Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Silver

Episode Date: January 20, 2017

No need to be blue, we're back with an all-new Sawbones about silver! See, that's a very good joke, because ingesting silver can turn you blue, but you wouldn't know that because you haven't listened yet. Sorry. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Saubones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. Hello everybody and welcome to Saw Bones. The mayoral tour of Miscite at Medicine,

I'm your co-host, Justin McAroy. And I'm Sydney McAroy. Oh, see. I don't know, a little mazily. A little mazily over there, Justin. A little mazily, a little congested. Yeah. Golly, it's been a rough.

It's been a rough couple of weeks that cost a damn McAroy, friends. Yeah, you may have noticed we didn't have an episode out last week because we have been struck by illness. We're okay. Yeah. Well, I'm like, clarify though, I have it. Oh yeah, you're, you're like,

I have an amazing immune system, basically, almost like a super power, I think you could say, like a superhero kind of. Yeah, it's because you work at a hospital and just think kids for hundreds of thousands of dollars, this amazing super power, it could be yours. All you have to do is dedicate, what did I, a third of my life, ish?

Yeah. To my training, sink into six figure debt, and then you too. You too, can be immune to colds that your husband and baby get. Yeah, Charlie and I got the same thing basically on the same day, except I got it like three hours earlier

and I was feeling bad and I was like, oh yeah, here comes some baby time. I want to need to be babyed. I want to need to snuggle up in a bed with some soup and just be pampered. I need ramen. I need ramen. I need some gatorade. Yeah.

And then three hours later, Charlie started running fever. He was like, well, that's it. I hope I enjoyed my three hours of pampering because that's all I get. That was really good. And then my body got better. That's good. And afterwards. It's a dad power. So anyway, we didn't have an episode last week.

It's just been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been is very fragile. No, you know what it is?

Allopathic medicine has let me down. Traditional medicine failed you. Traditional and osteopathic too, like we're all in this together. Traditional medicine failed you. It has failed me and my daughter for the last time. It was okay when it just me, but now it's come after my family.

Traditional medicine has failed me. I'm going into 2017, Salad Bones goes off of a grid to find the buck wildest. Not Salad Bones, not Sydney, Sydney, Stain, right here. The jam man. Goes off the grid. What are you gonna use? Goji berries.

Yes, super fruits, definitely blueberry essence for sure. You're just naming berries. Is that all you have? You just have fruits and berries. That's all you're gonna do. Buckwheat husks in my pillowcase for better sleep, more rested sleep. Air, sentadairs, different sentadairs. Right, sentadairs. All that stuff. Silver. I once, what? Silver. You want me to silver? You know, I once heard of tape that I got at my church about colloidal medals and how they're like way better,

like vitamins don't do anything. And you need to take colloidal. And your church? It wasn't like a church sponsored tape. Okay. We used to have this tape rack full of like inspirational messages, right? So it was like, if you were struggling with something, you'd take a tape off this rack and listen to it.

And it tells you to take a colloidal metal? No, I used to take them and use them as blank tapes. I would record it with my music. That's terrible. Yeah, it was terrible. But one time, I joined one, and instead of being an inspirational message about Jesus and stuff, it was being like an inspirational message about, um, Jesus and stuff, it was this guy just talking about colloidal metals.

And it was a doctor just doing like a 45 minute long talk about colloidal metals. And it was like fascinating. And I seriously listened to it like 50 times, except I don't remember any of the, the details about it. Right. So, okay. I would love to hear this tape again, but I can never, I can never find it. But I was, I didn't know how to get coloidol medals, but I knew there were the only thing

I was gonna save me. Well, how about instead of that, I give you 30 minutes of a doctor telling you why you shouldn't. Well, Sid, that's not a great deal, but you go. So why don't we talk about coloidol silver and a little bit about silver in general, because it's, I mean, it's pretty hot. It's pretty, pretty trendy.

Pretty expensive. It's right underneath gold, as far as I know. Well, let me, let me get that. Yeah, over on the go. The silver and go. A lot of people wanted us to talk about this. A lot of people were sending me pictures of blue people when asking me to talk about it,

and I'll get to why they were blue. So thank you, Jessica and Miriam and Steven and Ashley and Chris and Kristen and Elizabeth and Greg and Caitlin and Sarah and Maureen and David and Adam and Katie and there were even more who tweeted in sent Facebook messages. Everybody wants to know what the deal is with silver. So the use of silver and medicine actually does date back to ancient times. Just as all of the websites that tell you to use silver as medicine will insist. They're correct. The Greeks and the Romans both believe that silver had cleansing powers of some kind for food

and drink. And in light of that, they would often use silver vessels to store food or water or the Romans often stored wine in them because they thought it kept it more pure, more clean. Plenty, our old buddy Plenty the Elder, he advised not just storing food and drink in it but actually applying it to wounds. He thought that if you included it in like a plaster that you were applying to a wound, like a bandage kind of situation that you were applying to a wound, like a bandage kind of situation

that you were applying to a wound, it would help it heal faster if you put silver somewhere in there, somewhere up in the mix. During the plague years, silver was thought to be especially helpful and again, warding off the plague, whatever it was. I mean, I know what it was, you know, germs, but... Germs, right. Right, but like they didn't know that. Whatever the plague, whatever measmo, or bad air, whatever they thought the plague was, they thought silver was pretty good at

wording it off. And so again, they would eat off the overplates and use silver utensils, especially the very wealthy. Well, I assume silver was slightly easier for them to come by, right? Exactly. Yeah. But it was also, I mean, it was specifically chosen. I mean, if you're very wealthy, you have a variety of precious metals. You could make your plates and forks and whatnot out of. You would choose silver because it was thought to have this power, this germ fighting before

we knew that they were germs power. So what did we think they were fighting? Just like... Something. Something. Like I said, maybe me asthma, like the idea that there is bad air, like, you know. Yeah. And this is, this may be part of where we get like the phrase born with a silver spoon.

Oh, you're right. Although, although there are a couple different different sayings that supposedly came from the use of silver and from some of the complications of it. It's with anything, I think with a lot of those kinds of expressions, it's never 100, well, I'm sure it is sometimes. But most of the time I think it's not 100% clear where it came from. There's certainly a lot of connotations connecting silver to purity, I think. The, um, and well, yeah, it kills, it kills werewolves. Like it probably, you know, it was often,

like silver, the idea of like having silver items, I think has more of a, um, spiritual connotation than like gold, I think, for example. Right. I get that. It's good for binding vampires up, I think for example. Right, I get that. It's good for binding vampires up, according to the treatment. Yes, yes, yes, that too. Sure. What can it do?

Kill germs. Well, yeah, cure most disease or any. But pioneers used to put silver coins in their water jugs as a way to try to prevent any kind of contamination. Again, before really knowing what they were preventing, like just sticks them silver in there. Same thing, in milk jugs, it was very common that you would wanna stick a silver dollar

in your milk jug. How much did milk cost in these times? Does that, I mean, does that, is it just fat rolled into the cost? Well, I'm assuming this is the milk silver dollar. Like you keep it. It's your one. Right, I'm assuming this is the milk silver dollar. Like you keep it. It's your one. Right. Has a car? Did you get out that milk? Uh, yes, yes, I did. Has car. Did you get the silver coin out of the milk? Uh, no, Darlin, I'm sorry. That's the specific,

it's like that, it's like that box of, you know, baking powder, baking soda, not powder, baking soda, this in the back of your refrigerator. Yes. Like you're not know, baking powder, baking soda, not powder, baking soda. Listen, the back of your refrigerator. Yes. Like you're not going to use it for baking soda purposes. Poor baking soda, man. You get open. You like think, man, they're going to put me in cake.

They're going to put me in bread. I want to be so useful. They bring you home, finally get you off the shelf after months of waiting. You're like, yeah, time'm trying to be put to use and they tear you open and put you in the fridge. That's gotta be, cause you've gone from being very useful to like, oh man, I'm just gonna absorb stink for months.

Can I ask, in a world do you buy a box of baking soda anticipating that someday you're gonna put it in your fridge? Doesn't everybody just move into a new house buy a box of baking soda, stick it in the fridge and then forget why they ever put it in your fridge. Doesn't everybody just move into a new house, buy a box of baking soda, stick it in the fridge, and then forget why they ever put it in there, find it when you move out and throw it away? You're looking at me like I'm gonna help you with this,

and you come to the wrong road, yeah, my dear. No, what you do is you write a date on it, and it's three months after you install it, and then you replace it. Does your wife notice? Apparently she does not. After 10 years of marriage, she does not. I thought we had the same one in the fridge

that we've always had there. That's why when you open our fridge, you'll get overwhelmed by visible stink lines because I put the time in. That's not a medical thing, but someday I'm gonna look up how effective those really are. Very, very effective Sydney. They wouldn't advertise it if the, oh no, I've made a huge mistake.

Again, this was kind of thought to purify the water, keep it clean. So, from all of these uses of silver, mainly for food and drink-like purposes. In the 1800s and, or late 1800s and early 1900s, we start to see like an expansion of what we think silver is good for. So one use in particular is for newborns, whose mothers may have had certain sexually transmitted infections, especially gonorrhea, there was concern that they could have

different infections of their eyes, the babies when they were born. And so silver eyedrops were actually put in newborns eyes to help prevent complications from different illnesses. That sounds problematic. Not necessarily. Okay. That's not what I, you know, we use in our hospital today, but some places in the world that could still be in use. Actually. Silver salts in nasal sprays were very common for different cold allergic complaints, anything that affected you.

Made you have a runny nose or cough or congestion or anything like that. Wound dressings, it was very common to put silver, just as Plenty had recommended in wound dressings. And in World War I, silver was often used in the battlefield to dress wounds. Can you clarify something, and please, if I'm getting ahead of you, please let me know. But do we have, like with mercury, I know exposure to that is not great. Is it a spoiler to ask you if exposure to mercury is the same kind of dangerous or has the same sort of dangers?

You mean to silver and there is a danger there? To silver, yes. Yes, but not the same as mercury as you're going to see. It is not as dangerous as mercury. When I think about liquid metal, I just... Right. I mean, it's best not to ingest it. But putting it on topically was not necessarily always dangerous. Was it effective? Often, no. History will be the judge. Right. But was it was it dangerous? No, and I mean, it was commonplace for surgeons to use silver sutures for all these reasons. To have silver and pregnant sutures.

I know why silver is so expensive, because these all-time people were just like throwing it around. Put it in everything. Put it in everything. Use it all up. There were all kinds of health tonics you could buy too. Big bottles of various mixtures of patent medicine standards, things like opium and cocaine and alcohol,

all that stuff that makes sense. And also silver. Also silver, especially for again, for gonorrhea, for epilepsy, for stomach disorders, for colds, there were lots of different silver based, usually liquid medicines that you could drink for these things. Now, in the 1940s with the antibiotic era, we came up with the idea of fighting infections, you know Effectively effectively So the use of silver kind of declined because these were all thoughts to like keep you healthy

Killed germs before we knew the regirms and then even after we knew the regirms But then that became unnecessary with antibiotics But that the use of silver for different medical reasons did not die off. We kind of saw this spike again in the, like the search for more natural cures that kind of started. Maybe we could say in like the 70s and then pervaded in the 80s and then by the 90s, silver was kind of a thing again.

It was back in fashion. And you even see like in 2003, there was a clothing line of different kind of lingerie and sportswear that had silver ions in it to help prevent odor and bacterial growth in your clothes. Colloidal silver, the silver that everybody's talking about, became really popular again in the 90s as a cure all of sorts.

And when we say colloidal silver, what we really just mean is like water with silver ions floating in it. Okay. So that's what I'm really talking about. Does it take a lot of silver to make that? You can put different amounts in it. Okay.

A lot of the people we're going to talk about made it themselves. So it's advised, of course, for infections. And this is based on, I don't think I've said this yet, this is based on the fact that there were studies done in labs, so in vitro, meaning in labs, that showed that silver can kill bacteria when directly exposed to bacteria. So we discovered bacteria, we put silver on them, it killed them and we went, yes, we have a cure. Now, not everything that you can do in a lab is easily replicated in the human body, as we've said before. So as I'll as I'll get to it at the end, that this becomes problematic, but that's based on those

early studies and then these ancient uses of silver, we see people advising it for everything. Infections for general wellness, just keep yourself healthy and infection-free by taking silver. All those usual vague claims, but also for things specifically like herpes, silver became a very popular recommendation for herpes in the 90s for diabetes for tuberculosis. What? For HIV? In the 90s? The 90s? In the 1990s for HIV and for cancer. No. That's where you'll, well you already lost me actually. You didn't lose your cancer, you already lost me. It's now, by now you'll find people who promote silver

for the cure of 650 diseases. I'll be honest. And all our cure listings, I don't think we've ever gotten past like two dozen. I'll be honest, I'm a physician and I, you know, I went to medical school. I don't have like a list of diseases. Like there was no point in history

in my medical training where I had to like memorize, like here are all of diseases. There was no point in history in my medical training where I had to memorize, hear all the diseases, now memorize them. I don't know that there's 650. Well, there's a lot of fragmentation. They don't just say, cold, there's a really bad cold, a summer cold, a kind of bad cold that you get over, you gotta break it up.

I mean, if we're talking ICT 10 codes, there are thousands, so like way more of those, but I don't know. Anyway, these were probably based on studies where they killed various bacteria and viruses in the lab. The reason that everybody's argument, the reason I don't want to give you silver and I would rather give you penicillin is because Big Pharma pays me to do that. I can assure you,

Big Pharma has never called me and asked me to prescribe you penicillin or any other ankle audit. There was so much of this that in 1999, the FDA issued a final rule on colloidal silver establishing that, and this is a quote, all over the counter drug products, containing colloidal silver ingredients

or silver salts for internal or external use are not generally recognized as safe and effective and are misbranded. Many OTC, over the counter drug products, containing CO2 silver ingredients or silver salts are being marketed for numerous series disease conditions and the FDA is not aware of any substantial scientific evidence that supports the use of OTC CO2 silver ingredients

or silver salts for these disease conditions. But what about blue people, Sydney? Well, people still, people don't like to listen to authority. So taking silver supplements is still very popular. And chronically, if you continue to ingest silver, well, here's the thing, your body doesn't really need it. Right.

There are lots of trace, you know, elements and then materials that we need, very small amounts of in our body. Iron. Yeah. Well, we need more of that. That's not trace. But there are lots of things that we only need a little bit of. Silver's not that.

We don't need it. You don't need silver. Nice. Yes, we need that. We need that one. But that's an amino acid, right? No. Dang. It's a vitamin. We need that one. But that's an amino acid, right? No. Dang.

It's a vitamin. It's a vitamin. But we don't need silver. So it's just going to accumulate in your body. What is it accumulate? Mainly in your skin. Yep. When enough silver deposits in your skin, you're going to start to change colors.

You're going to start to look kind of grayish, kind of bluish. If you continue this. This is a condition called Argeria and it is from taking primarily from taking silver supplements. In the early 1900s, some people who were already doing this were actually in freak shows at the time, where they would travel as the blue man, you know, not the group. No, the blue man. I do not think they have our geria. I do think they paint themselves that color. Some of them have our geria.

No, I'm pretty sure that they just apply paint externally. They used a lot of silver drums and silver, because of equipment, it's not drums. Of course, those guys, they're always tubes, whatever's around, but they were all silver and they all turned blue. And that was how the first, they used to be just we called the man group.

A lot of people didn't know that. When we're next, then then the blue happened. Uh-huh. Those are the original guys though. Right. Everybody else is a pretend to throw. If you want to be legit, if you want to be like taken seriously, if you want, like, if you at the conferences, right, this is hard to hear.

Sydney. Listen, you should sit down. Okay. There's more than one blooming. Yeah. Barnum and Bailey circus, which is over sin, right? Sin, yeah. Yeah, that's believing.

I think there was, there was a blue man who famously traveled with, with the circus in back when they had free shows. And one, he had one of the worst cases ever of Argeria very, very blue. That's all I mean by that. He was just quite blue. Just quite blue. They diagnosed it at Bellevue in 1923 on autopsy where they kind of figured out how this

happened. There was also one in the Coney Island circus who was named Captain Fred Walters who initially took a silver nitrate for some sort of neurological condition, but then when he realized that he turned blue and he could tour with freak shows to make money, he kept taking it, you know, to get bluer. Sydney, I got to hear about more blue people. I'm going to tell you about more blue people, but first Justin, why don't you come with me to the billing department?

Let's go! The medicines, the medicines that ask you let my cards before the mouth. The three of you enter a cave of a big red dragon and is standing over a horde of precious golden rubies. And he says, what do you do, adventurers? I'm a dragon man. I cast fire on him. It's very good. I addressed the red dragon to say, us, we're the hosts of the Adventure Zone, a podcast about family playing Dungeons and Dragons.

Very good synergy, commit to the bit. I, I, I rolled to charm new listeners. It is very effective against all odds. Everybody wear the macros, we host the Adventure Zone to podcasts where we play Dungeons and Dragons together. It's a comedy podcast. We don't take the rules too seriously,

because there's a lot of them and we did not take the time to learn them. Maybe listen to us. We come out every other Thursday on the maximum fun network. You'll find us on iTunes or on maximumfund.org. I think this promo is a critical hit. Sydney, I demand to hear about more blue people. Okay. So another unfortunate victim of drinking silver was Rosemary Jacobs. Back in the 1950s as an 11-year-old girl, she was prescribed silver containing nasal drops. That was a very common preparation of silver back in the day where nasal drops often used for things like allergies and chronic sinusitis. She used them, just as

the doctor prescribed for years, just as needed and it turned her skin kind of a silvery gray, which it still is to this day despite treatments that she's had to try to kind of peel off the silver layer that have not been completely successful. Now, Ms. Jacobs uses this as a platform to speak out against the dangers of unregulated alternative medications because she was following her doctor's orders. just one one more reason to be suspicious of non evidence-based medicine. Uh, now, many of you sent me pictures to inspire this topic of a guy who was blue. And those pictures are of Paul Karrison. Um, he, you, you, if you have seen someone with our geria, this is probably the gentleman you've seen because he's a poster boy an impressive beard and he an impressive white beard and he is quite blue

Go on so many people have called him not me, but on TV have called him Papa smurf right me, but on TV, have called him Papa Smurf. Right. Right. City, that's Europe, physician, right? That's horrible. I didn't call him that. He was called that.

He was on like the Today Show. And they called him that. His poor man. And that was not me. He had a skin infection and some dermatitis and some other skin conditions. He did a little reading, figured out that silver was this alternative medicine that, you know, doctors don't want you to know about. So he made a salve for his face out of silver and he also made his own homemade tonic out of distilled water, silver,

and salt, and drank it, and turned blue. But he did insist that it cleared up all of his skin conditions. Except for one, which is having blue skin. Now, another famous... Wait, before you go on, I have a question. Yeah. Okay, so I'm getting kind of conflicting reports from you, and I need you to clear it up for me.

If you stop taking the silver, will your skin change back? No, this is often a permanent condition. So why did my guy, the captain, Captain Fred keep pounding the silver? Well, one, the more you take, the more impressive the color will be. Impressive. Well, the more vibrant. The more vibrant. color will be. Impressive. Well, the more vibrant. The more vibrant. The more vibrant.

The more vibrant. Look at that. Whoa, honey. Hey, blue. Hey, blue. Look at this jiggle. What an impressive, you a blue you are, sir. You really knock my song soft.

The other thing is that even though, even though this is often an irreversible condition, it could fade somewhat with time. So it's not really like a, like, you're not, it's not like, an actually like an accumulation of silver, right? No, it's a deposition of silver in your tissues. But you just don't process it, like, because you don't know how.

No, you're not, you're body. We're not made to. That makes sense, that makes sense. It's good, it's good, it doesn't belong in your body when you're not made to process it. Yeah. Just putting that out there. Another guy who turned himself blue, drinking an unapproved homemade silver based antibiotic was Stan Jones now. I'm not approved. Oh my gosh. FDA approved from a made silver in the wild. Listen, the update has really got off the brand.

It looks good. Yeah, what's that in there? It's lover. It's rubber stamp. This, if you've heard of Stan Jones, he was a, he is a libertarian from Montana, who ran for the Senate and did not, when he actually ran for like multiple positions in Montana and the government, he ran for like governor and he ran for the Senate. And I mean, he, he, I don't think he is running in any races more recently, but throughout

the 2000s, he ran multiple times for different government offices. He did not win the Senate rate, a Senate race, but he probably had an effect on it. I guess he, as a third party candidate, probably tipped the scales in the direction of the Democratic candidate. So he's credited with influencing, if not winning, a Senate race. Back in 1999, he became very worried about Y2K, which of course was what was thought to be the apocalyptic end of humanity when all of the computers got confused because we went from 1999 to 2000 and they didn't know how to cope with it. Right. Anyway, he thought that the world was going to end and we were going to need to learn

how to take care of ourselves and part of that was going to be making our own medicines. So he started making himself a homemade silver antibiotic. He did it by charging to silver wires in a glass of water, releasing silver ions into the silver particles into the water. Ions into the so were particles into the water He initially was making it then anticipating that he would stockpile it and use it in case of infection But then as he did more reading he found that people recommended it for general wellness and and health So he just started drinking it every day We need a different word for reading on the internet. It's the thing. We really shouldn't

call it reading. Has he started slipping ice, I don't know. Injusting information on the internet. Trauma information. He didn't, now here's the thing. So he's drinking silver water. He does not realize, or at least this is what he said, he didn't realize that he had turned blue until he was participating in a Senate debate in 2002. And after it was over, a reporter came up to him and said, are you okay because you look really blue? He didn't know, so he went and he saw a doctor and then there was diagnosed with Argeria from drinking homemade silver. I believe that did not stop him. He continued

to drink silver and it kind of became part of in addition to being a political candidate, what he was known for. Oh, he's that blue guy. Yeah. And then also I did a quick Google because I've been googling all these people to see how blue we're talking. Yeah. And I've been giving them little ratings in my head on blueness. And my guy's still endorsing it and getting out there and spraying the world and just letting people know about how great the stuff is. What's the argument that we're supposed to be blue?

What? I mean, what's the argument there? You drink something, it turns you blue. And so then what do you say? He's blue, but he feels great. But obviously, humanity was meant to be blue. In addition to turning you blue, there have been instances of colloidal silver,

ingesting colloidal silver, causing things like neurological problems, kidney problems, kidney problems, liver problems. That's not as common. I'll be honest in terms of how dangerous is it. It's not, it could be dangerous, but for most people, it's just going to turn you blue. Now the flip side of that is it also won't help you in any way.

So you will just be sick and blue. And blue. Yeah. You will not be healthy and blue. You'll be sick and blue. Now, there are uses, we do use silver, someone in medicine. There are silver dressings, for wounds, specifically for burns that are still used today.

I've ordered them in my career. So far, sofa, diazine is the form of it. It's not colloidal silver, but it's form of silver. That we can put in on wounds to help try to prevent bacterial growth. Because as I said, like in labs, silver can be used to kill bacteria. It's just when we have tried to reproduce those studies by dumping it into humans We've never seen those same results which happens We also use silver nitrate on wounds which I've talked about before it's another kind of form of silver that we can use for wound Healing and debridement, but we're just not bleeding, but again It's a breed, debridement

For dead tissue that we want to kind of get rid of Although it can be somewhat corrosive to the skin, and it can also stain your skin, as we've already talked about with silver. And it was really worrisome to me as I was reading about this, the evidence for using these things that I use, that we use in medicine actually isn't as strong

as I thought it was, especially silver dressings, which I thought were kind of obviously these work. There have been some studies that have questioned if they're any more effective than placebo at preventing bacterial growth. So now some studies say they are, but some studies sway over on that. And that's something we use in medicine today. So I thought that was really interesting. Now again, we have no evidence they're harmful.

We just don't necessarily. Anyway, we've investigated it for other uses. We've tried to coat like into tracheal tubes, things we use for ventilation, like when we intubate somebody. We've tried to coat those with silver to prevent pneumonia that can happen. I haven't, we haven't really seen success with that yet. We've tried it with urinary catheters

that we, you know, insert if somebody needs a catheter. That didn't work. It just made really expensive catheters. Russian space programs have tried it to keep water sterile. It's been used in some water filtration and sewage systems around the world. There's some evidence that it might be helpful in some of those like bacteria fighting environments. And they have tried giving patients silver acetate. This is actually something you would ingest for smoking cessation, but they never saw any effect from that.

Here's the skinny on silver. Just don't take it. You don't need it. Your body doesn't need it. We don't use it. We have real medicine. Cut it out. Using antibiotics judiciously is certainly very important

because they are overused and there is a danger that bugs become resistant and they won't be as effective. Silver is not the answer, everyone. Just use your antibiotics, smarter. Just be better stewards of antibiotics. Don't take silver plates. Listen, I know during this episode, it may have sounded like I was making fun

of people with our area. And I just wanna say, I am not making fun of anyone who is actually prescribing by a real doctor because they were tricked. But if you read about it on the internet, or you're from your friends friend, or whatever, I am in fact making fun of you because you're fine, you're just blue

because you did something that is ininvisible. I'm not making fun of you because you're fine. You're just blue because you did something that is inadvisable. I'm not making any character judgments about you. I am just making fun of you for being blue. And I'm sorry for that. Please stop drinking silver. Everyone is silver. Please stop drinking silver.

It's gonna save me that hard. No. A lot of health things are hard. Just don't drink silver. If something turns you blue, it probably is not the answer. That's going to do it for us folks. Thank you so much for listening. This is probably going to be our last reminder of this,

but we are going to be on the Jonathan Colton cruise that is March 4th through March 11th. We're going to go to a bunch of different ports of call at Cabo San Lucas, and an overnight land festival at Loretto, Loretto? I don't know. I'm really looking forward to it. There's a ton of great people on the ship.

Besides just us, who cares? I will, I care about Sydney, but not me. In our daughter. In our daughter. The juxtapher. Welcome to Night Vale, Nerf Herder. Max Temkin, creator of Cartesian Super Anti, Rebecca Sugar is a new ad creator of Stephen Universe.

Are you kidding me? I'm flipping out. Just gonna lose this mind. Flip it, you're gonna lose your mind. Well, I am too, but you more so. Yeah, collectively. Yeah, you're gonna be got even more. But it's gonna be great.

And there are still, believe it or not, there are still some cabins available. Very limited though. Go to jokucrews.com, jococrues.com and get on board, literally. That's my new tagline. Right, because it's a boat. Thanks for the backspinning. Thanks for letting us use our some medicines as the intro now to our program. Thank you to all our sponsors.

Thank you to you for listening. Sorry about missing a week. But it's life, you know, say, Lavi will be better. We'll be better. Like isn't healthy or like, you know, we're getting there. But until next week, my name is just a macro. I'm Sydney Macroi. And it's always don'till a hole in your head. Alright! Yeah! Maximumfund.org

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