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Dangers of CD (Chlorine Dioxide) / MMS
📌 The Truth About The 1982 Study
PART I
Smith linked to the abstract on PubMed, but I’ll be using the full text version available here: Controlled Clinical Evaluations of Chlorine Dioxide, Chlorite and Chlorate in Man by Judith R. Lubbers, Sudha Chauan, and Joseph R. Bianchine, 1982.
The first thing the researchers did before embarking on their study was to survey available studies with disinfectants on animals. These studies date between 1937 and 1982. Some of them are not available online, but the researchers summarized what they found in the Discussion section of their report (pg. 62).
Among other troubling things, they found that chlorite ingestion was associated with methemoglobinemia (methemoglobin formation, increased glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase), hemolysis (hemolytic anemia, changes in hemoglobin levels and red cell count, increased mean corpuscular volume, osmotic fragility), and renal toxicity.
Is there evidence today to confirm that chlorite causes the same toxicity (methemoglobinemia, hemolysis, and renal toxcity) in humans? Yes. Starting as early as 1993, we have several ER reports of “acute sodium chlorite” poisoning presenting with all of these life-threatening conditions.
Of note are a 65-year-old’s accidental ingestion of sodium chlorite in water used to clean fruit (2012), a 55-year-old’s suicide attempt with ingestion of <100 mL 28% sodium chlorite solution (2014), and the 1993 report of a 25-year-old’s suicide attempt ingesting 10 g sodium chlorite.
In each of these cases, the successful treatment of methemoglobinemia did not prevent hemolysis or acute kidney injury (AKI). Chlorite was found to have multiple toxic actions, developing methemoglobinemia, acute hemolytic crisis, and AKI independently. The patients also had gastric ulcerations. They needed long hospital stays and multiple treatments including blood filtration to remove the chlorite before they could fully recover.
They also found that “MetHb formation is dependent on the amount of chlorite ingested.” Thus a small dose means less methemoglobin formation while a large dose means more. In other words, damage is still being done with small doses, just on a smaller scale.
So far, the animal studies and the ER case studies confirm the toxic, destructive action of chlorite in both animals and humans. We expect that Lubbers et al. would come to similar conclusions, right? Their 1982 report was eleven years too early to benefit from the first ER report, but they still had the animal studies and were aware of the findings.
The researchers trusted these findings to form the basis for which parameters should be monitored in their own study. In other words, they chose to monitor methemoglobin, mean corpuscle hemoglobin, urea nitrogen (BUN), etc. based on these animal studies.
Even though the doses used in the study were much less compared to the ER cases, chlorite ingestion was still attributed to kidney function, methemoglobin, and hemolytic-related changes (see table 3 on page 61).
Unfortunately the researchers failed to take into consideration symptoms that would accompany these morphologic changes. For example, they completely dismiss what they call “minor subjective symptoms and objective signs noted throughout the study; the “colds,” “lymphadenopathy,” “sore throats” and “flu” problems” (page 60).
When methemoglobinemia is mild, it will produce flu-like symptoms that are often overlooked:
Mild cases [of methemoglobinemia] may involve vague flu-like symptoms and headaches and therefore may remain undiagnosed.Methemoglobinemia Pathology, Britannica
Do users of CD/MMS for “therapeutic” reasons experience flu-like symptoms? Yes, they do. Are they aware that they are experiencing symptoms of mild methemoglobinemia? No, they are not, since it is “reinterpreted” as one of many “herxheimer reactions”.
On page 44 of Smith’s source documentation, Simple Moleculear Medicine by Brian Stone, the author wrote:
Another helpful aspect of understanding Herxheimer reactions is to note that it happens differently in different parts of the body. In the bowels, the first area where you experience it, you may experience nausea and loose stools/diarrhea. However, in the rest of the body, you might experience sore muscles, agitation or anxiety, low fever, higher heartbeat, headaches or overall tiredness. All of these other “flu-like” symptoms would come on after the discomfort in the bowels and may stay for a couple of days or slightly more. Both of these areas (Bowels and Rest of the Body) are being affected by the chemical reaction of pathogens being attacked and destroyed as well as the dissolving of toxic materials that are in you... It is just good to be aware of what to expect so that you can pass through it with more confidence and understanding.
Um... it’s good to be aware that you are poisoning yourself so that you can stop doing it! No, it’s not the destruction of “pathogens” or ‘toxic materials’ but the body’s own hemoglobin! The blood is starting to “rust”.
Methemoglobin forms when hemoglobin is oxidized to contain iron in the ferric [Fe3+] rather than the normal ferrous [Fe2+] state. Any of the four iron species within a hemoglobin molecule that are in the ferric form are unable to bind oxygen. Methemoglobinemia
The blood starts turning from oxygen-rich bright red to an oxygen-deficient, dull, chocolatey brown which eventually causes a blueish look to the skin, resulting in “decreased oxygen delivery leading to tissue hypoxia.” [ibid.]
How ironic, considering that one of the supposed ‘selling points’ of CD/MMS is increased blood oxygenation! Stone talks about the “blood oxygenation effect you find with ClO2.” (pgs 55 & 86). In reality, the more CD/MMS you consume, the less oxygen your blood will be able to carry.
If a person does have “pathogens” i.e. bacteria, parasites, infection, etc. could CD/MMS kill them? Yes, it’s possible, it is a “disinfectant”. The 2013 study Chlorine Dioxide Is a Size-Selective Antimicrobial Agent found that selectivity “of ClO2 between humans and bacteria is based not on their different biochemistry, but on their different size.” Meaning that it’ll kill the critters before it kills you because they are so much smaller than you.
But it can still do damage to the blood and kidneys at the same time. In the 2013 study referenced above, the researchers argue that ClO2 would be safe to disinfect skin since blood flow would disperse it away from the dermis, diluting the concentration (page 7). While they acknowledge that “serum in the blood vessels... contain many components capable of reacting rapidly with ClO2” they don’t disclose the reaction includes the oxidization and destruction of hemoglobin. Maybe they didn’t know? Maybe they were “blinded” by the conflict of interests declared (an invention with “competing financial interests” patented by three of the researchers)?
Part II coming up next...
PART II
Regarding the 1982 study, why did those researchers acknowledge changes to blood and kidneys and even note symptoms of methemoglobinemia yet completely ignore it all and declare “no obvious undesirable clinical sequellae”, the “absence of detrimental physiological responses” and the “relative safety” of ingesting chlorine dioxide, chlorite, and chlorate?
The fact that the researchers were aware of the dangers of methemoglobinemia in the animal studies is clear. In the abstract, they wrote:
Persons with a low level of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase [G6PD] may be expected to be especially susceptible to oxidative stress; therefore, in Phase III, chlorite at a concentration of 5 mg/l. was administered daily for twelve consecutive weeks to a small group of potentially at-risk glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase-deficient subjects.
The body needs G6PD to convert methemoglobin back to hemoglobin. That’s why they considered people deficient in G6PD “at-risk” and why they devoted a separate phase in the study to it.
Yet rather than plainly state what the candidates were at risk for (methemoglobinemia), they use the vague term “oxidative stress”, then ignore the changes and symptoms and call the stuff safe. Why?
The reasons they gave for ignoring phase III results for the G6PD-deficient group are that 1) they had no control group 2) the size of the group was too small, and 3) “laboratory drift” (instruments losing calibration/precision).
Um... why didn’t they recalibrate their instruments and/or apply a math model to account for laboratory drift? If they couldn’t find a control group or enough test subjects, why did they even do this part of the study and then just ignore it?
Their stated reason for ignoring the sore throats, swollen lymph nodes, colds, and flu throughout the entire study was that there was “no apparent grouping” and that they “appear to be randomly dispersed among the treatment groups”.
It’s not really clear what’s meant by this. Phases I & II had six treatment groups consisting of 10 men each. Each group tested a different disinfectant (chlorine dioxide, sodium chlorite, sodium chlorate, chlorine, and chloramine), leaving the last group to test all five disinfectants (see the study design sections on page 58).
“No apparent grouping” and “randomly dispersed among the treatment groups” seems to imply flu symptoms occurred in all groups, with all disinfectants. But that’s not a surprise, since they are all oxidants and would have similar effects on the blood. Chlorine was seen to oxidize the hemoglobin of rainbow trout to methemoglobin in 1977 (as well as cause hemolysis and hypoxia), five years before the 1982 study. And IDK about back then, but today it’s known that both chlorate and chloramine oxidize the blood to methemoglobin.
As for the statistics in the study - the researchers ran their data through statistical analysis software and revealed a flawed use of the statistical model (page 60):
The use of the analysis of variance in this manner is flawed by the common control group. However, the results of the analyses may be used with caution.
Regarding the trends discovered, the researchers dismissed them as “unlikely to be of clinical importance”. But their caveat was that this was for the duration of the study and further study “was warranted”.
One cannot rule out the possibility that, over a longer treatment period, these trends might indeed achieve proportions of clinical importance. (page 57)
The possibility that the trends might become clinically important with increased exposure cannot be excluded. (page 60)
One cannot rule out the possibility that, over a longer treatment period, these trends might indeed achieve proportions of clinical importance. However, within the limits of the study... (page 62)
Here the researchers disclosed that 12 weeks of exposure wasn’t long enough to rule out the clinical importance of the trends they were choosing to disregard. Keep in mind that CD/MMS protocols with indefinite “maintenance schedules” are based largely on this 12-week study.
So far, we’ve got admitted flaws and vague explanations that lead to more questions. Not what I want to see in a scientific study. Definitely not what would inspire me to place confidence in this report.
So at this point, I have to look at conflicts of interests. No statement was made regarding competing or conflicting interests. Huh.
All researchers were employed by the Department of Pharmacology, Ohio State University College of Medicine at the time of the study and seemed to be acting on behalf of their employer.
In our day, this school gets a LOT of money to fund research. The last two years have been a boon for them, with $301.9M in research funding quoted for 2021, but they made close to that amount with $268.5M in 2019, all of which include funding from various government agencies. We can expect that they made hundreds of millions of dollars in funding each year for quite some time. I wonder what they were making back in 1982.
The introduction to the study reads:
Chlorine dioxide is currently under serious consideration in the United States as an alternative to chlorine water treatment. Before chlorine dioxide may be used routinely as a water disinfectant, the safety of oral human ingestion of chlorine dioxide and its by-products must be assessed. For this purpose, a controlled clinical evaluation of chlorine dioxide, chlorite and chlorate was undertaken under the auspices of USEPA HERL #CR805643.
USEPA HERL stands for the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Health Effects Research Laboratory, and the study being under their “auspices” means that USEPA funded it.
In 1981, USEPA was eager to find alternatives to chlorine for disinfecting drinking water and was eyeing chlorine dioxide. Was government pressure at play in the 1982 study, either directly or indirectly, and did this influence the way the study was conducted and/or the conclusions of the researchers? Even if it was just the fear of losing future government contracts?
We might never have the answers, but for the time being it shouldn’t be disregarded as a possibility.
So that’s about it. There’s more I could’ve gone into such as the effects of these oxidizers on the thyroid, but I think this is more than enough to expose this study’s shaky foundation. Anyone who thinks that CD/MMS is safe based on the researchers’ statements in this study should now be able to see that these statements are questionable and misleading.
On top of that, the daily dose used in the study was way less than in the CD/MMS protocols.
During Phase II of the study, subjects received 5 mg/L, capped at 500 ml (or half a liter) per day, i.e. 2.5 mg per day. Converted to drops, test subjects took 0.05 drops per day. Not even a whole drop, not even half a drop, but 1/20th of a drop.
Smith is using the “Unactivated” MMS protocol 1 in Brian Stone’s book, which calls for 1-5 drops of sodium chlorite (NaClO2) solution between 22.4-29%. I saw concentrations of 25% on Amazon so I went with that for the calculations.
1 drop NaClO2 at 25% solution = 0.25 drop at 100%
5 drops NaClO2 at 25% solution = 1.25 drops at 100%
So even when factoring in the dilution of NaClO2 at 25% solution, the protocol is still 5 to 25 times more than what the test subjects were getting.
The bottom line is this: don’t drink CD/MMS! It’s poison that destroys blood cells, kidneys, and more! Flu symptoms are not “herxheimer reactions” but mild methemoglobinemia. Smaller doses do less damage, but they can still do damage.
PART III - ADDENDUM
Another issue that may or may not have affected their statistical models is software bugs. There is no way to know if this impacted the study or not, which is why I left this for an addendum.
Early 1980s was before the “world wide web” or internet as we know it. Software was distributed on “diskettes” and updates weren’t “downloaded” on-demand.
While textbooks and instructors often note the bugs and errors that occur in a given application or version of the software, the practitioner often overlooks these cautions.
The quote above is from a 1994 paper called Statistical Packages: Some Bugs And Errors by Robert A. Schwabe and Ryan M. Cherland. They described a 15-year struggle to standardize guidelines for statistical software due to lack of consensus, each program having its “flaws” and “devotees”.
A bug could mean that different computer hardware and software compilers would return different results when given the exact same values. An oversimplified example would be getting different results for 2+2 because you used a different computer!
In addition to actual bugs, they also described a disconnect between what the user thought the software was doing and what it actually did due to lack of visibility into how the computations were being done and poor documentation.
If the 1982 study contained actual values, we could verify the statistical analyses and come to our own conclusions. But it doesn’t. Despite acquiring a “massive volume of raw data” (page 61), there’s not a single value in the whole report. Not even a graph.
I'm still reading this, mid-way through part 2, but wanted to comment on something interesting. The oxidation of iron in the blood caught my attention. The flu-like symptoms. We've had some other discussion about viruses on another thread, and I brought up that in HIV/AIDS, the rate at which your body is oxidized predicts death. Indeed, oxidation (or at least a heavy shift away from reduction), is the commonality in HIV and AIDS. A group of researchers pointed this out back in the 1980s and were shunned as denialists (but have since been vindicated over and over again). They pointed out that those at-risk had in common multiple oxidizing agents and likely these were what was making people sick, not a microscopic barely detectable retrovirus. One of these potent oxidizing agents is nitrite inhalants, better known as poppers. To this day a lot of gay men still snort them which is mind-blowing to me (as a gay man, I just have always had better sense I guess). Turns out poppers can cause, you guessed it, methemoglobinemia, because of their strong oxidizing potential. And one of things that can happen that we are told is a tell-tale sign of becoming HIV infected, is, you guessed it, flu-like symptoms.
It's just like symptoms of CD poisoning are being mis-interpreted as herx reactions. This is all fascinating to me.
Anyway, just some initial commentary.
Out of curiosity what does it mean when there are the same symptoms from going on a low vitamin A diet? Nothing toxic is being ingested other than maybe oxalates or some other plant toxin in beans. How do we know if its toxicity or a die off reaction taking place in the microbiome?
Yours is a valid question and has been one of the trickiest parts of my own attempt to fix my health.
It can be very difficult to distinguish between "healing pains" / detox reactions and actually doing more harm to yourself.
The main clue is temporal variation in the symptoms. If the exact same symptoms keep getting worse for over a month or two, you may be doing yourself more harm than good. Detox usually happens in something of a wavelike fashion, where you'll have noticeable improvements that can be interspersed with other temporarily worsening symptoms.
A variety of shifting skin and nail conditions have been the hallmark of my Vitamin A detox. I started off with brittle nails that improved pretty quickly, but I then had dry skin problems come and go all around the body. I've had nail beading and ridging appear and disappear. I've had acne come and go. I very suddenly had severe gum inflammation and recession appear over a year into the diet in response to a combination of fat and fiber from coconut, and later confirmed with fat and supplemental psyllium husk. The recession has slowed by not entirely stopped. I had awful burning eyelids early on that stopped after a month or two. I've had something akin to burning mouth syndrome (on the roof of my mouth) constantly, one of my longest lasting symptoms, but the severity changes noticeably from week to week.
You're obviously more likely to do harm to yourself by taking non-food substances that are known to be toxic in small quantities like CD/MMS, although nutritional supplements are certainly riskier and more potent than a lot of folks would have you believe.
What is the goal of using it?
Smith is recommending it to “destroy aldehydes” (retinaldehydes) in the body by oxidizing them if I remember correctly. He actually threatened people not to come crying to him if they get stuck during the detox with ALDH enzyme production and won’t drink bleach. Interesting that Grant made a full recovery without drinking a drop of bleach.
To anyone reading this that has come over from Smith’s network, I’d love to hear from you! You were my motivation to start this thread here, when I saw I wouldn’t be able to warn you over there.
@wavygravygadzooks are you still keeping an eye out there? Are you seeing any comments of people trying the protocol and/or reacting to it?
Also, I didn’t have a chance to do the whole course before losing my account. Did you notice anything else in the course that might be a hazard to people’s health?
Quote from Angela B. on June 8, 2022, 9:41 pmWhat is the goal of using it?
Smith is recommending it to “destroy aldehydes” (retinaldehydes) in the body by oxidizing them if I remember correctly. He actually threatened people not to come crying to him if they get stuck during the detox with ALDH enzyme production and won’t drink bleach. Interesting that Grant made a full recovery without drinking a drop of bleach.
He's going to need a lot of proof that's what's actually happening. Wow. And what happens to it when it's oxidized? Is it more easily detoxed?
I don't pay close attention to Smith's site. I scan through the messages that appear in my email for anything that seems interesting, but I've given up trying to save anyone from doing themselves harm over there. I disagree with Smith on almost everything he says, so when you ask if he's recommending anything else that could do harm, I would say that depends on what level of damage constitutes "harm".
Is eating a bunch of fiber harmful if you don't actually need it to detox or for any other reason, yet it impairs critical nutrient absorption?
Is lactoferrin harmful if you don't actually need it to detox and it causes bile acid dumping into the colon unnecessarily?
Is it harmful to tell people that Vitamin C, Vitamin E, potassium iodide, and supplemental D3 are poisonous/problematic when they have been demonstrably helpful to many people?
Is it harmful to tell people to avoid eating animal fat and to avoid ketosis when those are demonstrably integral parts of an evolutionary human diet?
Each poor recommendation by itself isn't too bad, but when you add them all up, who knows what degree of negative impact it might have on some people. CD/MMS is by far the worst and craziest thing I've seen come out of his mouth, the rest is mostly just sub-par nutritional and supplement guidance.