The Blue Man Fraud -- blame the media?

Have you seen this guy on the news? He's not the aging founder of the whack-cool-instruments-with-sticks-while-painted art troupe the Blue Man Group. His name is Paul Karason, and supposedly he's been in the news because he took a dietary supplement and turned blue.

Okay, I've heard of eating too many carrots and turning orange -- but what on earth could make you turn blue? I mean, I like the Smurfs as much as the next guy, but this is extreme.

Well, it turns out some people take a silver supplement for their health. I don't mean silver as some kind of ranking, like gold-silver-bronze, or silver as in it's a shiny pill. No, they take actual silver, dissolved, tiny tiny tiny particles. Before the late 1930s, "Colloidal Silver" -- that is, a preparation in which the particles are actually suspended in the fluid, not dissolved ionically -- was used as a mainstream antibiotic. Sulfa and penicillin squeezed it out of the market. The US EPA says it's okay to use silver as a hospital disinfectant.

But drinking the stuff? Yes, people do it. And the man in the picture supposedly changed colour from it.

Now, there may be more to the story. A company that sells colloidal silver would be devastated if people believed taking the stuff would turn you into a Smurf or a drum-banging hippie, yes? That's the problem facing PurestColloids.com. They've set up a web page to debunk what they call the "Blue Man Fraud." According to the site, it's partly his fault for cooking up a home-brew silver drink that's totally NOT like the stuff they sell ... and then going suntanning, which fixed the blueness in his skin much like a silver-particle photographic plate would if you exposed it to light. They say the Blue Man was not consuming the kind of Colloidal Silver they sell.

But they go a step further and blame the media. Uh-oh! I don't much care for that! The company outright says that the mass media cannot be trusted to report anything that even resembles a truthful story.

Now, now. As part of the evil mass media myself, I know that end-of-the-line fact-checking is often lacking. If it comes down the wire, we assume that the people uplines have the story straight, and that it's fair game for reading. I'm smart and cynical enough to research further if the story seems weird enough to be questionable, or is on a subject I feel terribly under-informed about.

And, in the case of silver turning people blue, I might have turned to Wikipedia, for example, to see if silver actually turns people blue. What's it say? "Long-term intake of silver products may result in a condition known as argyria, one symptom of which is a blue or gray discoloration of the skin .... Many scientific articles report cases of argyria after ingestion of colloidal silver.[13][14][15][16][17][18]."

Okay, fair enough. It can happen. PureColloids.com is welcome to try to tell the public that its particular formulation will absotively posolutely NOT turn customers blue. Counter information with information, but please don't smear the media.

As always, I encourage you to read both sides, sort through hyperbole, and err on the side of common sense. Check out the pros and cons (the companies tell you some pros at http://www.purestcolloids.com/blue-man.php, Wikipedia will point you to what the FDA and others suggest about cons) before taking any supplement.

Except bacon. Bacon's a good supplement for anything.