I second this... I have already sent it on to a number of colleagues!
PT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lisa" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, July 12, 2010 10:39 AM
Subject: RE: CS>8 myths about CS.
Thank you -- this is awesome!
Lisa
-----Original Message-----
From: Alchemysa [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, July 12, 2010 3:29 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: CS>8 myths about CS.
Something I saved a while back. Might have appeared here before...
but worth repeating occassionaly.
David
8 Prevalent Myths and Misconceptions About Colloidal Silver
Myth #1: Children are being harmed by colloidal silver
In June of this year, the Friends of the Earth environmentalist group
came out with their new position paper calling for a total ban on the
over-the-counter sales of colloidal silver products as well as EPA
regulation of all products using silver as an antimicrobial agent.
And why? Because, they claimed, the proliferation of silver-based
antimicrobial products is depriving children of coming into contact
with the requisite number of pathogens needed to stimulate their tiny
immune systems.
Of course, it's an unbelievable claim at face value. After all,
little kids eat dirt. They roll around in the grass and dirt all day,
throw mud balls at each other, play baseball in empty lots, climb
trees, swim in lakes and rivers, play on dirty floors, climb into
dumpsters in search of "treasure," and do all of the things needed to
put them into contact with hundreds of billions of microorganisms
every single day of their lives. Yet the Friends of the Earth -- with
a straight face, mind you -- presented as a reason to ban colloidal
silver and other silver-based products the idea that kids' immune
systems were being developmentally deprived thanks to the
proliferation of so many silver-based products. And this new myth is
now being picked up in forums across the internet, and used as
"evidence" that colloidal silver is harmful. Clearly, these guys at
the Friends of the Earth have never had children.
Myth #2: Colloidal silver has been "banned by the FDA"
Recently we also saw an MSNBC news article written by reporter Mike
Celizic which declared that the FDA had "banned colloidal silver"
back in 1999. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
What the FDA did was prohibit colloidal silver vendors from labeling
their product as a "natural antibiotic" and restrict colloidal silver
advertisers from talking about its powerful antimicrobial qualities
in advertisements.
This restrictive action, of course, led to more public interest in
colloidal silver than it had ever enjoyed in its entire 100 year
history, and propelled colloidal silver into one of the most popular
nutritional supplements of all times. Celizic's erroneous contention,
however, has now been picked up by other writers and spread across a
variety of internet forums where it is being used by opponents of
natural health to convince people not to use colloidal silver because
it's been "banned by the FDA."
Myth #3: Colloidal silver causes a "cytokine storm"
Next, we had a famous internet doctor claim that colloidal silver
could cause a potentially deadly "cytokine storm" (massive
inflammation) in the lungs of even healthy individuals. The doctor
presented no evidence whatsoever for his claim. And a quick search of
the available medical data demonstrated that the only significant
research done on colloidal silver and cytokines showed that silver
actually modifies cytokine expression and reduces inflammation. The
authors of the medical study even stated that colloidal silver should
be further investigated as a potential treatment for the massive
inflammation caused by the "cytokine storm" phenomena. The famous
internet doctor later removed the erroneous statement from his web
site, but not before other writers spread it all over the internet as
"evidence" that colloidal silver usage can have potentially "deadly"
consequences.
Myth #4: Colloidal silver harms human cells
We also recently saw the old "colloidal silver harms human cells"
myth being dredged up again. Once more, the culprit was the
environmental group Friends of the Earth, which erroneously
attributes medical research demonstrating that silver damages
bacterial cells (i.e., e. coli cells) as evidence that silver damages
human cells. Of course, they can't explain how Dr. Robert O. Becker
of Syracuse Medical University was able to conduct all of those now
famous in vivo (i.e., in the body) medical studies on human subjects,
in which he used an electronic device to drive billions of tiny
silver particles deep into the infected tissue and bone of
"incurable" victims of osteomyelitis, and managed to cure every one
of them without causing any harm whatsoever to their cells or tissues.
Certain other internet writers have also misinterpreted a recent test
tube study demonstrating that high levels of silver in the blood
stream could harm certain human cells. The levels of silver used in
these lab tests would have been the equivalent of 15 ppm in the human
blood stream - a level you couldn't reach without drinking gallons of
a standard colloidal silver solution.
Myth #5: Colloidal silver causes hardening of the arteries
Honestly, I don't know where in the world this one came from. But
suddenly it's cropping up on web sites all over the place, with no
documentation whatsoever to back it up. As usual, it appears that one
writer is simply quoting another, who is then quoted by another and
another, until a complete fallacy becomes "reality." Several weeks
ago I googled "colloidal silver and hardening of the arteries" and
"colloidal silver and arteriosclerosis" and searched for several
hours. I couldn't find a single solid piece of medical documentation
for the claim that colloidal silver causes hardening of the arteries,
except for the regurgitated and unattributed claims in those articles.
I also searched the various medical science news sites (even the ones
that are routinely critical of silver) and couldn't find any
references to it causing artery problems. What's more, I hired a
pharmaceutical consultant to track down the origin of this growing
myth. He searched the PubMed database and other key medical study
databases, and could find absolutely nothing indicating any negative
connection between colloidal silver and arteriosclerosis, or
hardening of the arteries. We did find a recent study published in
the prestigious medical science journal ACS Nano, demonstrating that
silver stops red blood cells from clumping, which would help prevent
heart attacks and strokes rather than cause them. So at this point my
conclusion is that someone just made up the claim out of whole cloth,
and it is getting passed around the internet by people too lazy to do
any fact-checking or to demand documentation.
Myth #6: Colloidal silver causes harm to kidneys
This pervasive myth, along with Myth #7 below, is being cited in a
variety of news articles on the internet, as well as by environmental
groups like Friends of the Earth that are working to force the EPA to
regulate colloidal silver products as "pesticides." Both of these
myths are unfounded. As Dr. Gary Connett wrote in the prestigious
Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine in 2007, "Case reports have
described possible nephrotoxicity and neurotoxicity, but these have
not been substantiated by studies in animal models." (See J R Soc Med
2008: 101: S51-S52. DOI 10.1258/jrsm.2008.s18012.) In other words,
doctors have speculated that silver usage has caused harm to human
kidneys and the human nervous system based on individual case
reports, but that speculation has not been proven to be true when
silver is actually tested. Silver given to animals during medical
studies has shown no significant harm to the kidneys, liver or
nervous system of the animals. Neither could it be definitively
demonstrated that silver was the actual culprit in the few individual
human cases that led doctors to speculate that silver may have
nephrotoxic or neurotoxic properties. In short, there is no
significant evidence that silver harms the liver or the nervous system.
Myth #7: Colloidal silver causes harm to the nervous system
See Myth #6 above. Again, numerous internet "news" reports cite this
myth, but there are to date no studies proving it. It is all based
upon speculation, from a few single cases in which doctors made
assumptions that later could not be proven to be true in animal studies.
According to a study titled "Critical Observations on the
Neurotoxicity of Silver," published in Critical Review of Toxicology
(2007;37:237-50) "Although silver is metabolized throughout the soft
tissues, available evidence from experimental animal studies and
human clinical reports has failed to unequivocally establish that it
enters tissues of the central nervous system or is a cause of
neurotoxic damage...No evidence is available to demonstrate the toxic
risk of silver to the peripheral nervous system...Transitory silver
sulfide deposits seen in the tissues of the blood-brain and blood-CSF
barriers are mostly lysosomally bound or deposited on basement
membranes or collagen without toxic effect. Silver is mostly excreted
from the body in the urine and feces." In other words, in animal
studies and human clinical reports, there is no evidence that silver
causes harm to the human nervous system.
Myth #8: Colloidal silver causes cancer
This myth is being promulgated chiefly by one of those fake internet
"doctors" who is pushing high-dose vitamin C therapy to help prevent
infections. Now, I'm not against high-dose vitamin C therapy, but I
am against people pretending to be doctors when they're not. And I'm
certainly against people who promulgate outright lies, such as the
lie that colloidal silver causes cancer. This myth originally
circulated in the 1970's after some scientists surgically implanted
silver discs under the skin of animals, and saw that sarcomas (soft
tissue cancer tumors) later developed. So they announced to the world
that silver causes cancer. Later, when more level-headed researchers
looked into the situation, they discovered that just about anything
surgically implanted under the skin would induce sarcomas, i.e.,
glass, plastic, ivory, wood, etc. This is due to a phenomena called
"solid state carcinogenesis." In other words, it wasn't the silver at
all, but the normal effect of just about anything being implanted
directly under the surface of the skin.
The Environmental Protection Agency later jumped into the fray,
looking for another reason to regulate silver, but after reviewing
the existing medical and scientific documentation the agency had to
conclude, "No evidence of cancer in humans has been reported despite
frequent therapeutic use of the compound [i.e., silver] over the
years." In other words, there are no cases of colloidal silver-
induced cancers reported in the medical or scientific literature.
Quite the contrary, researchers Furst and Schlauder later conducted
animal studies designed to avoid the possibility of solid state
carcinogenesis. They found that even when relatively high amounts of
silver were injected intramuscularly once a month into rats it did
not induce cancer.
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