Mozzie Clicks

[hughie522]

The Swift article about silly stuff for sale in in-flight magazines got me thinking about something I bought a few months ago: the mozzie click.

It's manufactured by Tecnimed srl of Italy, and uses the compression of qwartz crystal (paraphrasing) to generate a short electrical impulse which can relieve the pain of mozzie bites (you click it on the skin 5 - 15 times).

The problem is, I don't know whether it's genuine or just some placebo effect. I don't know enough about human biology to know whether this is legit or not and the site information seems pretty convincing (but then, they all do to the layman). There's a few studies quoted on their site below:

Website: http://www.tecnimed.com/index_e.html

Anyone know anything about this?

[casebro]

It sounds like an excellent placebo- the more intense the treatment, the greater the placebo effect. Something that takes effort, clicks, sparks, smells of ozone, ought to have a bigger placebo than Smilin' Bob. You do remember "My placebo got bigger with Enzyte" don't you?

This reminds me of the myth that high voltage neutralizes venom. Outdoorsmen were actually hooking themselves up to their car's ignition coils, or tazing themselves, for snake bite. Theory was that it 'cooked' the venom, or did something to kick the immune system into action. Not so, seems snakes only even inject about half the time anyhow.

[politas]

The scientific bibliography they have there only mentions snake bites, so I'm not sure how relevant such papers would be to mozquito bites, which are irritating for entirely different reasons.

I suppose it's possible that these devices numb your nerves long enough for your body to deal with the irritant. AFAIK, the red swelling is mostly caused by scratching, not the mosquito's saliva.

It's not a device I'd be spending any money on, anyway. Mosquito bites don't affect me after the initial sting.