I’m pretty sure that’s in the Bible somewhere, but I haven’t cracked one of those open in decades.
Anyway, Jim Bakker, convicted fraud, rapist, and shill for bulk food products, is now capitalizing on fear of the coronavirus to sell a “cure”, bringing on a naturopath to tout the virtues of colloidal silver.
The Jim Bakker Show is suggesting that the silver solution it sells can kill the coronavirus within 12 hours. pic.twitter.com/kbUGnUp69m
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) February 12, 2020
You know it doesn’t work, right? Bakker is selling quantities ranging in price from $40 to $300 to gullible old Christians who tremble in fear at every paranoid theory Fox News trots out.
…similarly marketed products also include colloidal silver which according to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) provides no known health benefits. Ingesting it can cause side effects including argyria, or discoloration of the skin or other tissue, and poor absorption of other medications by the body.
Whoa. When the NCCIH, an organization of quacks designed to funnel federal grant money to other quacks, says this snake oil has no health benefits at all, then you know it’s bad. Of course, knowing NCCIH, they’re probably only saying that because colloidal silver isn’t part of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and they’d rather you got acupuncture to cure your viral disease.
All praise free speech and free markets!
Sure, colloidal silver doesn’t kill coronavirus, but you know what does?
Drinking a pint of chlorine bleach, with an ammonia chaser.
Go for it FAUX viewers!
@2, I far prefer to enjoy a cigar in a room full of ethylene oxide, it kills 10000000000% of all germs.
Because, anything over 100% is more gooder in some markets…
Interesting. Bakker sells a lot of bullshit but I wonder if this could get him into legal trouble? Selling a product with specific medical claims that have zero support and can be disproven might actually be enough to land him in court, assuming anyone has the will to press that sort of case.
I remember an Australian series on outback medicine based around the hospital in the remote mining town of Broken Hill. There was one episode where a patient complained of upper arm pain. The treating doctors noticed his blue skin colour and discovered he was treating himself with regular doses of silver salts. X-rays revealed that a large section of his humerus was missing due to cancer. The doctors weren’t sure if the silver contributed to his disease.
@ Snarki, child of Loki, # 2: Wouldn’t a mixture of bleach and ammonia make you explode? Or at least give off a lot of toxic gas. (There’s a Jim Bakker joke in there somewhere…)
One of my mom’s neighbors tried getting me to try the stuff to cure a wart. I still have the still-full bottle of it. Might be the same brand, even, which wouldn’t surprise me. I mean, she’s someone who thought the End Times were going to happen in the Obama administration and has said “I’d rather have homeless people dying in the streets than see any of my tax money go to supporting them.”
In the pocket of Big Small Needle!
Snarki et al.,
Re: bleach + ammonia: Kid’s don’t try this at home.
The result is chlorine gas. More fun: Iodine crystals + ammonia–yields Nitrogen tri-iodide crystals, a contact explosive so sensitive that a fly landing on a crystal has been known to detonate it. It also stains your surfaces purple!
It is so unstable that you probably could never get enough of it in one spot to be dangerous. It would detonate before you could collect it.
@ a_ray_in_dilbert_space, # 9: I read about that in a Robert Heinlein novel! You probably shouldn’t tell how to get around the problem of not getting enough in one spot to be dangerous.
Speaking of ammonia and iodine, some joker mixed up a batch and spread it all over the sidewalk leading from the dorm to the beach. Seeing the cops try to scrape it into evidence bags was very entertaining.
True story: Back in the dark and distant past, before 9/11, when this sort of thing wouldn’t get you tossed into Gitmo, I was a physics teacher for a summer school for juvenile delinquents. The kids stayed in dormitories on a college campus, at in the cafeteria…, and of course they NEVER slept.
Well physical science was scheduled right after lunch, so I was lecturing to a room full of bobbing heads. I decided to give a lecture on spontaneous chemical reactions, one of which was 2NH_3 + 3 I_2–> 2 NI_3 + 3 H_2. As I poured the brown crystals into the filter paper for drying, I “accidentally” spilled a few on the floor. And 5 minutes and a soft shoe routine later, I had kids falling out of their seats.
After class, I plopped the still wet NI_3 crystals into a baggie and rode my bike over to the program office to report attendance. After a talk with the director, I left her office…forgetting the baggie full of NI_3. Suffice to say, the director and I had another very interesting and much more animated conversation later that evening when I stopped by the dorm to check on the kiddies.
@5, you are correct, absorbed silver is quite toxic. Colloidal-sized particles are probably too big to do much except pass right through your gut, but dissolved silver salts will go right into your bloodstream after oral ingestion, and better yet if they’re injected, which it sounds like this guy was doing.
Why not colloidal gold particles? The huckster could charge even more, and gold salts are really vicious acute poisons, so perhaps a few customers would try that and the huckster could get a few deaths out of it.