To introduce this post, I accused a commenter on the Bleachgate blogpost of being an ‘alternative medicine’ apologist in a private email. They posted this as a comment and emailed me back to say that I was confused about who hadn’t made their mind up about MMS.
This was my response.
I want to post it because I feel it also highlights just why I want to deal with MMS.
To Judge Judy
First, I accused you of being an alternative medicine apologist because you used one of their prime tactics, attacking conventional medicine.
Secondly, you’ve not made up your mind on MMS? Fair enough.
However, consider this: no clinical evidence exists for it, only anecdotes. Also, toxicity studies show that ClO2 (MMS), in doses lower than Jim recommends, is a neurotoxin and a thyroid toxin. These both are worrying. The fact that Jim sells MMS, or at least used to, and now instead makes money from others with his book, DVDs, courses and royalties from other MMS suppliers, then lies and says he makes no money from MMS, is even more worrying, especially since we’re talking about what is supposedly a medicine. A pseudo medicine that is being targeted specifically at those most vulnerable, those with cancer, AIDS and other life threatening, horrible illnesses. Even worse, it’s targeted at those with chronic illnesses, those with the most potential to suffer from the long term damaging effects of it.
All this, without a shred of evidence that it works.
Perhaps now you see my worry and desire to sort this out ASAP?
– Rhys
Rhys's Blog 
Thank you for that Rhys. As I have stated before, I am MMS-agnostic. You may be correct in your fight against this product. I do not know. Your supporters attack others by asking for hard numbers, yet when I ask them for the same they obfuscate. How many deaths can be attributed to MMS? How many injuries that required medical treatment have been reported?
If close to a million Americans die from causes that can be traced directly to medical intervention every year and no one dies from MMS, how concerned should we be?
Judy, if someone uses MMS for cancer treatment and dies, would that be reported as a death from MMS – most likely not – it would be a cancer death. If someone uses MMS for malaria and then dies is it death from MMS or death from malaria? I could go on but I don’t need to – the alt-med types ALWAYS claim no deaths attributed to their products, but diseases treated with quackery cause death all the time.
When people display all the symptoms of being affected by a neurotoxin after taking a neurotoxin, do they have to die immediately for you to recognize it as a bad thing??
How do we know it’s a neurotoxin? Because it’s been flipping tested – that’s why no reputable pharma company is knocking on Jim Humble’s door…not because they don’t see enough $$$ in it.
CanadianChick/SkepCdnChick
Well, as I’ve said, so far no deaths can be directly traced back to brand MMS yet.
However, I still think we should be extremely worried. Do we have to wait for deaths before that?
It’s a dangerous chemical. That much is known. People are being told to ingest it.
A) Most of them don’t know it’s a dangerous chemical and deny that it is when told.
B) Imagine a cancer patient making their last days hellish by drinking what IS an industrial bleach. They’re vomiting and having severe diarrhoea. All because they were told by someone to suffer through it and they’d be cured. Instead, they die. And they die in more pain than if they’d not had the MMS.
C) Now imagine an HIV/AIDS patient told that they can be cured by MMS. They take it and have sex because they think they’re cured. They pass it onto their partner.
D) Jim took/sent MMS to Africa. There’s next to no doubt about that. What about all the patients who took MMS? Jim didn’t follow up on them. We don’t know what the hell happened to them. They didn’t know that it was a harmful industrial bleach. They were told it was a health drink.
E) Jim actively tells his patients that real medicine is harmful, telling them similar things that you said, that medicine kills people, neglecting to mention the people that it saves. He tells them lies or delusions, that ARV drugs CAUSE AIDS rather than delay them.
See, I can’t live with myself knowing that all this happens and just sitting by the side, not doing anything. Most of these things, perhaps they won’t result in direct causes of death. But they will, however, cause indirect deaths.
There is also the unverified case of Sylvia Fink. She took MMS, suffered the vomiting and nausea but refused to rehydrate as necessary. She fell into a coma and died. It’s possible that she had some other illness and that was what killed her, or it was exacerbated by the MMS.
The coroner’s report is yet to be released and Jim has already libeled her husband, calling him a liar etc.
More reasons why I think that MMS needs to be removed from sale.
When someone tells me something is dangerous my immediate thought is “In relation to what?” I could have provided numbers on tobacco, alcohol, Mad Cow Disease, airplane crashes, terrorist attacks and dog bites. The numbers of people who have been killed or injured from these is readily available, as are the numbers of those who have been killed by “medical error.” What are the numbers regarding MMS? I am open to the idea that MMS is dangerous. Show me the numbers.
Pointless comparison. What we do know about sodium chlorite is that it’s dangerous, especially if you mix it with acid to make chlorine dioxide. It’s never been shown to have any medicinal benefits. Therefore, selling it as a medicine is disingenuous at best, and downright evil at worst.
“First, I accused you of being an alternative medicine apologist because you used one of their prime tactics, attacking conventional medicine.”
Here you go again:
“If close to a million Americans die from causes that can be traced directly to medical intervention every year and no one dies from MMS, how concerned should we be?”
Evidence based medicine has saved more lives than anything else in the entire world ever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence-based_medicine
Alternative medicine that is shown to work gets called medicine.
Stop going on about deaths. They’re not the point.
“If close to a million Americans die from causes that can be traced directly to medical intervention every year and no one dies from MMS, how concerned should we be?”*
*Citation needed.
Yes, a citation is definitely needed so that the figures can be checked to see if they come from a reputable source. MMS has been associated with at least one death and many serious adverse effects and has no known beneficial therapeutic effects (please don’t bother, anyone, with the “it works for me” nonsense anecdotes – you’ll be wasting everyone’s time).
Medicine and medical treatments are not 100% safe, but they don’t claim to be. However, just because some people are harmed by medicines and medical treatments, to say that MMS must be safe as it’s not “FDA approved” is an extrapolation of such ridiculously enormous proportions as to be laughable.
The point here is that if someone with cancer takes MMS, indeed any other form of quackery (e.g.homeopathy), rather than properly tested medicine and dies, they will probably have died from a cancer rather than the quack medicine. Nevertheless, the quack medicine is every bit as responsible for the death of that person as the cancer because that cancer may have been treatable using properly tested therapies. Unlike “alternative medicines”, the benefits and risks of conventional therapies are fully documented and readily available.
MMS has not undergone ANY proper clinical trials, so there is no evidence that it is either safe or effective as a therapeutic agent. The chemistry and toxicology of sodium chlorite and chlorine dioxide are well-known and fully documented. Many “alternative medicines” may have no direct harmful effects (e.g. homeopathy, see http://www.1023.org). However, MMS is pretty toxic and does cause serious harm.
In the skeptical mindset, it is necessary to see evidence that something works before accepting it as a therapeutic agent. Proper, verifiable evidence from proper scientific studies and clinical trials. Such evidence does not exist for MMS. We do have “Bishop” Humble’s writings in his book, but there has been no publications of his so-called trials in peer-reviewed scientific/medical journals. No details on his trial methodology, ethical approval or informed consent. Scientifically, they have as much validity as a claim that the moon is made of green cheese.
So, given the current state of the evidence in the case of MMS, it needs to be removed from sale ASAP. If the MMS advocates really think that it is beneficial, they need to conduct some proper trials and have the results subjected to scientific scrutiny. If such trials are ever conducted and they prove MMS to be a safe and effective therapeutic agent, then it will be acknowledged as such and Humble will be a hero. However, it is my assertion that the MMS advocates don’t have the necessary skills or determination to get such trials conducted, so – for the foreseeable future at least – Humble remains a great big fat zero.
After all, the costs of running trials would eat massively into the seller’s profit margins and I don’t think they would be brave enough to risk doing a trial that showed their product to be ineffective and/or dangerous.
The point is that MMS is being touted as a cure for everything. That’s not possible. So even though it may not kill people directly, it can kill them indirectly when people drop conventional treatment for MMS. It’s like when some stupid doctor told people baking soda could cure cancer — people stopped chemotherapy and died as a result — baking soda wasn’t the cause of death, it was stopping chemotherapy. Maybe people should sue the person convincing them to stop life saving therapies for their quack therapy — it’s sort of like manslaughter.
Jim Humble probably has, indirectly, had a hand in killing a few people by convincing them his bullshit is true — they stop meds to take MMS and die — does this implicate him in the death of a person — I think so.