➡ Dr. Andrew Kaufmann discusses the use of colloidal silver, a supplement that can turn your skin blue. He explains that while silver has been used in medicine for a long time, colloidal silver is different and is not used in mainstream medicine. Despite claims of its antimicrobial properties, the FDA does not consider it safe for medicinal use. The main concern is that while it can kill bacteria, it is not specific and can also harm healthy cells in our bodies.

➡ The text discusses the effects of colloidal silver on living organisms, including humans. It explains that while silver has been used for its antimicrobial properties, it can also be harmful, even toxic, to our cells. The text also challenges the germ theory, suggesting that diseases aren’t always caused by bacteria or viruses. Lastly, it warns about the potential side effects of using silver, such as skin discoloration and internal organ damage.

➡ Colloidal silver, a product used for health based on germ theory, can kill bacteria but may also harm our bodies. Despite its use, the germ theory itself lacks solid proof, suggesting that germs aren’t the only cause of sickness. Therefore, it’s recommended to reconsider using colloidal silver and explore other health approaches. Also, understanding the cause of brain fog, often due to toxic exposure, can help regain mental clarity.

And this is actually silver being deposited in your skin, and unfortunately this condition is permanent, and it can occur after only a brief exposure. This is The True Health Report, where critical appraisal fuels true freedom. Hello and welcome to The True Health Report. I’m your host, Dr. Andrew Kaufmann. It is partly my mission to really look into many health strategies that are outside the mainstream system. So these may be considered alternative remedies, but I want to apply the same level of scientific skepticism and discernment to these remedies as I would to mainstream medical remedies and pharmaceuticals.

And I think that’s very important not to have different standards for what is inside the system versus what is outside the system. I think it can lead us astray to our own detriment if we consider that anything truthers suggest using or people outside the system suggest using is actually a good idea. So today I’m going to talk about the supplement that can turn you blue, aka colloidal silver. So let me explain what this is. Now, silver itself, the element and various silver compounds, mostly silver salts, have been used since antiquity for medical applications, but that doesn’t mean that they had good effects necessarily.

And predominantly what has been used is silver nitrate, which is a salt of silver in a solution. And this is still used in mainstream medicine for certain applications, usually as a caustic agent to cauterize tissue or to induce coagulation blood clotting to stop bleeding and to stop the growth of tissue in a certain area. But this is not what we’re really talking about with colloidal silver, but it is important to mention because many of the studies that have been done, especially the toxicology studies showing large profiles of safety have been done not with colloidal silver, but with these other compounds.

So colloidal silver is a special preparation of silver and it’s different from elemental silver or the precious metal jewelry that you might be familiar with, but you use that as a starting material and you apply an electrical current in the form of electrodes and this is done in distilled water. So you end up with essentially a solution or a colloid of silver ions, because the silver is ionized as it separates through the electrical current. And these are nanoparticle size, which is defined as one dimension of the particle is less than 100 nanometers.

And just to remind you, a nanometer is one billionth of a meter or 10 to the minus ninth meters. And nanoparticles are important because they actually have different properties in biological organisms than larger size particles, as many of you know. And this is a product also with nano sized particles. And like I said, it’s distinct from other silver containing compounds. Now silver is widely used in modern medicine, but only topically. So it’s only used in really various types of materials that are supposed to aid wound healing. And then it’s used in a variety of materials that interface directly with biological organisms or really with people in medical settings like certain types of catheters and other devices.

But it’s not used as a systemic treatment. So in other words, there’s no oral preparation pill, there’s no injection. In fact, the FDA has put out a statement that it is not considered safe and that it’s not authorized for any medicinal applications or uses. So if you go into a hospital pharmacy, you will not find any type of oral or injectable preparation of silver in any form. But in the alternative healthcare circles, many people are taking this by mouth. And this presents sort of a difficult situation to evaluate because there are no studies looking at giving it systemically other than toxicology studies mostly done in animals.

And I will describe some of those studies during this presentation. However, the main health claims around colloidal silver involve its antiseptic and antibacterial or antimicrobial properties. In fact, it’s said to be toxic to all microorganisms, including bacteria, yeast, fungi, and even the infamous viruses, dare I say. And this is why it’s thought to be clinically beneficial. So let me bring up some slides so we can look at this in a little bit more depth. And here, what we have is like some of the typical claims here about colloidal silver, that it is nature’s antibiotic.

It’s a potent germicide, so it kills germs. Over 650, quote, unquote, pathogens, which is defined as a microorganism that causes a disease. It is like a quote, second immune system. It heals burn wounds, fights bacteria and viruses because they need to be fought. And it is a natural preservative. So let’s examine some of these claims a little bit more closely and think about what this actually means. So it turns out that all of the research related to it as an antimicrobial actually does not involve any systemic infection. So there’s no studies on pneumonia or meningitis or any other major type of infection other than wound infections.

So because, as I mentioned, it’s really only been used as a topical preparation. So the only type of infection that doctors would typically consider a topical treatment would be a wound infection or some other type of possible skin infection, but usually they treat those with systemic antibiotics. And there are no studies looking at those here, only wound infections. So we can’t really evaluate one if it is actually useful for those other things. The only logic we can use is that it kills bacteria in a test tube, therefore it must be effective for these things.

Now, the studies in a test tube is really where most of the antimicrobial activity comes from and essentially what they do is they have a petri dish with a culture of a pure bacterial strain or sometimes mixed strains, and then they add different concentrations of colloidal silver and they observe how many of the bacterial colonies survive or die, et cetera, and they determine some numbers based on those observations. And it turns out they’ve shown that it can kill many different species, as mentioned here, 650, except that these include all of the species that normally live in our bodies, even when we’re healthy, like things like E.

coli. So it is not specific for the quote unquote bad bacteria if such things actually exist. Okay. So basically when I looked for information about colloidal silver, of course, I looked extensively through the mainstream medical research literature like PubMed and other databases, PubChem, et cetera. But I also looked for other sources like from alternative health websites, natural healing videos and such, and virtually all of the health benefits claimed were about infectious diseases. So this really is problematic, and I’ll go into that a little bit more in a minute, but let’s look at the proposed mechanisms whereby it’s supposed to kill bacteria and perhaps other microorganisms.

So here is a diagram from one of the papers I reviewed here, and this kind of doesn’t show much detail, but I’ll show another image on the next slide with more detail of how this works. So this is a model based on having a wound dressing with silver inside of it. And here we can see that the silver leeches out of the wound dressing and approaches the bacterial cells. And this could also happen from a catheter, like I mentioned before. And so there are silver ions then that permeate into the bacterial cell represented by this circle on the right.

And you can see that it shows it basically binds to proteins, DNA and RNA, and leaves the rest up to your imagination. But as you might imagine, it may not be a good thing to have it bind to all those biomolecules because that could interfere with the functioning of those cells. And that’s the mechanism it said to account for the bacterial cell death. Now here’s a more detailed diagram, but really showing the same process here. We have a test tube on the left with the source of the colloidal silver and then a schematic diagram of a bacterial cell.

But this goes into a little bit more of the mechanism that silver ions generate reactive oxygen species or free radicals. So they’re actually oxidants, the opposite of antioxidants that we have all heard are good for our health, even though our body makes them on a regular basis. And that it generates hydrogen peroxide, which basically causes a chain reaction of our own molecules that they become damaged. And here, it shows the end result of that as DNA damage in the center of the oval and protein denaturation. So what that means is that the proteins, whether they serve a function as enzymes to catalyze biochemical reactions, or whether they serve in a structural role like zinc fingers or other structural proteins, that once they’re damaged by these oxygen species, they can no longer function in a proper way.

And these are the factors that ultimately result in the death of these bacterial cells. So one question that we need to ask is, since we, as people, have also DNA and proteins that we rely on for all our biological functions, wouldn’t silver also cause the same problems in human cells? Now, this, of course, sidesteps some very important facts, but I just want to help you see how I think about these things because there are many biochemical procedures and molecules and processes that are conserved in all living creatures, including even in plants.

So we have biochemistry that is in common with plants, with bacteria, with yeast and fungus, et cetera. So if we disrupt these biochemical processes in one organism, then chances are it’s going to also have effects in other organisms. Now, that being aside, I think we often forget, although we know the importance of the microbiome in our health, we tend to lose sight of the fact that these bacterial cells and other microorganisms are really part of our biology. And we know from a lot of different kinds of research that we cannot be healthy without these microorganisms.

So if we are putting something in our body that will kill these microorganisms, we could view that as they are killing us in some way as well because we will lose the benefit of those organisms and their role in maintaining and promoting our health. So that is a big problem. Now, the other problem is that we need to really, once again, look at germ theory. And if we do that carefully, we’ll see that the basic premises have never been shown to be true. So like Cox postulates, the idea that the cause of the disease, if it’s a bacteria, for example, has to be present in people with that disease and everybody with that disease and not in people without the disease, that in and of itself has failed for almost all of the conditions that they say are bacterial infections.

And if we look at a more even fundamental level, the idea of contagion, because germs causing disease is really based on the observation that people seem to get sick around the same time and then the hypothesis that they’re passing a germ between each other and that’s what is making them sick. Well, it turns out that there have been quite a number of scientific studies trying to demonstrate that and they’ve disproven it. So that is not how we get sick and the reason why people are sick sometimes in the same place and at the same time is not from passing a germ between them.

There are other explanations. So if we look at these truths, then we won’t have to go down this path of evaluating colloidal silver because the only justification for its use is based on a false premise. But nevertheless, let us go further because there could be other things that we learn through experiments that we might not be able to reason out the way that we just did. So this is a very good paper, which really comprehensively looked at the research out there for the clinical effectiveness of colloidal silver. And there are many statements thrown around in the literature that just blanketly say that it’s effective for burns and wound healing.

But in this paper, they actually looked a little bit more specifically and showed that that’s not really the case. And in fact, in some situations, it could be detrimental to wound healing. And even in those cases where there seems to be an observed benefit, it’s very short-lived and the authors of this paper recommend only using it briefly and then using other means after that. But I want to read the highlighted portions from here and explain them a little bit because I think this really teaches us a lot about this substance. So the usefulness of silver for wound treatment has been known since 69 BC.

So that’s quite a long time to have a lot of experience. While silver metal has no medicinal activity, silver ion has broad antimicrobial spectrum and is cytotoxic. That means toxic to the cell, to bacteria, imaginary viruses, yeast, and fungi. Silver binds to DNA, RNA, and various proteins leading to cell death via multiple mechanisms such as protein and nucleic acid denaturation, which basically renders them so they can’t function. Increased membrane permeability, I didn’t mention this, but it basically opens up the membrane of that cell to let things leak out and things come in that are not supposed to come in.

And poisoning of the respiratory chain, which I also didn’t mention, for this reason, resistance against the silver ion has only rarely been reported. So in other words, it’s so effective at killing the bacteria, they can’t figure out ways to overcome it through mutation or however we’re told that happens. Now, I want to just read this last portion. While the silver ion has great antimicrobial and bacterial properties, it is also toxic to fibroblasts when present in high concentrations. And fibroblasts are a type of cell that we would find in our skin, which is why they know about it because they’ve only studied it for wound healing.

And this basically validates what I was saying before that those mechanisms that it’s toxic to bacteria by binding to proteins, the DNA and RNA, why wouldn’t they also occur in our cells? And now here we see evidence that that is exactly the case. And the last statement here that I’ll read is injudicious use of silver containing dressings can lead to impaired wound healing. So it’s not universally good, even though it kills bacteria, it can actually be detrimental even in wound healing with topical application. And by the way, one of the most famous preparations with silver, which is, you know, used predominantly for burns is something called silver sulfadiazine or silvedine, I believe is the brand name.

And this is, you know, widely looked at as being a really positive thing and has, you know, uniquely successful in burns. However, when we look carefully at the data as reported in this article, it is actually not advantageous and actually delays wound healing when used. So now that we know that it’s not very effective and we’ve confirmed that at least has the potential to be toxic and is toxic to fibroblasts, let’s look at some toxicology studies. Now, this toxicology reviews that I’m going to present specifically look at studies with nano sized silver particles, what you would find in any good quality colloidal silver preparation.

Now, this study reports on different animal studies. It’s a review paper and we can see here that there are four types of animals that were viewed in this table. So one is healthy adult male mice, and you can see that they had substantial liver damage after only 35 days of treatment with two milligrams per kilogram dose. And that is a pretty small dose. The rabbit dose is bigger, but those were only given twice and they still were able to detect some damage. But in the zebrafish where they did it for longer, similar to the mice study, 30 days, they had much more widespread damage.

And even in fruit flies, the bottom Drosophila melanogaster, those are fruit flies, for shorter and longer lengths of time, they had lots of signs of toxicity. And these doses are compatible, by the way, with doses that would be in typical colloidal silver preparations that we might take. So these are not the super high doses that are used in some of the toxicology studies. Now, they also did some studies, not in animals, but just in cell cultures. And I thought this was really important because some of these cell culture lines are human cell lines.

So for example, cardiomyocytes, that’s heart muscle cells. And we saw here, negative changes in the heart muscle cells, in human embryonic stem cells. We saw negative effects. And in testicular cells also saw toxicity. And that has been replicated by other studies. So here is another toxicology review, but this is looking at reproductive toxicology. And here, silver nanoparticles showed testicular sperm toxicity in males and ovarian and embryonic toxicity in females. So that means it affected the developing baby in females. And here further in this study, they reported on that silver nanoparticles were detected in the placenta breast milk and pre and postnatal offspring.

So in the babies, in the womb and after birth, when injected with silver late in the pregnancy. So in other words, even though the injection occurred late in the pregnancy, after the baby was born and then being breastfed, they could find the silver in the breast milk. So I think we have some cautionary tales, but possibly the most dramatic type of toxicity or side effect, which I hinted at earlier with colloidal silver and other types of silver preparations is called argyria. And this is where it can turn your skin or your eyes or even your internal organs silver.

And there are different ways this is expressed in people. So in this first slide, I’ll show you there are these punctate areas of skin discoloration where it causes your skin to turn this bluish gray color, because you don’t have to have a huge exposure to cause this problem. You can have a small exposure over time and even as little as 30 days, this has been reported. Now, this gentleman up in the top right corner is in a lot of photos and he is sort of affectionately known as Papa Smurf being a very dramatic example of this.

But you can see all these images mostly from medical textbooks showing that this condition actually can happen. Now it’s said not to cause any health problems. It’s only cosmetic, but this is quite a dramatic cosmetic problem to be dealing with. I’ve reviewed quite a lot about colloidal silver today, told you what exactly it is, what kind of research evidence is available to evaluate it and that it is predominantly based on germ theory approaches to health, to treat infections, to kill bacteria. But unfortunately, that also results in toxicity to our bodies. And I think just based on the possible toxicity and the lack of demonstrated benefit, you can make a decision about whether or not to use colloidal silver for your health.

But I would suggest that you go back and review some of my earlier material and look into other folks in this space to understand that the fundamental proof of germ theory just has never been shown. And we’ve been misled all this time to worry about germs invading us and making us sick when in reality it’s not the cause and there are many other things to be concerned about. So I think we can take colloidal silver and put it on the shelf for now. I look forward to seeing you again for the next True Health Report.

If today’s episode helped you connect some dots, don’t stop here. Brain fog is often the result of toxic exposure. Once you understand what’s behind it, you can start taking your mind back. Watch Brain Hijackers for free at andrewkaufmann.com slash brain dash hijackers. You’ll also find the link below in the show notes. Your mind is yours. Protect it. Sharpen it. Trust it. [tr:trw].

See more of Andrew Kaufman, M.D. on their Public Channel and the MPN Andrew Kaufman, M.D. channel.