Pseudoscience – miracle cure

From New Scientist magazine. Demonstrates how pseudoscientific medicines often make outrageous claims as to their efficacy. Science, pseudoscience, alternative medicine.
  • 17 September 2008
  • From New Scientist Print Edition

FEEDBACK is indebted to denizens of the Urban75.com bulletin board for alerting us to a website that must surely be of benefit to all humanity. Go to Oilpulling.com and you will find it promises a method by which “migraine headaches, bronchitis, diseased teeth, arterio thrombosis, chronic blood disorders such as leukemia, arthritis and related illnesses, neuro physiological paralysis, eczema, gastro enteritis, peritonitis, heart disease, kidney disease, meningitis, and women’s hormonal disorders are completely eliminated from the organism”.

What could be better? Quite a lot, apparently, for it further claims that “in terminal diseases such as cancer, Aids and chronic infections this treatment method has been shown to successfully replace all others”. Users “could potentially live healthy to be 140 to 150 years old”.

And what could this treatment method be? It consists of swishing cold-pressed sunflower or sesame oil in the mouth: “In the morning before breakfast on an empty stomach you take one tablespoon… move oil slowly in the mouth as rinsing or swishing… for fifteen to twenty minutes.” You may not be surprised to read that when “Dr. F. Karach, M.D., presented a paper before the All-Ukrainian Association” (of what, they do not say) the “results of this therapy invoked astonishment and doubt”.

“Joaquim Figueredo notes that the principal team leader of the Stability and Calibration group at UK-based pharmaceuticals company Bodycote Health Sciences is none other than Suzanne Measures”

An Urban75 user going by the name of “fridgemagnet” asks: “Can I just eat an enormous fried breakfast every day instead?” Feedback isn’t sure, for while the Oilpulling site warns: “The oil must not be swallowed, for it has become toxic,” it later reassures us that “inadvertently if you swallow there is nothing to worry. It will go out through faeces.”

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