It鈥檚 a wonder these days that anyone ever gets sick.聽If you look through magazines, watch infomercials on TV or cruise the Internet you can have your pick of cure-alls.聽A variety of dietary supplements, oxygenated waters or natural sea salt聽 preparations all claim to cure every ailment known to humankind.聽Colloidal silver is one of these supposed panaceas.聽The term colloidal just means that the particles of silver are so small that they do not settle out of the solution.聽According to the advertisements, these particles are microscopic in size but they are very large in terms of their healing abilities.聽Bronchitis, colds, food poisoning, gonorrhea, meningitis, pink eye, shingles, tuberculosis, staph and strep infections, herpes and of course cancer and AIDS all yield to the power of colloidal silver.
鈥淭he greatest disease fighter known to man, will kill by suffocation over 650 viruses and bacteria,鈥� goes the claim.聽As with many of these hyper-hyped 鈥渃ures鈥� promoters have taken a smidgen of scientific fact and have blown it out of proportion.聽In this case, the scientific fact is that silver does have antimicrobial properties. Russian peasants used to keep water fresh by "silvering", meaning that they would leave silver coins in cisterns and jugs.聽Herodotus described water carts taken to war by the kings of Ancient Persia in which water from the Choaspes River was "ready boiled for use and stored in flagons of silver."
The surface of metallic silver will always harbour some silver oxide, a result of reaction with oxygen of the air.聽Small amounts of silver oxide dissolve in water and the silver ions in solution can indeed disrupt the metabolism of bacterial cells.聽Some water filters today contain small amounts of silver oxide to prevent bacterial contamination within the filter and silver nitrate is sometimes used in eye drops administered to new born babies to prevent conjunctivitis, an infection that can be acquired by passage through the birth canal.聽But these applications are a long way from curing AIDS or cancer.
There is no evidence that taking colloidal silver orally has the claimed beneficial effects.聽There is evidence that it can cause harm.聽Before antibiotics, silver nitrate nose drops were commonly used in the battle against infection.聽But not for long.聽Doctors discovered that their patients weren鈥檛 getting any better, but they were turning grey.聽They were afflicted by a condition known as argyria in which silver compounds deposit in the skin.聽This can happen with colloidal silver as well.聽Some people have become permanently discoloured in their quest for health.聽As a result the sales of non-prescription colloidal silver products which make health claims have been banned.聽Manufacturers still manage to skirt the law by selling their products as dietary supplements without making any direct claim on the label.聽They also sell machines that can be used to make colloidal silver preparations at home.
It is interesting that while some are hawking silver as a remedy, others are trying to eliminate its dietary use.聽In California there is a movement afoot to because of the potential toxicity of the silver they contain.聽This is as silly as treating gonorrhea with colloidal silver.聽And if it passes, what鈥檚 next? Clamping down on all those people in California who were born with a silver spoon in their mouth?
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