Do the claims made about this product have any merit? Does titanium have any therapeutic properties? I have a co-worker who swears by this glove, but I suspect that it works no better than any other brace.
It’s garbage. If the claim is that it works by reflecting body heat back to the affected area, then gold is a far better reflector of IR radiation than titanium and aluminum is about as good, if not slightly better as well as a whole helluva lot cheaper.
It doesn’t look like they are actually claiming anything especially therapeutic about titanium itself, just that it “reflects heat back into the glove”. So all they’re really selling is a warm glove/hand brace (albeit with “TITANIUM!!!” in the ad copy) which I assume works as well as a generic neoprene one would.
This wikipedia article notes that titanium is useful in medical implants because it’s treated pretty neutrally by your body (thus, titanium hip implants and whatnot). The article also notes that it’s nontoxic when ingested.
No mention of any kind of health benefits, per se. IMHO whatever titanium is in that glove (and for $12.97 you ain’t getting a lot of it) isn’t contributing anything.
The advertisement is saying that titanium “bounces heat back”, which seems to be representing it as an insulator.
While titanium isn’t a great conductor, it’s still not a good insulator. It appears to have about the same heat conductivity as steel[sup]1[/sup], which going from the Wikipedia is about 15k[sup]2[/sup], as compared to 0.15k for plain ol’ dirt. So assuming there’s anything to be said for holding in the heat of your hands for therapeutic goodness, you’d still be better off with dirt than titanium.
Given that they’re not even right about what material would be right to use to get their attempted effect, I think it’s safe to discount that the effect itself has much backing to it.
Missed the edit window after reading.
Q.E.D. probably knows more about this stuff than me, so IR reflection might be what we’re talking about rather than heat conduction. I don’t know anything about the latter.
Oh, hell, I don’t know what they’re talking about either. “Bouncing back” sounded like reflection to me, so I ran with that. It occurs to me that the “titanium” in these gloves might very well be titanium dioxide. What that means, I have no idea as I’m not familiar with its physical properties WRT infrared reflectivity or thermal insulation.
My mom and grandma each have a titanium knee, and I was under the impression that titanium is really inert. I smell a scam here.
I did check out the wikipedia article before posting here, and noticed what it said about its neutrality toward the body. This made suspect that the presence of titanium in the glove would have no efect on one’s hand, but I thought I’d ask to make sure I hadn’t misinterpreted anything. I thank you all for your replies; saving that $12.97 paid for my SDMB subscription 