Colloidal silver

Colloidal silver

Colloidal silver has appeared in the news yet again. It's one of those stories that comes around every year or two: maybe someone's decided to start selling it again or perhaps yet another man has turned blue as a result of taking it. The time of the story may change but the story itself is always the same. Colloidal silver is another one of those health fads which while it is based in a minor part of reality, is in fact a scam and a fraud. You see, while colloidal silver might indeed have certain antibiotic effects, it also has some rather bad side effects. And not only that, we now have vastly better antibiotics which you should be better off using rather than the colloidal silver. Here's an example of the sort of claims made for colloidal silver:

There's few problems with those claims: for example, cellulitis is not a bacterial infection. Nor is osteomyelitis. If it is effective against epiglottis in children (something we are most dubious about) why isn't it in adults? These are the sort of claims we associate with snake oil salesmen I'm afraid, not with proper medicine. It's also worth noting that penicillin has been shown to be more effective in those diseases where bacteria are indeed present: which is why the medical world uses it and its derivatives rather than silver.

Oh, and you know that silver is a heavy metal? So drinking a solution of it is giving yourself heavy metal poisoning? And if you want the full skinny on colloidal silver you can always read Quackwatch: Colloidal silver is a suspension of submicroscopic metallic silver particles in a colloidal base. Long-term use of silver preparations can lead to argyria, a condition in which silver salts deposit in the skin, eyes, and internal organs, and the skin turns ashen-gray. Many cases of argyria occurred during the pre-antibiotic era when silver was a common ingredient in nosedrops. When the cause became apparent, doctors stopped recommending their use, and reputable manufacturers stopped producing them. The official drug guidebooks (United States Pharmacopeia and National Formulary) have not listed colloidal silver products since 1975.