I’ve already recounted my tale of the Giant Rat of Sogo, in which I was trapped for 4.5 hours in a rat-infested department store, but what I failed to mention were the “magic†rocks.
We were in the bedding department, negotiating the purchase of a house-warming gift. The negotiations were in Chinese, so I was bored and pondering the other items in the area when I came across the item pictured here. I made the mistake of having my wife ask what it was.
The story I got was, to put it mildly, absurd. This special pad is filled with amazing, magical rocks from brazil, that exhibit an miraculous healing properties.
When the pad interactions with your body heat and humidity, it generates a natural electrical field and negative ions, which promote health and well-being.
It’s good to see that snake-oil merchants haven’t been put out of business or relegated into cyberspace, they’ve settled into major department stores in Taiwan.
The sales girls were so keen to sell me this pad that they insisted that we take it home and try it out for two days. I know there are no magic rocks or demonstrable health benefits derived from negative ion bombardment or electrical stimulation – at least not of the type they were claiming, but I thought it would make an interesting blog post.
So I tried the pad in the spirit of scientific inquiry – zip, nadda, nothing. It gets a bit warm and sweaty, which is not a good thing in Taiwan.
So we returned it, especially since it cost over US$ 200. Yes, that’s not a typo. Two-hundred US dollars. Even more frightening: They make entire mattresses out of the stuff. I couldn’t stand to even find out how much that cost!
Finally, I did a little research on the “magic†rocks. It’s nothing more than tourmaline, a semi-precious gemstone with no “magical†properties whatsoever. (The phenomena of being both pyroelectric (generating electricity from heat/cold) and piezoelectric (generating electricity from mechanical stress) are completely natural, explainable and scientific. None of which renders healing properties any more than magnets do.) Being pyroelectric does mean it is great for collecting dust, though.
I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried. People are just falling all over themselves to believe nonsense.