FSTDT Forums
Community => Science and Technology => Topic started by: Askold on June 28, 2013, 04:39:52 am
-
How the heck is this still popular?
I mean I've heard about it now and then and EVERY FRIGGING time the story includes someone's skin turning blue/grey after using colloidal silver. I swear that this is just as stupid as the AIDS deniers stuff. People are getting sick and dying but people still use the dang stuff and counter every fact and claim against it with conspiracies and excuses.
Don't they know other users who have gotten sick? You'd think that they'd notice if all of their friends start cosplaying Smurfs...
Anyway I got another reminder about this after a mainpage post about it. Against my better wisdom I went to check the source and it just kept getting worse:
http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/5242084/fpart/all/vc/1
Some people are repeatedly trying to explain to the original poster how stupid his idea is. And the fact that his test is so poorly planned that despite the mushrooms dying there is no way to "prove" what did it (probably the silver though, as he would have known even before the experiment had he read anything about it.)
I also found some Finnish sites, mostly shops that sell natural remedies and alternative medicine supplies, are selling colloidal silver. And now I have a headache. I didn't know how popular and far spread this thing was. And I'd have thought that there are some regulations or laws against the baseless claims the sellers of this stuff make. "Oh, sure Argyria is real but it only happens if you are doing it wrong." And all that junk about how "electrically charged silver molecules" are somehow safer and better and do not cause argyria...
-
My cousin is convinced that wearing magnets makes her healthier while my sister-in-law wears a copper bracelet because the copper keeps his body "in balance." The only positive their ideas have over the colloidal silver is they aren't ingesting their magnets or copper (at least they aren't yet).
-
Actually, magnet therapy is showing some success in treating people with bipolar and severe depression.
As for the other, oy vey. Some people will drink anything.
-
Actually, magnet therapy is showing some success in treating people with bipolar and severe depression.
Transmagnetic cranial stimulation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation) shows some success (but is still in early stages of research and the results are not completely conclusive).
Magnet therapy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_therapy), i.e. wearing small permanent magnets on your body, is a completely different thing and has no actual effect.
-
I've seen dog collars that include magnets for magnet therapy.
I wish I was joking.
-
I've seen dog collars that include magnets for magnet therapy.
I wish I was joking.
My favourite was the anti-tick magnet thing you're supposed to give your dog. The marketing material is the usual mumbo jumbo about quantums and magnets. It's actually just a magnet strip(like in a credit card) that says "DOG TICK" in binary (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Shoo!Tag#Investigating_the_magnetic_encoding)
As for drinking collodial silver, eh, I guess most people who are into it have never seen one of their friends turn blue so they can all brush it to "not doing it properly."
Does anyone rub lead to their skin to make it shimmer?
-
About 6 months ago my psychiatrist has advised me on taking "liquid silver" for my acne.
-
About 6 months ago my psychiatrist has advised me on taking "liquid silver" for my acne.
How? Why? It doesn't take a PhD to know and someone with a PhD should know better.
-
About 6 months ago my psychiatrist has advised me on taking "liquid silver" for my acne.
I hope you found a new shrink ASAP, sounds like a crank, and what was he doing giving advice about acne in the first place?
-
Rad, if you can, try AcuTane. That shit worked WONDERS for me. I was acne-free (or effectively) inside of six months. You have to get blood draws every month because it can do bad things to your liver, but it's a small price to pay, I think.
-
The body can benefit from silver. Flamazine is a very effective burn ointment, and I wouldn't doubt that some amount of it can help with certain health problems, but I'll be the last to stand up for colloidal silver being in any way necessary.
-
Eating silver...plebs. Everyone knows the real class is in eating platinum.
-
My cousin is convinced that wearing magnets makes her healthier while my sister-in-law wears a copper bracelet because the copper keeps his body "in balance." The only positive their ideas have over the colloidal silver is they aren't ingesting their magnets or copper (at least they aren't yet).
Reminds me of a former friend's mother. She was a nutty fundie, but she also got into pseudoscience and alternative medicine. She claimed that you should only walk on Earth surfaces like grass, dirt, and sand and never wear shoes to try and maintain your connection to Earth's magnetosphere. She gave her kids magnet-filled foam pillows, which are decidedly lethal when used in pillow fights, and always had a mysterious "herbal tea" that she kept on a magnet in the fridge that she drank regularly (and always seemed high as balls after drinking it).
-
My cousin is convinced that wearing magnets makes her healthier while my sister-in-law wears a copper bracelet because the copper keeps his body "in balance." The only positive their ideas have over the colloidal silver is they aren't ingesting their magnets or copper (at least they aren't yet).
Reminds me of a former friend's mother. She was a nutty fundie, but she also got into pseudoscience and alternative medicine. She claimed that you should only walk on Earth surfaces like grass, dirt, and sand and never wear shoes to try and maintain your connection to Earth's magnetosphere.
I realise I shouldn't be looking for sense in pseudoscientific woo, but why grass of all things? I'm not even sure what a "connection to the magnetosphere" is supposed to be, but I'd guess you'd be better off with a ferromagnetic material like iron or nickel.
-
My cousin is convinced that wearing magnets makes her healthier while my sister-in-law wears a copper bracelet because the copper keeps his body "in balance." The only positive their ideas have over the colloidal silver is they aren't ingesting their magnets or copper (at least they aren't yet).
Reminds me of a former friend's mother. She was a nutty fundie, but she also got into pseudoscience and alternative medicine. She claimed that you should only walk on Earth surfaces like grass, dirt, and sand and never wear shoes to try and maintain your connection to Earth's magnetosphere.
I realise I shouldn't be looking for sense in pseudoscientific woo, but why grass of all things? I'm not even sure what a "connection to the magnetosphere" is supposed to be, but I'd guess you'd be better off with a ferromagnetic material like iron or nickel.
Exactly, you shouldn't be looking for sense. The idea is that man-made materials (even ones as benign as asphalt, to say nothing of interior floors), which includes shoes, blocks your connection to Earth's magnetosphere and causes illness. So you should go barefoot and only walk on natural ground.
-
Earths magnetic field extends pretty far. Wearing shoes is not enough to insulate you from it.
-
Earths magnetic field extends pretty far. Wearing shoes is not enough to insulate you from it.
Do you REALLY expect to make sense to a woman who thinks small magnets have any curative powers?
-
I wish they would just stick with completely mystic/religious things rather than pseudoscience. Why claim that magnets or colloidal silver work when it is easy to disprove? Why sell stuff that is poisonous and actually harms people?
All those nonsensical explanations hurt my head, at least prayer healing or homeopathy and the like don't have a chance of poisoning and killing the user... And at least I don't feel like screaming "MAGNETS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!" to someone who does faith healing or such.
Although using those and not going to real doctor at all is also harmful, but using them alongside real prescription medicine is not that bad.
-
Uh...
I understand walking barefoot in grass and dirt to almost-literally connect with nature, but...
Considering I believe the whole "magnet therapy" is proven to be a load of bullshit I just want her to stay far away from my hypothetical children.
-
I wish they would just stick with completely mystic/religious things rather than pseudoscience. Why claim that magnets or colloidal silver work when it is easy to disprove? Why sell stuff that is poisonous and actually harms people?
All those nonsensical explanations hurt my head, at least prayer healing or homeopathy and the like don't have a chance of poisoning and killing the user... And at least I don't feel like screaming "MAGNETS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!" to someone who does faith healing or such.
Although using those and not going to real doctor at all is also harmful, but using them alongside real prescription medicine is not that bad.
Rationalwiki has some good articles on homeopathy (including scientific explanations for why it's bullshit), as well as reasons for why people continue to stick with it.
Generally homeopathic and pseudoscientific methods have a lot of manipulative anecdotal accounts, and rely on vague personal feelings when determining symptoms and improvement rather than actual measurable changes. Just about anything good can be applied to them, while anything bad can be waved off as something unrelated.
One other way homeopathy tries to avoid any scientific scrutiny is to make bullshit claims about how exact a process has to be (especially their "succusion" to mix up the stuff right, which has intentionally vague instructions to let anyone decide whether or not it's working based on whether or not it's convenient to claim that it was done improperly), or how it has to be tailored to the individual. Their thinking is that if a medicine has to be specifically tailored to the person and situation, they can brush off any actual objective claims of effectiveness by saying that it wasn't "done right."
-
I wish they would just stick with completely mystic/religious things rather than pseudoscience. Why claim that magnets or colloidal silver work when it is easy to disprove? Why sell stuff that is poisonous and actually harms people?
Pseudoscience is a cheap way of making your bullshit seem legitimate, because it draws on the fact that most people accept that science is the way we know things about the world, but many of them can't tell the difference between actual science and science-flavoured woo.
Magnets are easy to use for this because they already seem almost magic, and they have a shitload of legitimate applications. If you don't know any better, it's not hard to think "magical healing powers" is a perfectly reasonable addition to the list.
As for why people end up selling actively harmful stuff as woo, well, law of large numbers. If you sell bullshit without caring what it actually does, then there's a non-negligible probability that it will do harm*. Enough people selling bullshit, some of it will be poison. And then there's the opportunity cost, which makes things much worse.
*Conversely, there's a non-zero probability that it will help, but it's much smaller. In general, any random change in a complex system with multiple interdependent parts is far more likely to break it than to improve it.