to show that something that doesn’t matter doesn’t work, how are we to do the same for the things that do matter?

Americans’ level of general science knowledge is among the lowest of all industrialized nations. Interstitial advertisements on the web and on television are full of products claiming varied salubrious outcomes, from increased energy to weight loss to immunity boosting. These have been on television for years, so either advertisers are very stupid or people actually buy their products. These ads come with the Quack Miranda Warning. People are willing to buy products to treat a condition when the ad (not to mention the package) specifically says it is not intended to treat any condition. Would these people still see a physician who prefaced all his advice with “these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA” and all his prescriptions with “what I am about to prescribe is not intended to treat, diagnose, prevent, or cure any disease”?

While on the subject TV pseudoscience, I cannot leave out the Discovery and History channels. For all the infotainment programs like Dirty Jobs and Deadliest Catch and genuinely informative programs like the popular MythBusters and Modern Marvels, there is a lot of just plain garbage, like Discovery’s ridiculous Ghost Lab and History’s laughable Ancient Aliens, not to mention the one-off specials like the Moon Landing Hoax. All this in addition to cable news discussions littered with paranoid fantasies about victory mosques, birth certificates, concentration camps, and controlled demolitions.

But I digress.

A Word About Skepticism

People seem to think skepticism is closed-minded and that its practitioners believe in nothing and seek to disprove all things. While I am fond of the old joke that if one is too open-minded her brain will fall out, it would seem to me that in reality, skepticism is the most open-minded of all perspectives. Skepticism starts only with openness but demands a fair analysis of available data and adheres closely to the view popularized by Carl Sagan that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I think I am comfortable speaking for most self-described skeptics when I say that we do not want the “paranormal” to be disproved. On the contrary, for any scientist, how awe-inspiring, mind-bending, and absolutely thrilling would it be to make a simple discovery that would turn a field or two of science on its head?

But let’s have some evidence, please.