Twenty-First Century Snake-Oil Elixir

An honest literature review can save your life

"Dr. Oz: Miracle Snake Oil Diet!" by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0

First of all, I hope you are all having a great Christmas despite the latest outbreak of COVID-19. I must warn you… Today’s column is a little dark!

Johann Biacsics was one of the leaders of the Austrian anti-vaccination movement. In October, he contracted COVID-19, but began treating himself with chlorine dioxide (CDL), an industrial bleach that is widely sold by con artists as a snake oil cure called Miracle Mineral Supplement or Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS). He claimed high-dose CDL enemas cured the disease. Unfortunately, the disease had other ideas.

The anti-vaxxer was admitted to hospital in early November with breathing difficulties. Tests showed he still had COVID. However, he refused his treatment plan and checked himself out of hospital. He continued to try and fight the disease using CDL, but died soon afterwards.

To be fair to Baicsics, he put an impressive amount of skin in the game. However, betting your life that you are right while the entire medical establishment is wrong seems a little extreme. Wouldn’t it be better to play for lower stakes? When the hospital told him that his tests had come back positive, wouldn’t it have been sensible to admit that maybe he had miscalculated?

Why would someone take such a drastic course of action? Of course, we don’t know exactly what Biacsics was thinking, but previous entries on Sharpen Your Axe can point us in the right direction. Maybe he was attracted to the utter certainty of a health guru who told him what he wanted to hear in order to sell him supplements and quack cures; and he then followed the links to the bottom of an internet rabbit-hole. His new friends probably developed conspiracy theories to explain away inconvenenient facts and specialized in clichés to shut down critical enquiry. As he became a leader of the movement, he began to fall in love with the status it implied.

It is, of course, possible that you are right and everyone else is wrong. However, it is improbable. Successful contrarianism is a difficult path. It is always best to begin with a literature review. Honest research on the mainstream position that you find unappealing will help you avoid beginners’ mistakes. Don’t forget to think about your methodology as you review the literature.

There is no shame in seeking help from other people if you struggle with the material. We don’t always need to work everything out ourselves. One way of of doing this is to explain your thinking to someone with credentials and expertise and then ask them a dangerous question: “What do you think I am getting wrong?”

In Baicsics’ case, a little time learning about toxicology at the start of his journey would have shown him why a couple of drops of CDL can be used to purify large amounts of water, but that this doesn’t mean that it is safe to consume it directly.

Of course, you might struggle to understand the answers you receive. There is no shame in this. If this happens, rejecting it out of hand is probably a bad idea. Why not give it the benefit of the doubt as you do more work on the basics? See you next Sunday! And enjoy the rest of the holidays!

Further reading

A news story on Biacsics

Jim Humble, the first person to start selling MMS as a health supplement, claims to be a billion-year-old god from the Andromeda galaxy

One MMS guru claims that former US President Donald Trump consumed it before making his infamous remarks about drinking bleach

Members of an offshoot of QAnon (a pro-Trump conspiracy cult) who are waiting for John F. Kennedy to return from the dead in Dallas are now drinking CDL

Why has Trump announced that he had a booster shot? We can’t be sure, but the demographics are damning if he is planning a run in 2024 - vaccine misinformation is killing his voters

Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated! If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the first-anniversary post, which includes links to a free book.

[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.