Q-Ray bracelet buyers were misled: U.S. judge

Put the Q-Ray bracelet on the shelf along with purported baldness cures and feel-good tonics, according to a federal judge who ruled on Friday the jewelry did not relief pain as advertised.

U.S. District Judge Morton Denlow ordered QT Inc. of Mount Prospect, Illinois, and its owner, Que Te Park, to refund more than 100,000 buyers of the bracelets -- priced up to $249.95 -- and forfeit profits of $22.6 million earned between 2000 and 2003.

The ruling supported a 3-year-old complaint by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and rejected the defense's theory that if people believe the product helps them, why not advertise?

Before the ruling, the company's attorney said half the buyers of the product, a C-shaped bracelet with screw-on caps on each end, claimed to get relief from pain and more than half bought it for someone else, while one in four sought a refund. Among the wearers were professional athletes, the lawyer said.

"With the Q-Ray bracelet, if defendants had represented that the bracelet possessed no pain-relieving properties but was simply an interesting piece of wrist jewelry, there would be no placebo effect," Denlow wrote in his ruling.

Widely advertised in televised infomercials and on the Web since 2000, the pain-relieving qualities of Q-Ray bracelets were more fiction than scientific fact, Denlow ruled. He cited a Mayo Clinic study that showed the placebo effect was responsible for the effectiveness reported by some users. The placebo effect is when a treatment with no medical benefits makes patients feel better because they believe it will help.

Among previous products cited by the judge where false advertising was punished by the courts were the Helsinki Formula baldness cure and the Acu-Dot pain-relieving magnet.

Park found the bracelet, which is made in Spain by Bio-Ray S.A., in an airport shop in Barcelona and said it helped his back pain. He bought one for his wife for her migraines