Verdigris

I hate it when I don't know how something works. It means I can't fiddle around, changing this parameter or that input, to get precisely what I want out of it. Especially when it's such a simple thing as a copper bracelet.

I found it when I was looking for something else, a few weeks ago, and I had turned out every single drawer in the Haberdasher's unit where I keep my projects: things like half-built solar panel controllers, half-dismantled model railway engines that suddenly stopped working, things to make a cat's fur stand on end, you know the stuff. There, in the bottom of one drawer, was my old copper bracelet.

I bought it when I first moved into the station and started getting pains in my arms and shoulders. I hadn't suffered from them before, and I didn't know what was causing them, and one day in a street-market, I saw this anti-rheumatism device. So I bought it, wore it, probably stopped suffering the pains, couldn't be bothered wearing it any more, took it off, filed it away under D for don;t know.

And then I started getting the pains again, last autumn, and I had forgotten all about the bracelet. I could remember the pains, though. I went to the supermarket and got some of the glucosamine tablets with cod-liver oil. They seemed to work, but also, I had cut down on the brown sugar I had been adding to my oats and muesli, and for a while, convinced myself that it was the excess sugar which had caused the problem. It was, also, cheaper to buy less sugar than it was to buy more glucosamine.

When I was searching through the drawers to try and find the special tool for removing alloy cranks from bicycle axles and came across the bracelet, I remembered buying it all those years ago, and I slipped it back on again, because I had, once again, started to get odd twinges in my upper arms. And then I just forgot about it and went on looking for the bicycle tool.

I remembered the bracelet a little while later, not because my arm stopped hurting; it did, but that took a while longer; I remembered the bracelet because the skin all around it had gone green. Bright green. It washed off, which I was glad to see, but a day later, there it was again, bright green.

After a few days, I noticed that I hadn't felt any pains recently, and I also noticed that my wrist had stopped going green. So I switched the bracelet from my right wrist, for it was the right upper arm which had been hurting, to my left wrist.

Over the next few weeks, I noticed that on some days, my wrist would once more go a vivid green where the copper had touched it, but that the pains had not come back. So, I formulated an hypothesis; sometimes I would have an excess of acid sweat, which manifested itself by leaching salts from the copper onto my skin. What then is curious, is how the copper salts, bright green, act to stop the pains? Does some of the green get absorbed into the skin, thence to the bloodstream, and somehow make up a deficiency? If so, and if taking copper salts can cure arm pains, why doesn't a course of vitamin tablets with the appropriate minerals in them cure the pains?

I'll say right off that I don't believe in any of the quasi-scientific theories that you can find on the web about the beneficial effects of wearing copper bracelets. I know bollocks when I read it, and I should do, I've written enough of it myself.

The real interest to me is not what the copper does, but why, every now and then, I get acid sweat, and how this is linked to pains in the arms. I've already come across one interesting theory that explains how pains in the joints might occur from having excess acidity; the body takes calcium and neutralises the acidity by creating an alkaline compound, and, because the easiest place in the body from which it can get calcium in a hurry is from the joints, and old injuries or imperfections there start to hurt. But the place where I had pains was no near the shoulder joint, it was in the areas below them, about halfway down the upper arm.

And I know that it might seem pointless to wonder about what changes to my diet I could make when I've got this copper bracelet instead, but their are times when you don;t want to be wearing a large chunk of copper on your wrist. Such as when you're reaching around under the bonnet of the car and there's a good supply of amps lurking on lots of exposed terminals and wires. Yes, I know, I can take the bracelet off before I reach around, but then I'll put it down somewhere and fprget about it, and in fifteen years time I'll be rummaging around in the Haberdasher's unit looking for the tiny device that de-magnetises the solenoid valves in the Toshiba household robot, and guess what I'll find in the drawer?