Unlike some other arthritis treatments, there doesn’t appear to be anything actually harmful about the Free Enterprise Radon Health Mine in Boulder, Mont. True, radio-active radon gas—the active ingredient in what the mine’s owners advertise as "the unmedical approach to anthritis"—can cause cancer. (21)But while the radiation level in the old uranium mine is 175 times the federal standard for dwellings, patients spend only a couple of hours a day down there—not enough to be dangerous by itself. The average patient’s age is 72, according to Adrian Howe, chief of the state Occupational Health Bureay; since "the time it takes for lung cancer to develop in an adult is 15 to 30 years, it’s likely that other potential causes of death might occur before lung cancer." Is it odd that people would seek out a known carcinogen in their quest for relief from arthritis Not really. Arthritis patients are particularly apt to try unproven treatments; one study found that 94 percent of a group of patients had tried at least one unconventional therapy. Conventional therapies often don’t work and can have unpleasant side effects. (22)Pain is subjective, notoriously prone to the placebo effect, the temporary improvement that may follow even medically useless treatments. The symptoms of arthritis can become much weaker for a time no apparent reason, and it is easy for patients to be fooled by such a phenomenon. People who take unconventional cures "get" pain relief, "not an actual decrease in swelling of the joints or changes in lab-test results," says Dr. Frederic McDuffie, director of the Arthritis Center at Atlanta’s Piedmont Hospital. "Who can tell them they’re not feeling better" (23) Almost every substance that can be packaged has been sold as an arthritis treatment at one time or another. These range from the merely misnamed ("arthritis formula" painkillers, in which the formula is aspirin) to the harmless but useless (copper bracelets) to the repulsive (injections of turtle blood, because turtles live a long time without getting arthritis) and the dangerous (unsupervised doses of steroids). Just last month a supermarket newspaper carried a front-page story on a "wonder salad dressing" for arthritis (garlic oil and cider vinegar). In one experiment, people believed that spraying joints with the household lubricant was beneficial. (24) Radon mines at least boast a distant medical antecedent. At one time, McDuffie says, radiation therapy was used to treat a severe spinal arthritis. Unfortunately, he adds, "the amount of radiation they had to give to produce relief caused leukemia." Daryl Parker, president of the free Enterprise mine, claims that in radon therapy the gas "works as a powerful nerve and cell stimulant that has a profound effect on the central nervous system.., it stimulates the boy’s own ability to heal itself." (25) It is a powerful tribute to either nerve stimulation or the power of suggestion that people say they really do feel better after sitting in a damp, 50-degree cavern for two hours a day. As many as 120 people daily spend $3.50 an hour to descend 80 feet into the granite-walled tunnel and breathe the stimulating emanations. "I’ve been to a number of doctors. I’ve been to healers in the Philippines, and sitting in the mine gives me more relief than anything," says 69-year-old D.M. Langford, who drives up to the mine twice a year from the San Joaquin Valley. "I get where I can’t walk if I don’t come up here." As McDuffie says, who can tell him he’s not feeling better