The Health Benefits of Colloidal Silver: A True Story

How to Turn Your Skin Blue or Gray with a Supplement

This is a story of Rosemary Jacobs and the so called health benefits of colloidal silver.

Please note that she has not paid me to publish this nor have I paid her for the rights to use this. She has offered this as a fellow participant in the race we call human. She had the misfortune of finding out the hard way, along with the health benefits of colloidal silver, there is a disastrous and life changing side effect.

I am amazed that when telling about Rosemary, people will say that they take it and they have not turned blue. The problem is, they have not turned blue yet. It is repeated and continuos use that causes the problem. Once the body reaches the tipping point, then it is too late.

Also, there are those who say that this is not real. What is in it for her? Why would she mount a campaign against this. The answer is simple. She is a decent human being that does not want the same thing that happened to her to happen to you.

So, after you read this, please pass it on. Please book mark it, please stumble upon it and please warn others. Any who visit this site know that our focus is on legitimate alternative and complimentary medicine and nursing. We also feel a responsibility to expose the frauds.

Also, please post your responses to either the Ulterior Health Blog or to to the form at the bottom. We would love to gather other stories of the so called health benefits of colloidal silver. This is also one of the colloidal silver testimonials you will not see on the websites of those who promote it.

Now, on with the story....

When I was a child growing up in the suburbs of NYC back in the 1950s, I developed a cyst on my throat which was removed surgically by an ENT, an MD who specialized in treating diseases of the ears, nose and throat. On a follow up visit my mother told him that I always had a cold.

The doctor, who struck me as a caring, compassionate human being responding that it is not possible. He added that I must have allergies. He concluded saying that he had medicine that would help me.

Pulling out a small pad, he wrote a prescription for the drug with directions that it should be taken "intermittently as needed". My mother took the script to our neighborhood pharmacy where the druggist filled it for her. When my nose got stuffy, I put some drops in my nostrils. When the bottle was empty, the same pharmacist refilled the prescription for us.

Note: this was a medical use of colloidal silver and the colloidal silver dosage was prescribed by a doctor.

About three years later when I was in high school, I volunteered along with some friends to work in the local hospital, which happened to be run by Catholic nursing sisters, as a candy striper, the name derived from the red and white pinafore we wore.

Before we could start working, we were required to take a first aid course given by the sisters. The course I took was held on Saturday mornings in the basement of a convent several miles away from the hospital. The instructor was a nun, nurse and pharmacist all rolled into one.

After taking several classes, I walked in one Saturday morning only to startle the teacher. Sitting behind her desk, she looked up at me and said, "Why are you that color?" I didn't respond because I had no idea what she was talking about. She asked again, "Why are you that color?," but without waiting for an answer added, "Tell your mother to take you to the doctor. Find out why you are that color."

Mom was as stunned as I was when I told her what the nurse had said. Suddenly we noticed and so did everyone else. My face was gray. I startled and sometimes frightened strangers in the street. Some people thought I was about to drop dead because of a very serious heart condition. Others feared I had a contagious disease.

My mother phoned our GP, General Practitioner, who happened to be a good family friend who saw me frequently. But he hadn't noticed the discoloration either. When we went to see the only thing he could think of was lead poisoning, but doubting that that was it, he made an appointment for me to see a dermatologist who was also a professor on the staff at one of the large medical schools in NYC.

When Saturday came around again, I went back for another first aid class. This time the sister greeted me with, "You're taking nose drops, aren't you?"

"Yes," I responded.

"Stop!," she said. "They contain silver. That is why you are gray."

Turns out that while visiting the hospital she had seen a fellow nursing sister with the same sickly colored skin and asked her the reason. I don't know for sure but suspect that the same MD who prescribed the drops for me had also prescribed them for her since he practiced at the hospital and had his office very close by.

I reported this to my mother who reported it to our GP who reported it to the dermatologist I had yet to see.

When we went to keep the appointment, he took one look at me and said to my mother, "She has argyria. It is from the silver in the nose drops, but I will have to do a skin biopsy to confirm the diagnosis."

He told us that argyria was a well-known, well-documented medical condition for which there was no cure.

Dermatologists had been unsuccessfully looking for one for ages. They had been experimenting with chelating agents, substances which when taken internally the body eliminates but which while in the body also attach or form chemical bonds with undesirable substances like lead which the body cannot remove but which once attached to the chelating agent are pulled out with it.

The doctor said that while he himself would not experiment on me that he had colleagues at the medical school who would love to do just that offering to give us their names if we were interested. He wouldn't attempt it himself because he felt that the chances of success were very slight and that the chelating agents themselves could cause physical harm whereas it was generally agreed that all the did was discolor people.

Deciding then and there that I'd rather be a healthy gray person than a dead or unhealthy white or gray one, we never went to see the dermatologists at the medical school.

Back then no one sued doctors. I really don't know if anyone even told the ENT specialist what his drops had done to me. I simply accepted the discoloration as my fate in life, something I had to live with, but the experience did teach me a powerful lesson.

I don't simply believe experts, especially not medical experts. I look at the evidence, the entire body of evidence to see what is known, unknown and suspected. While I realize that will not guarantee that I am never injured again or that I will always benefit from treatments, I know that it greatly increases the odds in my favor.

I learned very early long before computers how and were to find the medical literature and spent a lot of time gathering and reading everything written about argyria and silver. I quickly discovered that if my MD had read the medical literature instead of fraudulent ads from drug companies in an era when they weren't strictly regulated like they are today, that he never would have prescribed the drug that disfigured me. He would have know it was a dangerous fraud.

I am now 67 years old and have collected fraudulent ads older than I am and medical journal articles older than I am warning about those fraudulent ads. I have met doctors over the years who have apologized for what one of their colleagues did to me saying they were sorry my parents had never sued him insisting that he had been negligent and most certainly should have known at the time never to prescribe a silver drug for internal use.

That is why I was astounded and horrified to discover in 1995 that silver was being sold as a "dietary supplement" and that salesmen were making the most outrageous, incredible claims about its safety and efficacy. They said it was "used successfully" against 650 diseases and conditions and that it was a "natural antibiotic!"

One salesman even wrote that people with a trace of silver in their bodies never get sick! A patent lie if ever there was one. I had breast cancer at the age of 42. My face was so gray the nurses in pre-op thought I was in cardiac arrest!

It was crazy. Silver was used before the advent of antibiotics, but it didn't work although it did discolor lots of people. In fact there was even a book written about the condition in 1939 called appropriately enough Argyria. Yes, silver like alcohol, peroxide, Clorox, etc. is a disinfectant that kills many pathogens on contact, in vitro, in test tubes, but not in vivo, in living people, inside their bodies like an antibiotic does.

I happened to have a copy of the 1975 5th edition of Goodman and Gilman, The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, often considered the Bible of Pharmacology, the last or next to the last edition in which colloidal silver, the name most silver salesmen gave to their products back then, is mentioned.

On p. 1000 it states, "There is no acceptable evidence that the routine use of silver solutions for prophylaxis of colds or other respiratory tract infections is at all efficacious, and cases of argyria have resulted from this practice. Fortunately, the colloidal silver preparations are now in a deserved oblivion."

I thought a terrible mistake had been made and tried contacting salesmen requesting evidence demonstrating that their claims about safety and efficacy were correct and to tell them about argyria. When a magazine that had heavily promoted "colloidal silver" or 'CS' refused to publish my letter to the editor warning about argyria, I decided there was no mistake.

It was fraud. Further investigation showed me that the promoters were quoting long dead quacks pretending they were reputable researchers living today, misquoting reputable scientists and selectively reporting anything positive they discovered written about any form of silver while ignoring everything negative.

Knowing that there would be new cases of argyria, I went on the warpath in an effort to alert the public to the uselessness and danger of ingesting silver. The salesmen said I didn't know what I was talking about that their products were different than the one I had taken and couldn't possible disfigure people, but when I asked for independent scientific evidence showing that that was true, they couldn't produce any. Nada. Zilch.

One salesman threatened me and then admitted that there was no such evidence.

Tragically, I have been proven correct. There are now many cases of argyria caused by silver supplements. And what do the salesmen say when they learn about them? They blame the victims telling them that they took "too much" or "made it improperly" even when those same salesmen had told them it was completely nontoxic and they could take as much as they wanted and even when they followed the recipes those very same salesmen provided!

My guess is that only a small portion of silver promoters are quacks, lying about the benefits of silver to make a buck. The vast majority are good, caring, terribly naive people just like my doctor was. They believe the claims of salesmen without ever trying to independently verify them and simply repeat them as the truth to others. That is very dangerous with anything, but especially with medicine.

The history of civilization shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that expect where something causes an immediate, dramatic result, personal experience alone is not sufficient to determine the safety and efficacy of a drug or therapy because there are too many unknown variables inside a complex organism like a living human being.

To learn what works and what doesn't in medicine, things must be studied objectively using the scientific method which continues to evolve.

This is a true story of Rosemary Jacobs, the so called health benefits of colloidal silver and the damage that it can cause.