Category Archives: Quackery

Post 150: Choice Chronicles of the Chronicle Flask

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From citric to hydrofluoric, acids are an ever-popular topic

I began this blog in 2013, and since then I’ve written at least one post a month. This will be the 150th.

I put love and care into all my posts and, in turn, this blog has been good to me. Although no one’s ever paid me to write it, it has brought me work over the years – many people have asked me to write for them having read things here. But life is busier now than it’s ever been, and it’s time to wind things down. You’ll continue to find my non-fiction here and there, I’ll still be regularly updating my fiction blog, and if you want the latest info, look me up on Twitter. In particular, check out the #272sci hashtag for tiny bits of bite-sized science.

In the meantime, how about a little reminder of some of this blog’s most popular, most important, or just my favourite, posts? Let’s go!

The acid that really does eat through everything (2013)
Turns out, everyone loves acid – this post is one of my all-time most viewed. I guess there’s just something compelling about substances that can dissolve metal, and this one is particular special (and terrifying) for its ability to also dissolve glass and ceramic. (Oh, and sorry about the double spaces after the full stops. It was a long time ago. I know better now.)

Butyric acid, a very smelly molecule (2014)
On the subject of acids, this has been another popular post. I suppose if there’s anything more fun than an acid that eats through the bottle you’re trying to store it in, it’s an acid that smells of Parmesan and vomit. Seriously, it is an interesting one: we’re all familiar with the smell of ethanoic acid (aka acetic acid, found in vinegar), and propanoic acid (propionic acid) merely smells a bit sweaty, but add one more carbon and, hoo boy, you have an utterly revolting stench that some people are so sensitive to they can still detect it weeks, even months, after cleaning.

It’s important to understand what sugar actually is if you want to reduce your intake

Sugar that’s not sugar? (2015)
People talk a lot of nonsense about sugar. A particular pet hate of mine is people calling products sugar-free when they’re nothing of the sort, or implying that the type of sugary ingredient they’ve put in the thing they’re trying to sell you is somehow extra-healthy. If actually reducing your sugar intake is your goal (and it’s not a terrible one), this piece might help.

MMS and CD chemistry – the facts (2016)
This is my simple explainer about MMS (‘miracle’ or ‘master’ mineral solution) and CD (chlorine dioxide). This horrible, nasty fad seems to have faded away in recent years – partly thanks to the fact that even its founder, Jim Humble, admitted it cures nothing – but then again, I have seen CD-MMS linked to pseudoscientific Covid ‘cures’. Let’s hope this post continues to do its job as a useful reference for anyone that needs it.

Absurd alkaline ideas – history, horror and jail time (2017)
Continuing the theme of health, I’ve written several posts about so-called ‘alkaline’ diets, and this isn’t the most popular (that would be Amazing Alkaline Lemons?) but this is the one I wish more people would read. It explains where the whole silly notion came from in the first place. (As does this Twitter thread, slightly more succinctly.)

There really is no need to panic about slime

No need for slime panic: it’s not going to poison anyone (2018)
I’ve yet to meet a child who doesn’t love slime, and every now and then the gooey stuff becomes so popular that we start to see scare stories. So it was in 2018. However, with a few sensible precautions, slime really isn’t dangerous. It’s all explained here.

Let’s speed up the rate at which we recognise our female chemists (2019)
This one was all about the little-known Elizabeth Fulhame. She was the first chemist to describe catalytic reactions – in 1794, when the more famous Berzelius was a mere teenager. Let’s remember her name.

Chemical connections: dexamethasone, hydroxychloroquine and rheumatoid arthritis (2020)
Covid hit us in 2020, and it would prompt more than one post – including this one when dexamethasone had its moment in the spotlight. Probably an unfamiliar drug to most people before this point, dexamethasone was one of the first practical treatments for rheumatoid arthritis in the mid-20th century. Unlike some other much-hyped treatments, we have solid evidence for the effectiveness of this medicine – although it is really only useful for people suffering with very severe symptoms. Still, it’s pretty cool that an old drug turned out to be such a useful tool in a modern pandemic.

There’s chemistry in your skin

Sunshine, skin chemistry, and vitamin D (2020)
To make it a nice, round ten, I’ll sneak in another 2020 post. This one is all about vitamin D. A lot of people are very critical of supplements, and while I understand their position, this particular case is slightly different. If you live in certain parts of the world, you really, really should be considering vitamin D supplementation for at least part of the year, and this post will tell you why.

Brilliant Bee Chemistry! (2021)
This one wasn’t so long ago, but I love it. Bees are fascinating creatures, and if you don’t know what the connection between bees and bananas is, you ought to have a read.

So, this is it, folks – thank you, it’s been fun! Happy New Year!

Content is © Kat Day 2022. You may share or link to anything here, but you must reference this site if you do. You can still support my writing my buying a super-handy Pocket Chemist from Genius Lab Gear using the code FLASK15 at checkout (you’ll get a discount, too!) or by buying me a coffee – just hit this button:
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Rock bottom: can rocks in your dog’s water bowl protect your lawn?

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fractal image, featuring the hashtag #272sci

Take a look at the Twitter hashtag #272sci

One quick thing before I dive into this month’s post: if you’re a Twitter user, check out my series of very tiny science tweets under the hashtag #272sci. The aim is to explain a science thing in one tweet – without using a thread – and it’s 272 because that’s the number of characters I have to use after including the hashtag and a space. So far I’ve covered leaf colours, frothy milk, caffeine and poisonous millipedes. There will be more to come!

Now, speaking of Twitter, a couple of weeks ago Prof Mark Lorch tweeted about Dog Rocks. Dog… what? I hear you ask (really quite understandably).

Well, it turns out that Dog Rocks are a product that you can buy, and that you put into your dog’s water bowl. Your dog then drinks the water that has been sloshing over the rocks, and, this is where we start to run into trouble, this is meant to have an effect on your dog’s urine. This, in turn, is supposed to protect any grass your dog might then pee on.

photo of a patch of dead grass

Dog urine damages grass

All right, so let’s start somewhere in the vague vicinity of some science: if you have a dog, or even if you’ve just spent some time with someone who has a dog, you’ve probably noticed that dog urine isn’t very kind to grass. Commonly, you see something like the photo here, that is, patches of yellow, dead grass, surrounded by quite luscious green growth.

Why is this? It’s because dog urine – like the urine of all mammals – contains urea, CO(NH2)2. Urea forms in the body when animals metabolise nitrogen-containing compounds, in particular, proteins. It’s essentially a way for the body to get rid of excess nitrogen.

People sometimes confuse urea with ammonia, for reasons that I’ll come to in a moment. But they’re not the same thing. Urea is odourless, forms a pH neutral solution and, if you extract it from the liquid in which it is dissolved, produces solid crystals at room temperature.

Pure ammonia, NH3, by contrast, is a gas at room temperature (boiling point -33.3 ℃), forms alkaline solutions (with pH values greater than 7) and has that pungent ‘ngggh get it away from me!’ smell with which we’re probably all familiar.

Sample pots full of pale yellow liquid

Fresh urine contains urea, but little ammonia

Although these two substances aren’t the same, they are linked: many living things convert ammonia (which is very toxic) to urea (which is much less so) as part of normal metabolism. And it also goes the other way, in a process called urea hydrolysis. This reaction happens in urine once it’s out of the body, too, which is the main reason why, after a little while, urine starts to smell really, really bad.

Okay, fine, but what has this got to do with grass, exactly? Well urea (and ammonia, for that matter) are excellent sources of nitrogen. Plants need nitrogen to grow, but dog urine contains too much, and too much nitrogen is bad – in the same way that too much of pretty much anything nice is bad for humans. It damages the blades of grass and a yellowish dead spot appears, often ringed by some particularly lush grass that, being slightly outside the immediate target zone, caught a whiff of extra nitrogen without being overwhelmed.

Back to Dog Rocks. Interestingly, the website includes an explanation not unlike the one I’ve just given on their fact sheet. What it doesn’t do is satisfactorily explain how Dog Rocks are supposed to change the nitrogen content of your dog’s urine.

photo of a dog drinking water

Dog Rocks are meant to be placed in your dog’s water bowl

The website says that Dog Rocks are “a coherent rock with a mechanically stable framework”. Okay… so… Dog Rocks won’t dissolve or break up in your dog’s water bowl. A good start. It goes on to say, “the rocks provide a stable matrix and a micro-porous medium in which active components are able to act as a water purifying agent through ion exchange” and “Dog Rocks will help purify the water by removing some nitrates, ammonia and harmful trace elements thereby giving your dog a cleaner source of water and lowering the amount of nitrates found in their diet.”

You’ll note they’re using the word nitrate. Nitrates are specifically compounds containing the NO3– ion, but I think they’re using the term in a more general way, to suggest any nitrogen-containing compound (including urea and ammonia). And by the way, nitrates are different from the similar-sounding nitrites, which contain the NO2– ion. Fresh urine from a healthy dog (or human, for that matter) shouldn’t contain nitrite. In fact, a dipstick test for nitrite in urine is commonly used to check for urinary tract infections, because it suggests bacteria are present.

Anyway, nitrates/nitrites aside, it’s the last bit of that claim which really makes no sense. Your dog is not ingesting anything like a significant quantity of nitrogen-containing compounds from its water bowl. Urea comes from the metabolic breakdown of proteins, and they come from your dog’s food.

Photo of puppies eating food that I totally picked because it's cute ;-)

The nitrogen-containing compounds in your dogs’ urine come from their food, not their water

It’s faintly possible, I suppose, that Dog Rocks might somehow filter out some urea/nitrates from urine. But then your dog would have to pee through the Dog Rocks and, honestly, if you can manage to arrange that, you might as well train your dog not to pee on your grass in the first place.

I suggest that there are three possible explanations for the positive testimonials for this product. 1) Owners who use it are inadvertently encouraging their dogs to drink more water, which could be diluting their urine, leading to less grass damage. 2) It’s all a sort of placebo effect: owners imagine it’s going to work, and they see what they’re expecting to see, or 3) they’re all made up.

You decide, but there is absolutely no scientifically-plausible way that putting any kind of rocks in your dog’s water bowl will do anything to stop dog pee damaging your grass. This is £15 you do not need to spend. But hey, you could avoid the money burning a hole in your pocket (see what I did there?) by buying me a coffee… 😉

Check out the Twitter hashtag #272sci here, and support the Great Explanations book project here!

Do you want something non-sciency to distract you from, well, everything? Why not take a look at my fiction blog: the fiction phial? You can also find me doing various flavours of editor-type-stuff at the horror podcast, PseudoPod.org – so head over there, too!

Like the Chronicle Flask’s Facebook page for regular updates, or follow @chronicleflask on Twitter. Content is © Kat Day 2021. You may share or link to anything here, but you must reference this site if you do. You can support my writing my buying a super-handy Pocket Chemist from Genius Lab Gear using the code FLASK15 at checkout (you’ll get a discount, too!) or by buying me a coffee – just hit this button:
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Chemical jigsaw puzzles: how do chemists identify molecules?

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Front cover of Great ExplanationsA quick thing before I get into this month’s chemistry ramble: I’m guessing that you, lovely reader, enjoy reading about science stuff. Especially stuff written by an amazing crowd of hard-working science communicators, one of whom is yours truly. So, please consider spreading the word about this awesome book: Great Explanations. Or even better, pledge! There are some fabulous rewards at the different pledge levels. Either way, thank you x

Okay, back to it! Recently, a bit of an argument blew up on Twitter regarding what is, and isn’t, in covid vaccinations. The particular substance du jour being graphene oxide. The @TakeThatChem account pointed out that one of the sources being touted by some as ‘evidence’ for its presence (the article in question was by Robert O Young, remember him? Yes, the one that did actual jail time) didn’t describe the use of any sort of technique that could identify graphene oxide. Which, just to be clear, is absolutely not an ingredient in covid vaccinations.

The debate culminated with questions about how, exactly, scientists do identify substances on the molecular level. @TakeThatChem wondered if one of the users who had become embroiled in the debate even understood how a chemist might work out a molecule’s structure, and then posted an image.

Screenshot of tweet by @TakeThatChem showing an NMR spectrum (link in text)

This tweet illustrated a technique that can be used to identify molecules.

British students of chemistry first meet images like this somewhere around the age of 17–18, so although this is somewhat advanced, it’s still essentially school-level. Which means that for a chemist, it’s one of those things that’s so familiar that, half the time, we probably forget that the rest of the world will have absolutely no idea what it is.

But for those that have never studied A level chemistry or similar: what is it?

The answer is that it’s a proton NMR, or nuclear magnetic resonance, spectrum. Now, NMR is quite tricky. Bear with me, I’m about to try and explain it in a paragraph…

Here goes: you know magnets? And how, if you put one magnet near another magnet, it moves? Now imagine that certain types of atomic nuclei are basically tiny magnets. If you put them in a really powerful magnetic field, they sort of move. If you then alter that magnetic field, they move as the field varies. A computer records and analyses those changes, and spits out a graph that looks like that one back there – which chemists call a spectrum.

Photo of MRI equipment

Medical MRIs use essentially the same technology as the one used to generate the spectrum

Did I nail it? There’s a lot more to this, not surprisingly. In particular, radio waves are involved. My quick and dirty explanation is the equivalent of describing a car as a box on wheels – it’s broadly true from a distance if you squint a bit, but if you said it in the presence of a qualified mechanic they’d wince and start muttering words like ‘head gasket’ and ‘brake discs’ and ‘you do know this is a diesel engine, yes?’

Anyway, it’ll do for now. If you’re studying NMR at a more advanced level, take a look at this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry written by… someone called Kat Day. No idea who that is 😉

The same technique, by the way, is used in medicine – but there you know it as MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging. It turns out that if you shove a human (or pretty much anything that contains a lot of carbon-based molecules) into a powerful magnetic field, the atomic nuclei do their thing. You might imagine that having all your atoms do some sort of cha-cha would hurt, but no – as anyone who’s ever had an MRI will attest, it’s mostly just very loud and a bit dull. The end result is an image with different contrast for different types of tissue. Fatty tissue, for example, tends to show up as areas of brightness, while bone tends to look darker – so it’s useful for diagnosing all sorts of problems.

Photo of jigsaw pieces

Interpreting a proton NMR spectrum can be a bit like looking at a jigsaw pieces

But back to chemistry. Chemists, preferring a simpler life (haha), are often working with single substances. Or at least trying to. If we imagine a molecule as a picture, looking at a proton NMR spectrum is a bit like looking at a mixed-up jigsaw puzzle of that picture. Each individual piece – or peak – in the spectrum represents an atom or a group of atoms.

Each piece tells you something and, at the same time, it also tells you about the bits that are joined to it. In the same way that you might look at a jigsaw piece and think, ‘well, this has a sticky-out bit so the piece that goes next to it must have an inny-bit,’ chemists look at a spectrum and say, ‘well, this bit looks like this, so its carbon atom must be attached to group of atoms like that.’

Okay, so what do the pieces in the spectrum @TakeThatChem posted show us? Well, reading spectra takes practice but, like most things, if you do that practice, after a while you get into the habit of spotting things straight away.

For example, it’s fairly obvious to me that whatever-it-is it probably has a carboxylic acid (COOH) group, and it definitely has a benzene ring. I can also see that the benzene ring has things bonded to opposite points, in other words, if you numbered the carbons in the ring from 1 to 6, it has things attached at carbon 1 and carbon 4. There’s a chain of carbons, which is branched, and there’s another CH3 group somewhere. To get more precise I’d have to look more carefully at the integrals (the differently-sized ∫ symbols over the peaks), hunt for a data sheet and study the scale on the horizontal axis along the bottom.

Photo of white pills

The spectrum is of a common drug substance, but which one…

My brain got as far as ‘hm, maybe it’s aspirin, oh no, it can’t be, because…’ before I came across the already-posted answer. I won’t give it away – spoilers, sweetie – but let’s just say it’s a molecule not a million miles different from aspirin.

So yes, chemists do have the means to identify individual molecules, but it requires a fair bit of knowledge and training to both carry out the techniques and to interpret the results. Despite what Hollywood might have us believe, we don’t (yet) have a machine that intones ‘this material is approximately 40% isobutylphenylpropionic acid, captain’ when you plop a sample into it.

The fact that real chemistry (and science in general) is not simple is precisely why pseudoscience peddled by the likes of Robert O Young is so appealing: it’s nice and easy, it follows a sort of ‘common sense’ narrative, it’s not swathed in all sorts of technical language. Anyone can read it and, without any other training, feel as if they understand it perfectly.

None of us knows what we don’t know. If someone comes along with an easy explanation, it’s tempting to believe it – particularly if they go on to play into our anxieties and tell us what we were hoping to hear.

Which brings me to a thread by the lovely Dr Ben Janaway, one tweet of which said, extremely eloquently:

Please do not harass [people protesting covid vaccines]. Please do not blame them. My education is a privilege they have not been afforded. They do not lack intelligence, they lack being taught how to make sense of very complicated things, most of it hidden. What can we do, listen and talk.

Photo of a facemask, syringe and vaccine vials

Please get vaccinated

His point is a good one. All we can do is keep spreading the word as clearly as possible and just hope that, maybe, it will change one mind somewhere. Because maybe that mind will change another, and maybe sense will spread.

Take care, stay safe, and get vaccinated. Get your flu jab, too, if it’s that time of year in your part of the world.

Support the Great Explanations book here!

Do you want something non-sciency to distract you from, well, everything? Why not take a look at my fiction blog: the fiction phial? You can also find me doing various flavours of editor-type-stuff at the horror podcast, PseudoPod.org – so head over there, too!

Like the Chronicle Flask’s Facebook page for regular updates, or follow @chronicleflask on Twitter. Content is © Kat Day 2021. You may share or link to anything here, but you must reference this site if you do. You can support my writing my buying a super-handy Pocket Chemist from Genius Lab Gear using the code FLASK15 at checkout (you’ll get a discount, too!) or by buying me a coffee – the button is right here…
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The Chronicles of the Chronicle Flask: 2019

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Happy New Year, everyone! Usually, I write this post in December but somehow things have got away from me this year, and I find myself in January. Oops. It’s still early enough in the month to get away with a 2019 round-up, isn’t it? I’m sure it is.

It was a fun year, actually. I wrote several posts with International Year of the Periodic table themes, managed to highlight the tragically-overlooked Elizabeth Fulhame, squeezed in something light-hearted about the U.K.’s weird use of metric and imperial units and discovered the recipe for synthetic poo. Enjoy!

Newland’s early table of the elements

January started with a reminder that 2019 had been officially declared The Year of the Periodic Table, marking 150 years since Dmitri Mendeleev discovered the “Periodic System”. The post included a quick summary of his work, and of course mentioned the last four elements to be officially named: nihonium (113), moscovium (115), tennessine (117) and oganesson (118). Yes, despite what oh-so-many periodic tables still in widespread use suggest (sort it out in 2020, exam boards, please), period 7 is complete, all the elements have been confirmed, and they all have ‘proper’ names.

February featured a post about ruthenium. Its atomic number being not at all significant (there might be a post about rhodium in 2020 😉). Ruthenium and its compounds have lots of uses, including cancer treatments, catalysis, and exposing latent fingerprints in forensic investigations.

March‘s entry was all about a little-known female chemist called Elisabeth Fulhame. She only discovered catalysis. Hardly a significant contribution to the subject. You can’t really blame all those (cough, largely male, cough) chemists for entirely ignoring her work and giving the credit to Berzelius. Ridiculous to even suggest it.

An atom of Mendeleevium, atomic number 101

April summarised the results of the Element Tales Twitter game started by Mark Lorch, in which chemists all over Twitter tried to connect all the elements in one, long chain. It was great fun, and threw up some fascinating element facts and stories. One of my favourites was Mark telling us that when he cleared out his Grandpa’s flat he discovered half a kilogram of sodium metal as well as potassium cyanide and concentrated hydrochloric acid. Fortunately, he managed to stop his family throwing it all down the sink (phew).

May‘s post was written with the help of the lovely Kit Chapman, and was a little trot through the discoveries of five elements: carbon, zinc, helium, francium and tennessine, making the point that elements are never truly discovered by a single person, no matter what the internet (and indeed, books) might tell you.

In June I wrote about something that had been bothering me a while: the concept of describing processes as “chemical” and “physical” changes. It still bothers me. The arguments continue…

In July I came across a linden tree in a local park, and it smelled absolutely delightful. So I wrote about it. Turns out, the flowers contain one of my all-time favourite chemicals (at least in terms of smell): benzaldehyde. As always, natural substances are stuffed full of chemicals, and anyone suggesting otherwise is at best misinformed, at worst outright lying.

Britain loves inches.

In August I wrote about the UK’s unlikely system of units, explaining (for a given value of “explaining”) our weird mishmash of metric and imperial units. As I said to a confused American just the other day, the UK is not on the metric system. The UK occasionally brushes fingers with the metric system, and then immediately denies that it wants anything to do with that sort of thing, thank you very much. This was my favourite post of the year and was in no way inspired by my obsession with the TV adaptation of Good Omens (it was).

In September I returned to one of my favourite targets: quackery. This time it was amber teething necklaces. These are supposed to work (hmm) by releasing succinic acid from the amber beads into the baby’s skin where it… soothes the baby by… some unexplained mechanism. They don’t work and they’re a genuine choking hazard. Don’t waste your money.

October featured a post explaining why refilling plastic bottles might not be quite as simple as you thought. Sure, we all need to cut down on plastic use, but there are good reasons why shops have rules about what you can, and can’t, refill — and they’re not to do with selling more bottles.

November continued the environmental theme with a post was all about some new research into super-slippery coatings that might be applied to all sorts of surfaces, not least ceramic toilet bowls, with the goal of saving some of the water that’s currently used to rinse and clean such surfaces. The best bit about this was that I discovered that synthetic poo is a thing, and that the recipe includes miso. Yummy.

Which brings us to… December, in which I described some simple, minimal-equipment electrolysis experiments that Louise Herbert from STEM Learning had tested out during some teaching training exercises. Got a tic tac box, some drawing pins and a 9V battery? Give it a go!

Well, there we have it. That’s 2019 done and dusted. It’s been fun! I wonder what sort of health scares will turn up for “guilty January”? Won’t be long now…

Like the Chronicle Flask’s Facebook page for regular updates, or follow @chronicleflask on Twitter. Content is © Kat Day 2020. You may share or link to anything here, but you must reference this site if you do. If you enjoy reading my blog, please consider buying me a coffee through Ko-fi using the button below.
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A Dash of Science, Social Media and VARD

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Yesterday I recorded a podcast with Matthew Lee Loftus (from The Credible Hulk) and Christopher El Sergio for A Dash of Science, all about science communication and social media. It was a brilliant chat – I won’t go into lots of details of what we covered, but if you’d like to hear it (you know you do!) the direct link is: Communicating Science on Social Media. You can also pick it up on iTunes and/or Tune In.

After our conversation ended I remembered something I developed little while ago, after marking a particularly infuriating research homework where a quarter of the class wrote down that Mendeleev was awarded a Nobel prize for his work on the Periodic Table. For the record: he never received the honour. He was recommended for the prize but famously (at least, I thought it was famously!) the 1906 prize was given to Henri Moissan instead, probably due to a grudge held by Svante Arrhenius of Arrhenius Equation fame (it’s a good story, check it out).

Mendeleev was never awarded a Nobel prize.

Does it really matter if a few students believe that Mendeleev won a Nobel prize? That’s not really harming anyone, is it? Maybe not, but on the other hand, perhaps it’s part of a long and slippery slope greased with ‘alternative facts’ which is leading us to, well, shall we say, situations and decisions that may not be in our best interests as a society.

How to encourage students to do at least a little bit of fact-checking? Of course, you could produce a long list of Things That One Should Do to check information, but I reasoned that while students might read such a list, and even agree with the principles, they were unlikely to get into the habit of applying them and probably quite likely to immediately forget all about it.

Instead I tried to come up with something short, simple and memorable, and here it is (feel free to share this):

Fact-checking isn’t easy; it’s VARD

The four points I focused on spell out VARD, which stands for…

Verify

V is for verify, which means: can you find other sources saying the same thing? Now, chances are, you can always find something that agrees with a particular piece of information, if you look hard enough. There are plenty of sites out there that will tell you that lemons ‘alkalise’ the body, for example (they don’t), that it’s safe to eat apricot kernels (it’s not) and that black salve is an effective treatment for skin cancer (nope).

However, if you’re reasonably open-minded when you start, chances are good that you’ll find both sides of the ‘story’ and that will, at the very least, get you thinking about which version is more trustworthy.

Author

A is for author. I often hear swathes of content being disparaged purely based on its nature. You know the sort of thing: “that’s just a blog,” or “you can’t trust newspaper articles”. I think this is wrong-headed. What matters more is who wrote that piece and what are their qualifications? I’d argue that a blog post about medical issues written by a medical doctor (for example, virtually anything on the marvellous Science Based Medicine) is likely to be a pretty reliable source. Conversely, there’s been more than one thing that’s made it into the scientific literature which has later turned out to be flawed or even flat false (such as Wakefield’s famous 1998 paper). It’s also worth asking what someone’s background is: Stephanie Seneff, for example, is highly qualified in the fields of artificial intelligence and computer science, but does that mean we should trust her controversial opinions in biology and medicine? Probably not.

You may not always be able to tell who the author is, or have time to dig into their motivations, but it’s nevertheless a good question to keep in the back of your mind.

Reasonableness

Be honest: is that story really likely? Or is it just shocking?

R is for reasonableness. Which is a pain to spell or even say, but it’s important so I’m sticking with it. It’s a sense-check. Human beings love a good story, and the best stories have unexpected twists and turns. That’s why medical scare-stories pop up in newspapers with such depressing regularity. No, ketchup isn’t giving you cancer. No, our children really aren’t being poisoned by plastics. But the truth doesn’t always make a good headline. In fact, when it comes to science, the more some ‘exciting finding’ is plastered over news sites, the less you should probably trust it – because the chances are that the exciting version being reported bears almost no resemblance to the researchers’ original conculsions.

Be honest and ask yourself: does this really seem likely? Or would I just like it to be true because it’s a great story?

Date

If a surprising story has just appeared, give it twenty-four hours – chances are if there are major issues with the information someone else will come forward.

D is for date. The obvious situation is when information is so old that it’s been superseded by something else. This is easy: just look for something more recent. However, the other side of this coin is probably more relevant in these days of rolling news and instant sharing of articles: something can blow up at short notice, especially something topical, and it later turns out that not all the facts were known. Take, for example, the famous green swimming pools in the 2016 Olympics, which more than one writer attributed to copper salts in the pool water before the full facts were revealed a few days later. Inevitably, the ‘corrected’ version is far less interesting than the earlier speculation, and so that’s what everyone remembers.

If something controversial and shocking has just appeared, give it twenty-four hours. If there’s something terribly wrong with it, chances are someone will pick up on it in that time.

It’s not easy; it’s VARD

And that’s it: Verify, Author, Reasonableness, Date. It doesn’t cover every eventuality, but if you keep these points in the back of your mind it will definitely help you to separate the ‘probably true’ from the ‘almost certainly bollocks’.

Good luck out there!

Now why not go and listen to that podcast 🙂

Like the Chronicle Flask’s Facebook page for regular updates, or follow @chronicleflask on Twitter. All content is © Kat Day 2018. You may share or link to anything here, but you must reference this site if you do.
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Just what is blk water, and should you drink it?

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Christmas is almost here! Are you ready yet? Are you fed up with people asking if you’re ready yet? Have you worked out what to buy for Great-uncle Nigel, who says he neither needs nor wants anything? Always a tricky scenario, that. Consumables are often a safe fallback position. They don’t clutter up the house, and who doesn’t enjoy a nice box of luxury biscuits, or chocolates, or a bottle of champagne, or spirts, or a case of blk water.

Wait, what?

Yes, this mysterious product turned up in my feed a few weeks ago. It’s water (well, so they say), but it’s black. Actually black. Not just black because the bottle’s black, black because the liquid inside it is… black.

It’s black water.

A bit like… cola. Only blacker, and not fizzy, or sweet, or with any discernable flavour other than water.

It raises many questions, doesn’t it? Let’s start with why. Obviously it’s a great marketing gimmick. It definitely looks different. It also comes with a number of interesting claims. The suppliers claim it contains “no nasties” and “only 2 ingredients”, namely spring water and “Fulvic Minerals” (sic). (Hang on, I hear you say, if it’s minerals, plural, surely that’s already more than two ingredients? Oh, but that’s only the start. Stay with me.)

It claims to “balance pH levels” and help “to regulate our highly acidic diets”. Yes, well, I think I’ve covered that before. Absolutely nothing you drink, or eat, does anything to the pH in any part of your body except, possibly, your urine – where you might see a small difference under some circumstances (but even if you do it doesn’t tell you anything significant about the impact of your diet on your long-term health). And bear in mind that a few minutes after you drink any kind of alkaline water it mixes with stomach acid which has a pH of around 2. Honestly, none of that alkaline “goodness” makes it past your pyloric sphincter.

Finally, blk water apparently “replenishes electrolytes”. Hm. Electrolytes are important in the body. They’re ionic species, which means they can conduct electricity. Your muscles and neurons rely on electrical activity, so they are quite important. Like, life or death important. But because of that our bodies are quite good at regulating them, most of the time. If you run marathons in deserts, or get struck down with a nasty case of food poisoning, or have some kind of serious health condition (you’d know about it) you might need to think about electrolytes, but otherwise most of us get what we need from the food and drink we consume normally every day.

Besides which, didn’t they say “only 2 ingredients”? The most common electrolytes in the body are sodium, potassium, magnesium, chloride, hydrogen phosphate and hydrogen carbonate. Most spring waters do contain some, if not all, of these, in greater or smaller amounts, but it’s not going to be enough to effectively “replenish” any of them. If, say, you are running marathons in the desert, the advice is actually to keep a careful eye on your water intake because drinking too much water can dangerously lower your sodium levels. Yes, there are sports drinks that are specifically designed to help with this, but they taste of salt and sugar and/or flavourings which have been added in a desperate attempt to cover up the salty taste. This is apparently not the case with blk water which, to repeat myself, contains “only 2 ingredients”.

And, according to the blk website the drink contains “0 mg of sodium per 500ml” so… yeah.

Speaking of ingredients, what about those so-called fulvic minerals? Maybe they’re the source of those all-important electrolytes (but not sodium)? And maybe they’re magically tasteless, too?

And perhaps, like other magical objects and substances, they don’t actually exist – as geologist @geolizzy told me on Twitter when I asked.

It’s not looking good for blk water (£47.99 for a case of 24 bottles) at this point. But hang on. Perhaps when they said fulvic minerals, what they meant was fulvic acid – which is a thing, or possibly several things – in a the presence of oh, say, some bicarbonate (*cough* 2 ingredients *cough*).

That could push the pH up to the stated 8-9, and didn’t we learn in school that:
acid + alkali –> salt + water
and maybe, if we’re being generous, we could call the salts of fulvic acids minerals? It’s a bit shaky but… all right.

So what are fulvic acids?

That’s an interesting question. I had never heard of fulvic acids. They do, as it turns out, have a Wikipedia page (Wikipedia is usually very reliable for chemical information, since no one has yet been very interested in spoofing chemical pages to claim things like hydrochloric acid is extracted from the urine of pregnant unicorns) but the information wasn’t particularly enlightening. The page did inform me that fulvic acids are “components of the humus” (in soil) and are  “similar to humic acids, with differences being the carbon and oxygen contents, acidity, degree of polymerization, molecular weight, and color.” The Twitter hive-mind, as you can see, was sending me down the same path…

A typical example of a humic acid.

Next stop, humic acids. Now we’re getting somewhere. These are big molecules with several functional groups. The chemists out there will observe that, yes, they contain several carboxylic acid groups (the COOH / HOOC ones you can see in the example) so, yes, it makes sense they’d behave as acids.

“No nasties”, blk said. “Pure” they said. When you hear those sorts of things, do you imagine something like this is in your drink? Especially one that, let’s be clear, is a component of soil?

Oh, hang on, I should’ve checked the “blk explained” page on the blk water website. There’s a heading which actually says “what are Fulvic Minerals”, let’s see now…

“Fulvic minerals are plant matter derived from millions of years ago that have combined with fulvic acid forming rare fulvic mineral deposits. They deliver some of the most powerful electrolytes in the world.”

“Fulvic minerals contain 77 other trace minerals, most of which have an influence on the healthiness of our body. They are very high in alkaline and when sourced from the ground contain a pH of 9.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m not totally convinced. I mean, as @geolizzy says in her tweet here (excuse the minor typo, she means humic, not humid),  it sounds a bit like… water contaminated with hydrocarbon deposits?

Yummy.

And, by the way, the phrase “very high in alkaline” is utterly meaningless. Substances are alkaline, or they contain substances which are alkaline. “Alkaline” is not a thing in itself. This is like saying my tea is high in hot when sourced from the teapot.

There’s one more thing to add. So far this might sound a bit weird but… probably safe, right? What could be more wholesome than a bit of soil? Didn’t your granny tell you to eat a pinch of soil to boost your immune system, or something? At worst it’s harmless, right?

Tap water is chlorine-treated to keep it free of nasty bacteria.

Maybe. But then again… water is often treated with chlorine compounds to keep it bacteria-free. Now, blk water is supposedly spring water, which isn’t usually treated. But hypothetically, let’s consider what happens when humic acids, or fulvic acids, or whatever we’re calling them, come into contact with chlorine-treated water.

Oh dear. It seems that dihaloacetonitriles are formed. (See also this paper.) This is a group of substances (possibly the best known one is dichloroacetonitrile) which are variously toxic and mutagenic. Let’s hope that spring water is totally unchlorinated, 100% “we really got it from out of a rock” spring water, then.

To sum up: it is black, and that’s kind of weird and a fun talking point – although if you like the idea of a black drink you can always drink cola. It doesn’t balance your pH levels – nothing does. I don’t believe it replenishes electrolyte levels either – how can it when it doesn’t contain sodium? – and I’m dubious about the “2 ingredients” claim (could you tell?). And the oh-so-healthy-sounding fulvic minerals are most likely due to contamination from coal deposits.

All in all, whilst it might not be quite such a conversation piece, I think it would be better to get Great-uncle Nigel a nice box of chocolates this year.

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Hydrogen peroxide: another deadly alternative?

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I’m sure most people have heard of hydrogen peroxide. It’s used as a disinfectant and, even if you’ve never used it for that, you probably at least know that it’s used to bleach hair. It’s where the phrase “peroxide blonde” comes from, after all. Hydrogen peroxide, and its formula, is so famous that there’s an old chemistry joke about it:

(I have no idea who to credit for the original drawing – if it’s you, leave me a message.)

To save you squinting at the text, it goes like this:
Two men walk into a bar. The first man says, “I’ll have some H2O.”
The second man says, “I’ll have some H2O, too.”
The barman brings the drinks. The second man dies horribly.

Now I think about it, it’s not a terribly funny joke.

Hydrogen peroxide has an extra oxygen atom in the middle.

Never mind. You get the idea. H2O2 (“H2O, too”) is the formula for hydrogen peroxide. Very similar to water’s formula, except with an extra oxygen atom in the middle. In fact, naturopaths – purveyors of alternative therapies – often refer to hydrogen peroxide as “water with extra oxygen”. But this is really misleading because, to torture a metaphor, that extra oxygen makes hydrogen peroxide the piranha to water’s goldfish.

Water, as we know, is pretty innocuous. You should try not to inhale it obviously, or drink more than about six litres in one go, but otherwise, its pretty harmless. Hydrogen peroxide, on the other hand, not so much. The molecule breaks apart easily, releasing oxygen. That makes it a strong oxidising agent. It works as a disinfectant because it basically blasts cells to pieces. It bleaches hair because it breaks down pigments in the hair shaft. And, as medical students will tell you, it’s also really good at cleaning up blood stains – because it oxidises the iron in haemoglobin to Fe3+, which is a pale yellow colour*.

Dilute hydrogen peroxide is readily available.

In its dilute form, hydrogen peroxide is a mild antiseptic. Three percent and even slightly more concentrated solutions are still readily available in high-street pharmacies. However, even these very dilute solutions can cause skin and eye irritation, and prolonged skin contact is not recommended. The trouble is, while it does destroy microbes, it also destroys healthy cells. There’s been a move away from using hydrogen peroxide for this reason, although it is still a popular “home” remedy.

More concentrated** solutions are potentially very dangerous, causing severe skin burns. Hydrogen peroxide is also well-known for its tendency to react violently with other chemicals, meaning that it must be stored, and handled, very carefully.

All of which makes the idea of injecting into someone’s veins particularly horrific.

But this is exactly what some naturopaths are recommending, and even doing. The idea seems to have arisen because hydrogen peroxide is known to damage cancer cells. But so will a lot of other dangerous substances – it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to inject them. Hydrogen peroxide is produced by certain immune cells in the body, but only in a very controlled and contained way. This is definitely a case where more isn’t necessarily better.

The use of intravenous hydrogen peroxide appears to have begun in America, but it may be spreading to the UK. The website yestolife.org.uk, which claims to empower people with cancer to “make informed decisions”, states “The most common form of hydrogen peroxide therapy used by doctors calls for small amounts of 30% reagent grade hydrogen peroxide added to purified water and administered as an intravenous drip.”

30% hydrogen peroxide is really hazardous stuff. It’s terrifying that this is being recommended to vulnerable patients.

Other sites recommend inhaling or swallowing hydrogen peroxide solutions, both of which are also potentially extremely dangerous.

If anyone ever suggests a hydrogen peroxide IV, run very fast in the other direction.

In 2004 a woman called Katherine Bibeau died after receiving intravenous hydrogen peroxide treatment from James Shortt, a man from South Carolina who called himself a “longevity physician”. According to the autopsy report she died from systemic shock and DIC – the formation of blood clots in blood vessels throughout the body. When her body arrived at the morgue, she was covered in purple-black bruises.

Do I need to state the obvious? If anyone suggests injecting this stuff, run. Run very fast, in the other direction. Likewise if they suggest drinking it. It’s a really stupid idea, one that could quite literally kill you.

* As anyone who’s ever studied chemistry anywhere in my vicinity will tell you, “iron three is yellow, like wee.”

** The concentration of hydrogen peroxide is usually described in one of two ways: percentage and “vol”. Percentage works as you might expect, but vol is a little different. It came about for practical, historical reasons. As Prof. Poliakoff comments in this video, hydrogen peroxide is prone to going “flat” – leave it in the bottle for long enough and it gradually decomposes until what you actually have is a bottle of ordinary water. Particularly in the days before refrigeration (keeping it cold slows down the decomposition) a bottle might be labelled 20%, but actually contain considerably less hydrogen peroxide.

What to do? The answer was quite simple: take, say, 1 ml of hydrogen peroxide, add something which causes it to decompose really, really fast (lots of things will do this: potassium permanganate, potassium iodide, yeast, even liver) and measure the volume of oxygen given off. If your 1 ml of hydrogen peroxide produces 10 ml of oxygen, it’s 10 vol. If it produces 20, it’s 20 vol. And so on. Simple. 3% hydrogen peroxide, for the record, is about 10 vol***. Do not mix up these numbers.

*** Naturally, there are mole calculations to go with this. Of course there are. For A-level Chemists, here’s the maths (everyone else can tune out; I’m adding this little footnote because I found this information strangely hard to find):

Hydrogen peroxide decomposes as shown in this equation:
2H2O2 –> 2H2O + O2

Let’s imagine we decompose 1 ml of hydrogen peroxide and obtain 10 mls of oxygen.

Assuming the oxygen gas occupies 24 dm3 (litres), or 24000 mls, at standard temperature and pressure, 10 mls of oxygen is 10 / 24000 = 0.0004167 moles. But, according to the equation, we need two molecules of hydrogen peroxide to make one molecule of oxygen, so we need to multiply this number by two, giving us 0.0008333 moles.

To get the concentration of the hydrogen peroxide in the more familar (to chemists, anyway) mol dm-3, just divide that number of moles by the volume of hydrogen peroxide. In other words:

0.0008333 mols / 0.001 dm3 = 0.833 mol dm-3

If you really want to convert this into a percentage by mass (you can see why people stick with “vol” now, right?), then:

0.833 mol (in the litre of water) x 34 g mol-1 (the molecular mass of H2O2)
= 28.32 g (in 1000 g of water)

Finally, (28.32 / 1000) x 100 = 2.8% or, rounding up, 3%

In summary (phew):
10 vol hydrogen peroxide = 0.83 mol dm-3 = 3%

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Black Salve BS

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Historically, people weren’t always careful in the sun.

Summer is fast disappearing in the Northern hemisphere and with it, the sunshine. Which is sad, as we all love a bit of sun, don’t we? Even if it doesn’t always love us, particularly those of us with fairer skin. Sunburn is no fun, but these days we also understand that it’s worse than a couple of days of painfully peeling skin: too much sun exposure can cause cancer.

Unfortunately there’s a whole generation – indeed more than one – who didn’t grow up with parents constantly slathering on the factor 50 (easy-to-use transparent sunscreens with very high SPFs didn’t appear on the market until the 1990s). For some sunburn was a regular part of summer, and those people need to be particularly vigilant for changes which might signify something nasty is going on.

On the plus side, these types of cancer are very treatable, and the outlook is hopeful. Often, the growth can be removed by surgery or even cryotherapy with very little scarring. Even the most dangerous kind of skin cancer, malignant melanoma, has a ten-year survival rate of around 90% with appropriate treatment.

But there’s the key: appropriate treatment. If you notice changes in your skin, especially a mole which is changing in colour or shape, you must see a qualified doctor as soon as you can.

What you should absolutely not do is visit the Black Salve page on Facebook (which I am not linking to for reasons which will be come obvious). This page, so Facebook tells me, is followed by nearly 17,000 users. It features a cheery cover photo of a family holding a canoe over their heads, and its profile picture is a pretty white and yellow flower.

Sanguinarine is a toxic salt extracted from the bloodroot plant. It’s infamous for its ability to destroy animal cells.

It’s all very suggestive of a homely, traditional remedy. The sort of thing your grandma had in her medicine cabinet. Very safe and “natural“. But while black salve might be a traditional remedy, it is anything but safe. Most preparations contain bloodroot, a source of the toxin sanguinarine, which kills animal cells.

Applying bloodroot to the skin destroys tissues and causes the formation of a large, black lump of dead flesh. Eventually this mass, called an eschar, falls off, leaving varying degrees of damage behind (internal use is also not recommended: consuming bloodroot can cause vomiting and loss of consciousness).

Bloodroot is easy to buy. Back in May this year the Good Thinking Society reported that eBay had removed “listings for dangerous cancer ‘cure’” following an investigation. Those listings were for black salve, and this was, of course, very positive news. Except for one thing: whilst listings for black salve were removed (and remain absent), listings for bloodroot were not. At the time of writing, a quick search reveals several bloodroot preparations still for sale.

At the time of writing, bloodroot is easy to find on eBay. The listing confirms that this is prepared from the “rhizome of certified organically grown Sanguinaria conadensis plants”.

Why is this such a bad thing? Because it’s easy to find recipes for making homemade black salve with bloodroot online, and using such mixtures can have truly horrific consequences. Last year the story of a woman who applied it to a basal cell carcinoma on her nose was widely reported. The black salve paste she used did so much damage that she ended up with a large hole in her nose through which she could actually draw air. Photos and video are available online (be warned: it’s gruesome).

Many patients turn to black salve as an alternative to what they imagine will be disfiguring surgery to treat their cancer. But, as in this woman’s case, the paste can do so much damage that far more extensive, reconstructive, surgery is ultimately needed.

Black Salve usually contains bloodroot and, sometimes, zinc chloride – another skin irritant.

It won’t surprise anyone to learn that dermatologists don’t recommend black salve. It can do enormous damage to the surface of the skin, resulting in scarring and a high risk of infection, and it does kill cancer cells along the way. But there is no guarantee that all of the cancerous cells deep within the skin will be destroyed. As a result, patients who’ve attempted to cure themselves may end up with cancerous tissue hidden, and growing, beneath a scar.

In fact, exactly this happened to an otherwise healthy 76 year-old woman in 2006. Her case is described in detail in the journal Dermatology Practical Conceptual – in summary, she refused surgery on a small melanoma on her leg. Instead, she bought black salve on the internet and applied it. A few years later the cancer had spread to her lungs, liver and lymph nodes.

Some people even recommend using black salve on breast cancers but this is, if possible, even worse. It’s highly unlikely that the salve will reach the entirety of a tumour which is beneath the skin. It is likely to do some horribly painful and disfiguring damage along the way, though.

Black salve is particularly popular in Australia, which of course has some of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world. But it’s available in the UK too. One online “herbal medicine” site is openly selling various formulations at prices ranging from £25-£100. Ironically, they describe their “Herbactive” product as “chemical free” (it isn’t, nothing is) and then go onto boast that it “now has a stronger concentration of bloodroot”. Fantastic.

They also sell a product which contains zinc chloride along with bloodroot. They claim zinc chloride is safe. It isn’t. It’s well-known to be a skin irritant, and should never be left in contact with skin.

The Black Salve Facebook page is full of anecdotes and testimonials, but light on evidence.

The Black Salve Facebook page is packed full of anecdotes and testimonials from people who claim to have used these mixtures safely. It’s all interspersed, of course, with the usual “Big Pharma” conspiracy theories. Namely, that the “truth” is being suppressed because there’s “no money in it for the pharmaceutical [industry].”

The irony is that reconstructive surgery is incredibly expensive, and the antibiotics, painkillers and other drugs that are inevitably needed to treat black salve victims aren’t free, either.

Given that Facebook’s community standards page states that: “We remove content, disable accounts and work with law enforcement when we believe that there is a genuine risk of physical harm or direct threats to public safety.” one has to wonder why the Black Salve page is still there. People are actually posting pictures of physical harm. What more does Facebook need?

Please, don’t be tempted to use black salve, or anything containing bloodroot. If you think you have a skin tumour see a properly qualified doctor and follow his or her advice.

It might literally save your life.

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Absurd alkaline ideas – history, horror and jail time

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I’ve written about the absurdity of alkaline diets before, and found myself embroiled in more than one argument about the idea.

To sum up quickly, it’s the notion that our bodies are somehow “acidic”, and if only we could make them “alkaline” all our health problems – cancer included – would disappear. The way you make your body “alkaline” is, mainly, by eating lots of vegetables and some fruits (particularly citrus fruits – yes, I know, I know).

The eating fruit and vegetables bit aside (they’re good for you, you should eat them), it’s all patent nonsense. Our bodies aren’t acidic – well, other than where they’re supposed to be acidic (like our stomachs) – and absolutely nothing we eat or drink can have any sort of effect on blood pH, which is kept firmly between 7.35-7.45 by (mainly) our lungs and kidneys. And if your kidneys or lungs are failing, you need something a little stronger in terms of medical intervention than a slice of lemon.

But who first came up with this crazy idea?

Claude Bernard carried out experiments on rabbits.

Actually, we can probably blame a nineteenth century French biologist and physiologist, Claude Bernard, for kicking the whole thing off, when he noticed that if he changed the diet of rabbits from largely plant-based to largely animal-based (i.e. from herbivorous to carnivorous) their urine became more acidic.

This observation, followed by a lot of speculation by nutritionists and some really quite impressively dodgy leaps of reasoning (by others, I should stress – not Bernard himself), has lead us to where we are now: umpty-million websites and books telling anyone who will listen that humans need to cut out all animal products to avoid becoming “acidic” and thus ill.

Bernard’s rabbits were, it seems, quite hungry when he got them – quite possibly they hadn’t been fed – and he immediately gave them boiled beef and nothing else. Meat contains the amino acids cysteine and methionine, both of which can produce acid when they’re metabolised (something Bernard didn’t know at the time). The rabbits excreted this in their urine, which probably explains why it became acidic.

Now, many of you will have noticed several problems here. Firstly, rabbits are herbivores by nature (they do not usually eat meat in the wild). Humans aren’t herbivores. Humans are omnivores, and we have quite different digestive processes as a result. It’s not reasonable to extrapolate from rabbits to humans when it comes to diet. Plus, even the most ardent meat-lover probably doesn’t only eat boiled beef – at the very least people usually squeeze in a battered onion ring or a bit of coleslaw along the way. Most critically of all, urine pH has no direct relationship with blood pH. It tells us nothing about the pH of “the body” (whatever we understand that to mean).

The notion that a plant-based diet is somehow “alkaline” should really have stayed in the 19th century where it belonged, and at the very least not limped its way out of the twentieth. Unfortunately, somewhere in the early 2000s, a man called Robert O Young got hold of the idea and ran with it.

Young’s books – which are still available for sale at the time of writing – describe him as “PhD”, even though he has no accredited qualification.

Boy, did he run with it. In 2002 he published a book called The pH Miracle, followed by The pH Miracle for Diabetes (2004), The pH Miracle for Weight Loss (2005) and The pH Miracle Revised (2010).

All of these books describe him either as “Dr Robert O Young” or refer to him as “PhD”. But he has neither a medical qualification nor a PhD, other than one he bought from a diploma mill – a business that offers degrees for money.

The books all talk about “an alkaline environment” and state that so-called acidic foods and drinks (coffee, tea, dried fruit, anything made with yeast, meat and dairy, amongst other foodstuffs) should be avoided if not entirely eliminated.

Anyone paying attention will quickly note that an “alkaline” diet is basically a very restrictive vegan diet. Most carbohydrate-based foods are restricted, and lots of fruits and nuts fall into the “moderately” and “mildly” acidic categories. Whilst a vegan diet can be extremely healthy, vegans do need to be careful that they get the nutrients they need. Restricting nuts, pulses, rice and grains as well as removing meat and dairy could, potentially, lead to nutritional deficiencies.

Young also believes in something called pleomorphism, which is a whole other level of bonkers. Essentially, he thinks that viruses and bacteria aren’t the cause of illnesses – rather, the things we think are viruses and bacteria are actually our own cells which have changed in response to our “acidic environments”. In Young’s mind, we are making ourselves sick – there is one illness (acidosis) and one cure (his alkaline diet).

It’s bad enough that he’s asserting such tosh and being taken seriously by quite a lot of people. It’s even worse that he has been treating patients at his ranch in California, claiming that he could “cure” them of anything and everything, including cancer.

One of his treatments involved intravenous injections of solutions of sodium hydrogen carbonate, otherwise known as sodium bicarbonate or baking soda. This common cookery ingredient does produce an alkaline solution (about pH 8.5) when dissolved in water, but remember when I said blood pH was hard to shift?

Screenshot from a BBC article, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-38650739

Well, it is, and for good reason. If blood pH moves above the range of 7.35-7.45 it causes a condition called alkalosis. This can result in low blood potassium which in turn leads to muscle weakness, pain, and muscle cramps and spasms. It can also cause low blood calcium, which can ultimately result in a type of seizure. Putting an alkaline solution directly into somone’s blood is genuinely dangerous.

And this is before we even start to consider the fact that someone who was not a medical professional was recommending, and even administering, intravenous drips. Which, by the way, he was reportedly charging his patients $550 a pop to receive.

Young came to the attention of the authorities several times, but always managed to wriggle out of trouble. That is, until 2014, when he was arrested and charged with practising medicine without a license and fraud. In February last year, he was found guilty, but a hung jury caused complications when they voted 11-1 to convict on the two medical charges, but deadlocked 8-4 on fraud charges.

Finally, at the end of June 2017, he was sentenced. He was given three years, eight months in custody, but due to the time he’s already spent in custody and under house arrest, he’s likely to actually serve five months in jail.

He admitted that he illegally treated patients at his luxury Valley Center ranch without any medical or scientific training. Perhaps best of all, he was also made to publicly declare that he is not microbiologist, hematologist, medical doctor or trained scientist, and that he has no post-highschool educational degrees from any accredited school.

Prosecuting Deputy District Attorney Gina Darvas called Young the “Wizard of pHraud”, which is rather apt. Perhaps the titles on his books could be edited to read “Robert O Young, pHraud”?

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Hazardous homeopathy: ‘ingredients’ that ought to make you think twice

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Would you take a medicine made with arsenic? Or deadly nightshade? Lead? Poison ivy?

You’d ask some serious questions first, at least, wouldn’t you? Is it definitely safe? Or, more accurately, are the odds better than even that it will make me better without causing horrible side-effects? Or, you know, killing me?

There ARE medicines that are legitimately made from highly toxic compounds. For example, the poison beloved of crime writers such as Agatha Christie, arsenic trioxide, is used to treat acute promyelocytic leukemia in patients who haven’t responded to other treatments. Unsurprisingly, it’s not without risks. Side-effects are unpleasant and common, affecting about a third of patients who take it. On the other hand, acute promyelocytic leukemia is fatal if untreated. A good doctor would talk this through with a patient, explain both sides, and leave the final choice in his or her properly-informed hands. As always in medicine, it’s a question of balancing risks and benefits.

Would you trust something with no proven benefit and a lot of potential risk? There are, it turns out, a swathe of entirely unregulated mixtures currently being sold in shops and online which clearly feature the substances I listed at the beginning. And more. Because they are all, supposedly, the starting materials in certain homeopathic remedies.

Homeopaths like to use unfamiliar, usually Latin-based, names which somewhat disguise the true nature of their ingredients. Here’s a short, but by no means comprehensive, list. (You might find remedies labelled differently but these are, as far as I can tell, the most common names given to these substances.)

If you haven’t heard of some of these, I do urge you to follow the links above, which will largely take you pages detailing their toxicology. Spoiler: the words “poison”, “deadly” and “fatal” feature heavily. These are nasty substances.

There are some big ironies here, and I’m not referring to the metal. For example, a common cry of anti-vaccinationists is that vaccines contain animal tissues – anything and everything from monkey DNA to dog livers. But many also seem to be keen to recommend homeopaths and courses of homeoprophylaxis – so-called “homeopathic vaccines” – which use bodily fluids such as pus and blood as starting materials.

Now, at this point I’m sure some of you are thinking, hang on a minute: aren’t you always telling us that “the dose makes the poison“? And aren’t homeopathic remedies diluted so much that none of the original substance remains, so they’re just placebos?

Yes, I am, and yes, they are.

Does anyone test homeopathic remedies to make sure there’s nothing in them….?

In THEORY. But here’s the problem: who’s testing these mixtures to make sure that the dilutions are done properly? And how exactly are they doing that (if they are)?

One technique that chemists use to identify tiny quantities of substance is gas chromatography (GC). This is essentially a high-tech version of that experiment you did at school, where you put some dots of different coloured ink on a piece of filter paper and watched them spread up the paper when you put it in some water.

GC analysis is brilliant at identifying tiny quantities of stuff. 10 parts per million is no problem for most detectors, and the most sensitive equipment can detect substances in the parts per billion range. Homeopathy dilutions are many orders of magnitude higher than this (30c, for example, means a dilution factor of 1060), but this doesn’t matter – once you get past 12c (a factor of 1024) you pass the Avogadro limit.

This is because Avogadro’s number, which describes the number of molecules in what chemists call a “mole” of a substance, is 6×1023. For example, if you had 18 ml of water in a glass, you’d have 6×1023 molecules of H2O. So you can see, if you’ve diluted a small sample by a factor of 1024 – more than the total number of molecules of water you had in the first place – the chances are very good that all you have is water. There will be none of the original substance left. (This, by the way, is of no concern to most homeopaths, who believe that larger dilutions magically produce a stronger healing effect.)

What if the sample ISN’T pure water after it’s been diluted?

If you carried out GC analysis of such a sample, you should find just pure water. Indeed, if you DIDN’T find pure water, it should be cause for concern. Potassium cyanide, for example, is toxic at very low levels. The lethal dose is is only 0.2-0.3 grams, and you’d suffer unpleasant symptoms long before you were exposed to that much.

So what if the dilutions somehow go wrong? What if some sample gets stuck in the bottle? Or on the pipette? Or a few dilution steps get skipped for some reason?

Are these largely unregulated companies rigorously quality-checking their remedies?

Well, maybe. It’s possible some producers are testing their raw materials for purity (ah yes, another question: they CLAIM they’re starting with, say, arsenic, but can we be certain?), and perhaps testing the “stability” of their products after certain periods of time (i.e. checking for bacterial growth), but are they running tests on the final product and checking that, well, there’s nothing in it?

And actually, isn’t this a bit of a conflict? If the water somehow “remembers” the chemical that was added and acquires some sort of “vibrational energy”, shouldn’t that show up somehow in GC analysis or other tests? If your tests prove it’s pure water, indistinguishable from any other sample of pure water, then… (at this point homeopaths will fall back on arguments such as “you can’t test homeopathy” and “it doesn’t work like that”. The name for this is special pleading.)

A warning was issued in the U.S. after several children became ill.

Am I scaremongering? Not really. There’s at least one published case study describing patients who suffered from arsenic poisoning after using homeopathic preparations. In January this year the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a warning about elevated levels of belladonna (aka deadly nightshade) in some homeopathic teething products. Yes, teething products. For babies. This warning was issued following several reports of children becoming ill after using the products. The FDA said that its “laboratory analysis found inconsistent amounts of belladonna, a toxic substance, in certain homeopathic teething tablets, sometimes far exceeding the amount claimed on the label.”

Now, admittedly, I’m based in the U.K. and these particular teething remedies were never readily available here. But let’s just type “homeopathy” into the Boots.com (the British high-street pharmacy) website and see what pops up… ah yes. Aconite Pillules, 30c, £6.25 for 84.

What happens if you search for “homeopathy” on the Boots.com website?

Have you been paying attention lovely readers? Aconite is…. yes! Monkshood! One of the most poisonous plants in the garden. Large doses cause instant death. Smaller doses cause nausea and diarrhea, followed by a burning and tingling sensation in the mouth and abdomen, possibly muscle weakness, low blood pressure and irregular heartbeat.

I must stress at this point that there is no suggestion, absolutely none whatsoever, that any of the products for sale at Boots.com has ever caused such symptoms. I’m sure the manufacturers check their preparations extremely carefully to ensure that there’s absolutely NO aconite left and that they really are just very small, very expensive, sugar pills.

Well, fairly sure.

In summary, we seem to be in a situation where people who proclaim that rigorously-tested and quality-controlled pharmaceuticals are “toxic” also seem to be happy to use unregulated homeopathic remedies made with ACTUALLY toxic starting materials.

I wonder if the new “documentary” about homeopathy, Just One Drop, which is being screened in London on the 6th of April will clarify this awkward little issue? Somehow, I doubt it. Having watched the trailer, I think it’s quite clear which way this particular piece of film is going to lean.

One last thing. Some homeopathic mixtures include large quantities of alcohol. For example, the Bach Original Flower Remedies are diluted with brandy and contain approximately 27% alcohol (in the interests of fairness, they do also make alcohol-free versions of some of their products and, as I’ve recently learned, they may not be technically homeopathic). Alcohol is a proven carcinogen. Yes, I know, lots of adults drink moderate quantities of alcohol regularly and are perfectly healthy, and the dose from a flower remedy is minuscule, but still, toxins and hypocrisy and all that.

There are cheaper ways to buy brandy than Bach Flower Remedies.

Amusingly, the alcohol in these remedies is described an “inactive” ingredient. It’s more likely to be the only ACTIVE ingredient. And since Flower Remedies retail for about £7 for 20 ml (a mighty £350 a litre, and they’re not even pure brandy) may I suggest that if you’re looking for that particular “medicine” you might more wisely spend your money on a decent bottle of Rémy Martin?

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