Welcome to Bad Science on the Internet! Here, we highlight some of the crazy and sometimes dangerous stuff people post online, and then we give you the facts. 

The Bad Science:

Several retailers sell something called miracle mineral solution for the treatment of numerous ailments, including malaria, HIV/AIDS, the flu, autism, and cancer. It’s also known as master mineral solution, MMS, the CD protocol, or CDS. There’s a whole book about how great it is!

Are they trying to sell you something?

Of course.

Does it work?

MMS DOES NOT WORK. FOR ANYTHING. DON’T TAKE IT. EVER.

Is it dangerous?

It sure is! MMS is made by adding sodium chlorite to acidic water, which produces chlorine dioxide, which is bleach. Yes, ITS MADE OF BLEACH.

Generally, it is recommended that you drink MMS, which its just as dangerous as it sounds. Drinking bleach will cause nausea, vomiting, and (if you drink enough) death. The bottle of bleach in your basement has a warning label on it telling you not to drink it. MMS is no different, in fact, it’s more powerful than the bleach you buy in stores. It’s Super Bleach!

Look, most people know instinctively not to drink bleach, but just to put it in context, here’s how chlorine dioxide stacks up with other nasty stuff in terms of acute toxicity, as measured by the average lethal doses (LD50’s) in rats.

Glyphosate (active ingredient in Roundup herbicide) = 5,600 mg/kg

Formaldehyde (carcinogen used to preserve bodies) = 500 mg/kg

Chlorox bleach (hypochlorite) = 192 mg/kg

Thiopental sodium (used for lethal injections) = 117 mg/kg

Chlorine dioxide (ingredient in MSS) =94 mg/kg 

Cyanide (rat poison) = 1.5 mg/kg

So the active ingredient in MSS is more toxic than glyphosate, formaldehyde, “regular” bleach, and the stuff they use in lethal injections. On the plus side, it’s not quite as bad as eating rat poison, so there’s that.

There is also a small group of people who believe that if MMS is given as an enema it can cure autism. This is absolutely not true, and is just as dangerous as you might think a bleach enema would be. There is no cure for autism. If anyone tells you there is, they are lying to you.

If it doesn’t work and is so dangerous, why is it available on Amazon.com?

The idea of using MMS to treat disease was “invented” by a guy named Jim Humble, who left the church of Scientology (presumably because it wasn’t crazy enough) to found what he calls the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, which promotes the use of MMS to treat disease. Jim claims to have discovered MMS when he was in Africa in the 1990’s and used it to treat his malaria. He self-published a book, and a small, dangerous community of adherents have been touting it’s benefits ever since. Besides the unsupported ramblings of Jim Humble and his followers, there is not a shred of scientific evidence supporting the efficacy of MMS, and a whole bunch of evidence telling us that drinking and “cleansing” with super bleach is incredibly dangerous.

The governments of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and others have all issued warnings against the use of MMS, and there have been several cases in the US of the government filing criminal charges against people offering MMS for sale as a medical treatment and shutting them down. This makes sense – unlike a lot of other fake “alternative” medical treatments, MMS is extremely dangerous, and profiting off of false claims about it’s nonexistent health benefits is a crime in most countries. People have died from MMS.

Maybe the idea of “cleaning” our insides makes sense in some basic way. It would be great if we could bleach our bodies clean like we do our kitchens, but that is not the world we live in. If you drink enough of this stuff, or squirt enough of it up your butt, it will kill you. Even if it doesn’t kill you, the malaria, autism, HIV, cancer, whatever you were using it for, will still be there.