What has me concerned is some research I saw on really dangerous snake-oil type treatments, as reported on a blog/podcast site at http://skeptoid. com, which had several posts written by Brian Dunning, a computer scientist who debunks pseudoscience reports as a hobby (I confirmed that the content is accurate and all quoted material below is from the author’s blog.)
Mucoid plaque is supposedly a toxin naturopaths and herbal charlatans say everyone has growing inside their bowels; in fact it is created by the pill sold to purge the plaque. In other words, the supposed cure is causing the problem, making people assume the malady is real.
What you get to cure mucoid plaque is a “bowel cleansing pill, said to be herbal, which causes your intestines to produce long, rubbery, hideous looking snakes of bowel movements, which they call mucoid plaque. There are lots of pictures of these on the Internet, and sites that sell these pills are a great place to find them. Look at www. DrNatura. com, www. BlessedHerbs. com, and www. AriseAndShine. com, just for a start.
“Imagine how terrifying it would be to actually see one of those come out of your body. If you did, it would sure seem to confirm everything these web sites have warned about toxins building up in your intestines. But there’s more to it. As it turns out, any professional con artist would be thoroughly impressed to learn the secrets of mucoid plaque (and, incidentally, the term mucoid plaque was invented by these sellers; there is no such actual medical condition). These pills consist mainly of bentonite, an absorbent, expanding clay similar to what composes many types of kitty litter. Combined with psyllium, used in the production of mucilage polymer, bentonite forms a rubbery cast of your intestines when taken internally, mixed of course with whatever else your body is excreting. Surprise, a giant rubbery snake of toxins in your toilet.
“It’s important to note that the only recorded instances of these ‘mucoid plaque’ snakes in all of medical history come from the toilets of the victims of these cleansing pills. No gastroenterologist has ever encountered one in tens of millions of endoscopies, and no pathologist has ever found one during an autopsy. They do not exist until you take such a pill to form them. The pill creates the very condition that it claims to cure. And the results are so graphic and impressive that no victim would ever think to argue with the claim.”
Another detoxing gimmick I came across is about some electrical foot-bath products on the market. “The idea is that you stick your feet in the bath of salt water, usually with some herbal or homeopathic additive, plug it in and switch it on, and soak your feet. After a while the water turns a sickly brown, and this is claimed to be the toxins that have been drawn out of your body through your feet. One tester found that his water turned brown even when he did not put his feet in. The reason is that electrodes in the water corrode via electrolysis, putting enough oxidized iron into the water to turn it brown. When reporter Ben Goldacre published these results in the Guardian Unlimited online news, some of the marketers of these products actually changed their messaging to admit this was happening – but again, staying one step ahead – now claim that their product is not about detoxification, it’s about balancing the body’s energy fields: Another meaningless, untestable claim.
“But detoxifying through the feet didn’t end there. A newcomer to the detoxification market is Kinoki foot pads, available at BuyKinoki. com and many drugstores. These are adhesive gauze patches that you stick to the sole of your foot at night, and they claim to ‘draw toxins’ from your body. They also claim that all Japanese people have perfect health, and the reason is that they use Kinoki foot pads to detoxify their bodies, a secret they’ve been jealously guarding from medical science for hundreds of years. A foolish claim like this is demonstrably false on every level, and should raise a huge red flag to any critical reader. Nowhere in any of their marketing materials do they say what these alleged toxins are, or what mechanism might cause them to move from your body into the adhesive pad.
“Kinoki foot pads contain unpublished amounts of vinegar, tourmaline, chitin, and other unspecified ingredients. Tourmaline is a semi-precious gemstone that’s inert and not biologically reactive, so it has no plausible function. Chitin is a type of polymer used in gauze bandages and medical sutures, so naturally it’s part of any gauze product. They probably mention it because some alternative practitioners believe that chitin is a ‘fat attractor’, a pseudoscientific claim which has never been supported by any evidence or plausible hypothesis. I guess they hope that we will infer by extension that chitin also attracts ‘toxins’ out of the body. Basically the Kinoki foot pads are gauze bandages with vinegar. Vinegar has many folk-wisdom uses when applied topically, such as treating acne, sunburn, warts, dandruff, and as a folk antibiotic. But one should use caution: Vinegar can cause chemical burns on infants, and the American Dietetic Association has tracked cases of home vinegar applications to the foot causing deep skin ulcers after only two hours.
“Since the Kinoki foot pads are self-adhesive, peeling them away removes the outermost layer of dead skin cells. And since they are moist, they loosen additional dead cells when left on for a while. So it’s a given that the pads will look brown when peeled from your foot, exactly like any adhesive tape would; though this effect is much less dramatic than depicted on the TV commercials, depending on how dirty your feet are. And, as they predict, this color will diminish over subsequent applications, as fewer and fewer of your dead, dirty skin cells remain. There is no magic detoxification needed to explain this effect.”
What remains indisputably true is that the country of Japan is not selling these toxinpurging foot pads like hotcakes, everyone is not using them, and the Japanese have health problems like any population.
Trying to eliminate wrinkles and other skin woes with false hopes that essentially involve throwing your money down the toilet on products that can’t help doesn’t really make sense. When there are brilliant things you really can do for your skin, wasting money isn’t the way to go. Purging yourself of the myths the industry loves instigating and perpetuating, and learning what you really should do instead are the best ways to take care of your skin.
