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Isn’t this wonderful news? My photograph shows an inexpensive magnetic bracelet that relieves pain and cures so many ailments – including the ‘silent killer’, high blood pressure. Except it can’t cure anything. It’s not a panacea, it’s a scam.
I grant that the false claims may have a surface plausibility to them. After all, we remember from school that our blood contains iron, a shortage of which causes anaemia; and magnets attract iron, don’t they? Well, sort of. We might recollect magnets attracting iron filings in school science lessons. However, the iron in our blood is not in the form of iron filings, but is bonded to the oxyhaemoglobin molecule. And that structure is not magnetic, so nothing happens when magnets are brought near. I’m on iron tablets at the moment, so let me test this theory right now.
Here are the results: fridge magnet and steel paper clips: attraction; fridge magnet and iron pills: no attraction. That’s because the iron in the pills – and in the blood – is not in the form of metallic filings (Fe0), but is in the ionic incarnation of iron (Fe2+), which is not magnetic. (My apologies for including this bit of science in a philosophy article, but it is really the only effective epistemic defence against medical...
Vadodara/Surat. A special CBI court has convicted four individuals in a 23-year-old fire insurance fraud case in Gujarat and sentenced each of them to three years of rigorous imprisonment. The cou...