The Blue Man

The Blue Man

Picasso had his blue period and then moved on to different colors. Paul Karason knows where the famous artist was coming from. After literally living the blues for more than a decade, the real-life “Blue Boy” is ready to try a different color. “I’m anxious to try green,” Karason joked to TODAY’s Matt Lauer in New York Thursday. “You get a little bored with blue.”

Recluse to celebrity

A year and a half ago, Karason vaulted from life as a relative recluse to Internet fame when he first appeared on TODAY to tell how he turned his skin the color of a ripe Concord grape with years of self-administered doses of colloidal silver. He went from a man who didn’t like to speak in public and didn’t appreciate the often-negative attention his singular skin color brought him to giving interviews on national shows and being approached with acceptance by people who had seen his story.

Lauer asked him if being on TODAY helped bring him out of his shell. “I didn’t have much choice. I couldn’t find the cave I was looking for,” Karason said with his characteristic self-deprecating humor. When he first appeared on TODAY, Dr. Nancy Snyderman, NBC’s chief medical editor, talked him into getting his first complete medical checkup in years. The colloidal silver that had been collecting in his tissues and turning his skin blue is a heavy metal, and there was fear it could have affected his organs, particularly his liver. Karason passed all the tests with flying colors (of a bluish hue) and was given a clean bill of health.

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.