psuedo-scientific bullshit

[baratron]

Thanks to a google search, I have just seen the biggest pile of rubbish since Alex Chiu and his magnetic bracelets. I give you Oxytherapy.com, a site trying to sell you machines to put poisonous oxygen compounds into your body. Apparently, there is both good and bad ozone. Since the primary ingredients of air are oxygen and nitrogen, when ozone is generated from air, the products are ozone and nitrous oxides. Both nitrogen pentoxide and nitrous oxide are toxic to the respiratory system but pure ozone is not; therefore if the nitrogen products are removed from the ozone, the toxicity would be eliminated. Ozone made from pure oxygen will produce only ozone and oxygen. Ozone generated from air is called IMPURE OZONE, but ozone made from oxygen is called PURE OZONE. Aha. Um, there is so much wrong with this that I can't even begin to sort it out. Pure ozone is pretty damn toxic. "Ozone made from pure oxygen will produce only ozone and oxygen"? Wha? And putting things randomly into capital letters definitely improves the logic behind their argument, don't you think?

Oh dear Lord, it gets worse. A link from that page called How Can I Protect Myself? says Prevent ozone from off-gassing into the air. This can be done through products such as an ozone destructor. An ozone destructor such as the one pictured below, is filled with granular activated carbon (GAC), which will destroy the ozone, resulting in the production of carbon dioxide and a little carbon monoxide. Oh, just what we want: carbon monoxide sitting around in the house, the chemical that bonds 200 times more readily with haemoglobin than oxygen, thus making the blood unable to transport oxygen around the body. You know when people die because their gas fires weren't properly ventilated, or when people commit suicide by running the car in the garage and breathing in the fumes? Yup, carbon monoxide.

fx: *rolls eyes and screams*

Comments

[mjl]

rather a different level of crazyness, but there was a
piece in the Guardian on "Bad Medicine" (the name of the author's book) with some quite funny lines... some stuff to argue with in it too probably...

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

I am forced to conclude that the people behind that website are monkeys on crack.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

Hm. But the gadget probably doesn't actually do anything, rendering it harmless.

The geek equivalent is indefinitely-repeatable compression algorithms, I think.