Ionic Foot Bath - Works or a Hoax?

So I bought a Groupon recently that was for an Ionic Foot Bath, Acupuncture, and a 1 hour Massage.  (Does everyone use Groupon?  If not, you totally should, it's amazing.  I buy SO MUCH stuff on here and I love it so much.  I even have the app on my phone to make my Groupon purchasing even easier!).

Anyway, I knew I would love the massage, have always wanted to try acupuncture, and figured I would just do the foot bath thing.

I was right - the massage was amazing, the acupuncture was an experience, but the foot bath thing was just weird.

The water starts out looking like this:

The trash bag adds a touch of elegance.

Then you put your feet in and they start the bubbly thing.  Then the water took an odd turn:

The whole soaking-my-feet-in-jaundice-water was different.

Apparently if it's this color, it means you have joint problems.  The dr. walked over and asked if I did.  I was actually super amazed that he could tell that, but a little suspicious of the water.

A little more time passed and then suspicious turned to out right revulsion.  Here's what the water looked like:

The water was brown/red, gooey, and super murky.

When the time finally came to take my feet out, the water smelled really irony and was a gross color.

In talking about it later to my husband, he also thought the whole process sounded suspicious.  We looked it up and I think it's all a hoax.  I watched a video where a guy put a banana in the water and got the same results.  So unless that banana also had joint problems, I think this was just 30- minutes where I sat with my feet in a gross pool of trash-bag water.