TOPIC:

This is a comment I wrote to Adam Abraham's Thought for Food blog in the wake of the controversy over Will Spencer's use of MMS ("Advanced Oxygen Therapy") to detox people, including Gulf Fisher's spokesperson Kendra Arnesen, and my repeated encounters with people I will characterize as knee-jerk opposition to MMS parroting the Anti-MMS talking points that we're now seeing all over the place:
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Adam, thanks again for your diligent work sorting out the confusion around claims for and against MMS and chlorine dioxide. It has been refreshing and consoling to see you bringing clarity into the increasingly heated and emotionally pointed propaganda against the unique properties of the chlorine dioxide molecule as used to detoxify the body.

In poking around on the internet to understand the campaign against MMS and Will Spencer in the Gulf, I've come across another media professional who is using, IMO, deceptive language and claims to attack MMS, and in this case, Jim Humble, quite personally. Links: bit.ly/cVZHFi - bit.ly/aIN2dr

The author's name is Martin Robbins, writing for the Guardian.co.uk as "The Lay Scientist." In his articles, one specifically on Humble and the Rhys Morgan flap regarding a message board for Crohn's Disease (including an interesting comment section with posts from the 15 year-old Morgan), and the other on a crusade against MMS last September in Kenya.

Robbins is now apparently on a personal campaign to get authorities everywhere to crack down on the availability of sodium chlorite, about which, on the say-so of the FDA "warning," he says "In other words, MMS is extremely nasty stuff." He talks about how an awareness campaign against the dangers of MMS was picking up back in September 2010 at the time of his articles. "Since then I'm thrilled to report that journalists in Kenya have picked up the story, exposing Humble and his dangerous "drug" in The Daily Nation, a top newspaper in the region...". He goes on to quote a Kenyan official who is following the official line of the FDA - "Dr Elizabeth Juma, said sodium chlorite was bleach and should not be used as medicine."

After noting that a clinic in Kenya is still, "sadly," providing sodium chlorite solution to its patients, Robbins says "So there is much work to be done, and I plan to chase up the Health Ministry and local authorities where possible in the near future."

Robbins follows with an update on an editorial in the Daily Nation in which he says "The paper suggests that the product hasn't been registered with officials in Nairobi (a process which requires data from clinical trials), making the treatment technically illegal. It goes on to criticise medical regulatory authorities in the country for perceived impotence in the face of dodgy medicines..."

In addition, for support for his claims, Robbins links to a blogger called noodlemaz at: bit.ly/8YVZeW - where the blogger deconstructs an interview with Jim Humble by holding him up to ridicule. The blogger is apparently a scientist: "I have a biochemistry/genetics degree; he (Humble) does not. His work has never involved biology or chemistry, he was a gold prospector. I’d be interested to verify that he ever went anywhere near the space program, too," and attacks Humble's expertise on many fronts. This isn't that difficult to do. Jim likes to talk and has an unguarded conversational style that frequently seems stream-of-consciousness.

The reason for my comment here is how I've been feeling while following the ongoing campaign to discredit the simple chemistry of MMS and to make ad-hominem attacks on its users and supporters. What I've found dismaying is the tone of such deconstructions, the distortion of language, the casting of anyone who disagrees with the control of human health by "experts" as being enemies, "the others," against whom no sanctions can be too severe because of the ways we (like Al Quaeda) endanger the masses of "Good Germans." Then there are the Goebbels-like repetitions, things like how MMS is "industrial bleach," lies about the chemistry, how it permanently changes the hemoglobin molecules so they won't carry oxygen, how activated and diluted MMS burns tissue, how anyone who considers using MMS is not only criminally mislead but is doomed. It reminds me of the campaign in the US press against Wilhelm Reich in the early 50's, before the great scientist was sent to die in US Federal Prison and his books were burned.

I'm going to be writing more about how this accelerating witch-hunt reflects the ways in which we tend to think about ourselves and the world, as, from my view, our habitual sense of separation from life is becoming more and more defended and leading to ever-greater insanities.

In the mean time, those of us holding out for some common sense must watch our reactivity, and have a level of compassion for those who are mechanically locked in a struggle to get "authorities" to deny informed and consenting people the use of natural substances as we have the unalienable right to choose.