Smog Queefing and Ozone Boofing
I was asked recently about ozone therapy, which to be honest I have no personal experience. The context of the inquiry involved treatment of viral infections namely the COVID-19 virus. It was suggested that ozone might be useful tool to battle this new infectious process. This area of medicine is often called alternative medicine, which is a real misnomer. There is only one type of medicine, evidence based. Not all therapies which have strong data driven support are embraced by traditional medicine, take for example cannabis. While a great deal of controversy still exists, the evidence of clinical benefit is robust and growing, while the data about risks is still preliminary. Cannabis is often placed in the category of alternative medicine. Based upon the current usage, alternative medicine is not based upon scientific proof or study but rather belief. A common example is the vaccination autism hoax. Based upon a belief that shots are bad, impressionable people latch on to the autism controversy because they want it to be true. Start with your belief and surround it with data which supports it. This is anti-science. True science starts with the data, develops a hypothesis, then tests the hypothesis to either support or refute it. The problem with alternative medicine, is that many of approaches or targets are legitimate. Hard to argue that nutrition, sleep, and exercise are unimportant. I personally benefit from breathing exercises, and enjoy yoga. So, when does an alternate or complimentary approach become wrong and become quackery. Four possible clues to quackery:
1) recommending against medical therapies that are helpful (such as vaccines)
2) promoting potentially harmful therapies without adequate warning
3) draining patients bank accounts
4) promoting magical thinking
So back to the subject of ozone therapy, tool or fool?
Ozone is a gas made of three oxygen molecules, tri-oxygen. Ozone is highly reactive and unstable, unlike its cousin bi-oxygen or O2 which is the stable gas making up approximately 20% of the air we breathe. Ozone is some ways is like bleach or hydrogen peroxide, and can be used as an effective disinfectant. Ozone in the atmosphere is protective blocking UV rays, but found to be a toxic gas (major factor of smog). This has led to the phrase, “Good up high, bad nearby”, https://www3.epa.gov/airnow/ozone-c.pdf. So how is ozone proposed to be used as a health treatment?
While studies do show its use to treat wounds as a disinfectant (skin, dental carries), the risks of the toxic gas outweigh the risks. The government has issued strong statements condemning medical ozone, including recent FDA statement in April 2019, “Ozone is a toxic gas with no known useful medical application in specific, adjunctive, or preventive therapy. In order for ozone to be effective as a germicide, it must be present in a concentration far greater than that which can be safely tolerated by man and animals”. So on one hand the government and science, states medical ozone is bad, but my friend begs me to be open minded about medical ozone, and suggests that it might be the key to the upcoming COVID-19 pandemic.
How is ozone administered? First breathing the gas is clearly bad (no disagreements from anyone). How about taking a sample of your blood, infusing it with ozone, and re-injecting it, autohemotherapy. This is the method proposed to be used to treated COVID-19 patients. This therapy was given to one African during the Ebola crisis, problem was that the patient never had Ebola. Ozone Autohemotherapy is dangerous, resulting in multiple deaths and lawsuits. Advocates of ozone injection are facing prosecution and jail time. So the treatment has changed to “insufflation” in which the gas is bubbled into a body cavity, like the rectum giving an ozone enema or vagina giving ozone douche. Because the word insufflation sounds legit, and the medical legitimacy is clearly lacking I prefer the colorful terms smog queefing (pussy fart) and ozone boofing (alcohol consumed via rectal administration). So we have gone from a society in which we used to think inserting a jade egg into the vagina was good, to one in which bubbling a toxic gas into the vagina is a reasonable idea.
Efforts to educate fall on deaf ears. Just because a limited study done in a test tube (in-vitro) had an interesting finding, does not mean human treatment (in-vivo) has any merit. The language of science does not appeal to practitioners of pseudo-science, threats of asset forfeiture and jail do not change their opinions. Public ridicule seems like a childish approach to combat ignorance, but how do we regulate free speech? The earth is flat, man never landed on the moon, blacks are inferior to whites, and toxic farts are good for you; are just a few examples of opinions I have trouble tolerating. Do we have a right to be stupid? Do health professionals have a duty to address ignorance and not profit from it?
I would like to build a bridge from traditional to alternative medicine, that is evidence based. Do probiotics work? What nutritional supplements work, and for what conditions? These areas need to be studied by open minded professionals. We should be open minded to new ideas but willing to abandon ideas that prove false. An example of a major error attributed to traditional medicine, hysteria. In short, uncontrollable emotion was thought to stem from the uterus. Traditional treatments then focused on genital stimulation to treat mood disorders. I am not kidding when I say that patients came to the doctor’s office repeatedly to be stimulated by mechanical vibrators. We now use terms like somatization disorder instead of hysteria, and are embarrassed by our forefathers recommendation of a dildo. Can we agree that when treating patients with ungovernable emotional excess or life threatening viral infections, that the desire to stick something in their vaginas is not a medically supported goal.
