[whispers]I think he was joking, njtt[/whispers]
Lordy, no. This nonsense is decades old.
The idea that it’s possible to manipulate your body’s pH (through diet or supplements) is a founding principle of woo. It appeals to the sort of mind that wants to think there’s a simple yet profound and safe way to treat or prevent all manner of diseases without resorting to them nasty allopathic drugs (or, for that matter, making painful but valuable lifestyle changes, something the allopathic satanic medical community long has preached in vain).
As previously noted - your body (in particular your kidneys and lungs) are very good at maintaining blood/tissue pH within a very narrow range. Go outside that range to any significant degree (i.e. during serious illness or through getting poisoned), and all those metabolic reactions that depend on normal pH levels start going haywire.
One thing (out of many) that I’ve never understood about the pH-is-key-to-health crowd: why would anyone think that alkalinity is better than acidity? “Acid” apparently has bad connotations for a lot of people*, but you can certainly burn yourself as badly with a strong base as with a strong acid.
A couple of good links for countering acid-base and water woo:
*not for my generation, man.
Colloidal silver actually did have a medial use prior to the development of antibiotics, and silver compounds still have a role in medicine due to anti-bacterial action, so it’s not entirely woo but really, antibiotics are safer, more effective, and don’t have the potential to turn your skin corpsey-blue-grey. It’s like people who promote “black salve” or bloodroot for skin cancer instead of modern medical treatment - in the 19th Century bloodroot salve that literally burned off the skin cancer with chemicals was the medical treatment but we’ve got much, much better stuff these days!
It’s as if people decided to give up electricity, synthetics and plastics, and go back to living at medieval standards. WHY? Even the Amish utilize modern medicine and synthetic fabrics. They’re better than what we had before in many applications.
Colloidal silver I can understand - there is a history of silver being used in medicine. It’s woo because we’ve got much better treatments these days. MSM? WTF? No long history or cultural importance. Likewise the pH thing - who the hell knew what the pH of the human body was before the 20th Century?
I dated a guy who was all about this. I was fine with it until he started giving his dogs specially filtered “alkaline” water. :: roll eyes :: I didn’t think they needed to be subjected to his woo bullshit. But yeah, he had spent dog knows how much on this contraption that hooked up to his kitchen tap. You had to turn all these dials and flip switches just to get a damn glass of water in his house. I’d sneak off to the bathroom sink and drink straight tap water; he’d lose his damn mind over that.
I tried to explain that you cannot eat and drink your way to different body chemistry. If you rendered the acids in your stomach alkaline, you wouldn’t be able to digest anything. And, as was mentioned upthread, there’s this thing called “stasis” where the body keeps its pH around 7.4. In reading debunking sites about this particular stripe of woo, I understood if the body pH varies by more than 0.2 in either direction, you die.
He didn’t want to hear it. He explained to me it works and it’s true because he gets up every morning and pees on a pH test strip and he had clearly reached alkalinity. I explained to him that pee is the body’s waste and he was filtering OUT all that alkaline crap – changing the pH of your pee is not the same thing as changing the pH of your blood. Whatever, he wasn’t having it.
I stopped dating him (for other reasons), and he touched base with me a few months later and told me he’d had eight kidney stones and had been really miserable. EIGHT kidney stones. So I googled that and my theory is (IANA Doctor) he gave himself kidney stones from that water filter thing. What I think it actually does is calcifies the water – or somehow neutralizes the acidity of the flouride in the tap water or something. Any container (glass, dog bowl, pitcher, what have you) he had that special filtered water in was coated with white residue – exactly like what happens in your water heater. We have very calcified water here because the water comes from a limestone aquifer. Excess calcium can cause kidney stones.
I think the dumb fucker gave himself kidney stones and I am waiting to hear the news that one or all three of his poor dogs has them. 
Colloidal silver is not the same thing as metallic silver, though. The silver in modern wound care dressings (usually what I hear is “they use silver cream for infected wounds, see?!”) is metallic silver, not colloidal silver. Metallic silver is antibacterial. Colloidal silver isn’t.
When people talk about foods being “alkaline” or “acidic”, I assume they are referring to the food’s Potential Renal Acid Load (PRAL), which is thought to be a factor in osteoporosis (calcium salts in the bones can be depleted in order to buffer the acid load):
It seems to me that woo alkalinity has as much to do with actual pH as Chinese “heating” or “cooling” foods have to do with actual temperature.
In the latter case, it becomes the Wu factor.
I’m not angry, just very disappointed. I need you to sit there and think about what you just did.
Oh dear. The first time I’d ever heard about this alkaline-woo thing was under some ironic circumstances. I work in a bio lab among several brilliant and talented scientists. One day one of our grad students was presenting his dissertation defense, and our whole department had planned on coming, along with his mother who had flown in from out state to see the defense.
Our grad student was busy in the morning and awkwardly had to leave his mom in our breakroom while he got ready and set up. Several of us in the lab kept her company while we waited. And she went on and on and on about how acidity in the body causes illness and cancer and uh, prawn flu or whatever. then she moved on to how much healthier she became and how much weight she lost with her alkaline diet etc., etc- we must know all this because we study this all day, right?..while a roomful of scientists smiled politely and gritted their teeth, trying not to be jerks to our grad student’s mom who’d come all this way to see her son become a PhD. She was very proud of him, but I doubt she understood much of the defense.
Nah, virtually everyone who goes on about an “acid” or “alkaline” diet is under the impression that your overall body pH is significantly affected by what you eat.
It’s rare to find a member of wootopia who talks about osteoporosis in this context (and it should be noted that any dietary pH connection to osteoporosis remains speculative). You can of course alter the acidity of your urine through diet and drugs (and for that matter you can do the same for saliva) but that’s a far different matter from affecting blood and tissue pH.
Follow my simple treatment protocol (patent pending!)
Step 1: identify a patient with cancer
Step 2: shoot said patient right in the cancer with a bullet - the bigger the better
Step 3: ask patient if they’re still worried about cancer
I’m preparing a paper for publication showing a 95.0% success rate. (Thanks to that one incredibly snarky little bastard)
Hey now. My cancer was cured with a knife. Why not a gun? You probably don’t even have to sanitize it first.
Actually… no, the wound dressings usually aren’t metallic silver, they’re usually silver sulfadiazine cream. Even there, the use of it apparently does slightly delay healing time vs. not using it according to Cochrane review.
There have recently been some uses of “nanoparticle” silver, but that’s really recent and I doubt the average woo-seller has the capability to produce the real thing. Also, the nanoparticle thing doesn’t really have that good of results, and much of the particles wind up being some sort of oxide of silver due to large surface area and exposure to the atmosphere.
There is some indication that silver coatings of tubes entering the body (endotracheal tubes, urinary catheters, etc.) may help reduce infections but the studies showing that are typically small and of limited utility from a research standpoint.
Really, the BIGGEST use of silver in medicine through the 20th Century was in x-ray films, the emulsions being based on silver compounds. That is largely falling to the wayside with digital x-rays although they’re still in use in some places.
On water molecule size:
The woo-meisters are not actually claiming that the size of water molecules changes. Their claim is that water forms bonds between individual molecules, as a string of ±±± and so on. We know this does actually happen in water, but the woo-sters would tell you that these bonds turn the water into big clumps that cannot get into your cells. Obviously, that’s total BS, but their idea is that smaller clumps means better hydration. Sometimes they’ll even talk about “hexagonal water” as some optimal or minimal size for these water clusters. (That Wikipedia link also has some information about general water clumping claims.)
Just to clarify on the kidney stone front-the reason that the gentleman mentioned above got kidney stones probably had nothing to do with the filtration per se; it was likely because his urine was too alkaline. Different compounds precipitate at different pH levels. A high pH tends to favor calcium phosphate stones. From here:
I suggest we change the above title to:
“If your body PH is alkaline, it won’t get cancer or other diseases-except kidney stones”
That’s funny. There is one person in my workplace who believes this. She singlehandedly runs the QC lab.
The cream contains ionic silver, but I don’t like it much. As you say, it doesn’t actually seem to speed wound healing. I’d rather use Medihoney, if the doctor will let me.
But I was referring more to silver dressings, which use metallic silver fibers or silver nanoparticles in the pads, which release silver ions when it gets wet with wound exudate. SilvaSorb and 3M’s silver alginate are the ones I’m asked to use most often, but there are others:
MRSA and the use of silver dressings: overcoming bacterial resistance
While “they” will claim that their homemade and internet available colloidal silvers are ionic nonoparticle suspensions, they’re mostly not. I particularly love the “nanoparticle” ones with visible bits of silver flake floating in them. :rolleyes: But hey, if they want to use them for wound care, have at it. At least it’s unlikely to turn them blue when used topically.
You need to stock up a lifetime supply now, while you still can.
What doesn’t kill you makes you sicker! Wooo!