Colloidal Silver--Safe or Scam?

The Natural Connection

It’s difficult to walk past a health food store these days without encountering an all out assault by the Colloidal Silver sales pitches. Colorful posters plastered on windows literally scream at you--“Nature’s Antibiotic!” “Kills 650 Germs in 6 minutes!”. If instead, you choose not to leave the comfort of your computer chair, you can purchase Colloidal Silver on hundreds of Internet sites, or have your friendly multi-level marketing neighbor deliver it to your door.

While many in the health food industry consider Colloidal Silver to be a universal panacea for dozens of illnesses as diverse as acne, stomach flu, malaria, HIV, scarlet fever, and warts, the FDA declared in a Final Rule August 17, 1999 that “all over-the-counter drug products containing colloidal silver or silver salts are not recognized as safe and effective and are misbranded”.

Furthermore, the sale of any nonprescription colloidal silver or silver salt product claiming to be effective in preventing or treating any disease was banned, effective September 16, 1999. Silver products can only be sold legally as “dietary supplements”, provided that no health claims are made for them.

Like two feisty bantam roosters squaring off in a barnyard, neither of the two opposing camps seems willing to give an inch of dirt. But while the Colloidal Silver controversy has heated up only in recent years due to the proliferation of preparations on the market, the use of silver for medicinal reasons has a long history.

Silver, along with numerous other metals, is known to have germicidal qualities. Ancient Greeks used silver vessels for storing water to keep it fresh. American settlers traveling long distances with wagon trains in the 1800’s knew that placing silver and copper coins in barrels of water kept algae and other bacteria from growing in the casks.

Silver based medicines were common and popular in the United States in the late 1800’s until the mid 1940’s, before the availability of modern antibiotics. Their popularity and use for the treatment of infections by physicians declined over the past fifty years, as their use was associated with an unpleasant toxicity called argyria. During long and prolonged ingestion of some silver medications, patients can deposit silver particles in the deep tissues of their skin, leaving them with a death-like, ashen-gray complexion that is permanent.

Recently, due to availability of inexpensive forms of Colloidal Silver, their presence on the shelves of health food stores has multiplied. Although the modern proponents of the use of Colloidal Silver maintain that the older medications were of a different formulation than those currently manufactured, in November 2000, a case was reported of a patient who developed argyria while taking a colloidal silver product.

A retired teacher named Rosemary Jacobs, herself a victim of argyria due to silver medications she was prescribed in the 1950’s for chronic allergies by her Long Island physician, has committed herself to educating the health food industry and the FDA about the dangers of chronic silver ingestion. Her photos that she has posted on the Internet, painfully describe the social isolation and economic difficulties “a slate-gray person experiences living in a black and white world”.

Current preparations of Colloidal Silver are unregulated by the FDA, and may contain from as little as 1-3 parts per million of silver (PPM) to as much as 70 PPM. Some toxicologists estimate that it could take as few as 200 cumulative doses (1 tsp) of a 10 PPM solution to cause argyria in some people, while others may tolerate up to five times that amount. Since silver is eliminated from the body through the kidneys and the colon, patients with renal or gastrointestinal disease may be particularly susceptible.

Product purity and germicidal activity of Colloidal Silver preparations is variable. One study done by the health food industry in 1995 revealed that two of nine products tested were contaminated with microorganisms. Five of nine products inhibited bacterial growth in a test tube, but test tube results are no indication of whether the same effect would occur in a living human.

Public concerns over the developing problem of antibiotic resistance by many bacteria has led hundreds of thousands of people to self-enroll in one of the largest uncontrolled trials of an unregulated supplement in modern times—a supplement that our government has declared misbranded and ineffective. Despite many people ingesting colloidal silver on a chronic basis, there are extremely few reports of toxicity. However, the toxicity of ingested silver is cumulative, and it may be many years before we know if the current silver craze of the last few years will prove to be harmful.

It is almost impossible to get balanced information on the topic of Colloidal Silver. Tempers and emotions fly high on this issue, one that is viewed as an issue of personal freedom by some, and public safety by others. Most of the disciples of the use of Colloidal Silver are involved in the marketing and sales of the products, and are not without bias.

The current FDA position on the potential toxicity of silver products, on the other hand, ignores the fact that there are many other approved pharmaceutical products on the market that account for over 100,000 deaths a year in this country, and seems to do nothing more than fuel underground sales of the products, making them even more difficult to regulate.

A comprehensive and objective reference on colloidal silver has recently been published as an on-line book by John Hill. His electronic book, “Colloidal Silver: A Literature Review: Medical Uses, Toxicology &Manufacture, 2^nd Edition” is available for $12.95 at the website http://www.clspress.com/tox.html. It covers what is known about colloidal silver, what it does, how it works, risks of toxicity, and what is not known about it. I enthusiastically recommend this easy to read book for anyone considering taking colloidal silver products.

For more information on this topic, please write to The Natural Connection, c/o Pauline Bellecci, MD, PO Box 777, Waycross, GA 31502 or contact us on our web site www.swampdocs.com