Sinusitis is the reason I discovered colloidal silver over 30 years ago. I had been suffering from sinus infections my entire life. My work involved frequent travel all over the world. I would come down with a sinus infection within a few days at each destination. I would seek help from the local medical community, which would result in injecting the latest antibiotic. That would usually clear it up in a few days. I had a long history of trying to remedy this situation. I have seen many ear, nose, and throat specialists and allergists. I even had an SMR (subcutaneous membrane restructure) operation, but I was still subject to infections. I was, and still am, disdainful of “alternative medicine.” I was in Las Vegas on a job and could not work for three days. I had been bedridden with a fever that would break and reappear, drank a lot of water, and “sweat it out.” I was awake in the middle of the night and listening to an all-night radio program that featured guests promoting various “wacko” subjects, from flying saucers to conspiracy theories.
One of these guests was promoting colloidal silver. He sounded more rational than the usual people on this program. Before introducing antibiotics, I was unaware that silver had been used extensively as an antimicrobial. The following day, I called the local health food store and ordered an 8-ounce bottle of the colloidal silver they recommended. They sent it by taxi, and the driver delivered it to my hotel room. It came with a dropper, and I started to flood my sinus cavities with it. Within two hours, all my symptoms disappeared. I was determined never to be without this remedy in the future.
Colloidal Silver – The Universal Germicide
Historical Background and Research
Silver has long been known for its special properties. People used silver containers in Ancient Greece and Rome to keep liquids fresh. Through the centuries, royal households carried on this practice by storing their provisions in silver containers. Privileged family members used silver eating utensils: they had their meals served on silver plates and their drinks served in silver cups. Indeed, ‘blue blood’ skin reportedly had a bluish tinge due to the minute traces of pure metallic silver they regularly consumed. In American pioneering days, new settlers traveling to the West would put silver dollars in their milk to delay spoiling.
Silver was regarded as a proven germ-fighter by the turn of the 20th Century. In medicine, a solution known as colloidal silver was commonly used as a mainstay of bacterial treatment. Although considered ‘high tech’ then, the type of solution used was inferior to today’s colloidal silver solutions. One of the drawbacks was that the particle size of the silver had yet to reach its optimum ultramicroscopic size and, thus, its highest absorption levels.
Back then, colloidal silver was very expensive to produce. The pharmaceutical industry wanted faster-working drugs that were cheaper and patentable. In addition, when manufactured improperly or taken at hundreds of times the proper dosage with extraneous silver compounds included, a permanent skin discoloration called argyria could result. For these reasons, colloidal silver fell out of favor. Even so, prestigious journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet (1914) published the results of scientific studies and examined the many successful uses of colloidal silver.
In 1910, Dr. Henry Crooks, a pioneer in colloidal chemistry, wrote that “certain metals, when in a colloidal state, have a highly germicidal action but are quite harmless to human beings . It may be applied in a much more concentrated form and with better results . Bronchial tuberculosis Staphylococcus pyogenes, various Streptococci, and other pathogenic organisms are all killed in three to four minutes: in fact, no microbe is known this colloid does not kill that in laboratory experiments in six minutes, [and] the concentration of the [silver] does not exceed twenty-five parts per million .”
In 1919, Alfred B. Searle, founder of the pharmaceutical conglomerate of the same name, wrote in his book The Use of Colloids in Health and Disease that:” applying colloidal silver to human subjects has been done in a large number of cases with astonishingly successful results. For internal administration, orally or hypodermically it has the advantage of being rapidly fatal to parasites without toxic action on its host. It is quite stable.”
Much later, in the 1970s, colloidal silver once again became a valued substance. Doctors at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, stumbled upon it while searching for effective treatments for burns victims, having tried many other medicines. Biomedical research has shown that no known disease-causing organism, bacteria, virus, or fungus can live for more than a few minutes in the presence of even minute traces of metallic silver.
Jim Powell reported in an article, ‘Our Mightiest Germ Fighter’ published in Science Digest (March 1078, pp. 59-60): “Thanks to eye-opening research, silver is emerging as a wonder of modern medicine. An antibiotic kills perhaps a half-dozen different disease organisms, but silver kills some 650. What’s more, resistant strains fail to develop when using silver. Moreover, silver is virtually non-toxic.”Larry C Ford. M.D. of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the UCLA School of Medicines Centre for the Health Sciences reported in a November 1988 letter: “I tested them [the silver solutions] using standard antimicrobial tests for disinfectants. The silver solutions were anti-bacterial for concentrations of 10 organisms per ml of Streptococcus pyogenes, Staphylococcus aureus, Neisseria gonorrhea, Gardnerela, Vaginalis, Salmonella typhi, and other enteric pathogens and fungicidal for Candida albicans, Candida globate and m. furfur.”Biomedical researcher Robert O Becker. M.D. from Syracuse University has reported that “Silver stimulates bone-forming cells into growing new bone where it had not healed for long periods.” Dr Becker is the author of The Body Electric and Cross Currents and is also known for his work in regenerating the amputated legs of bullfrogs.
According to Dr Becker, “Silver did more than kill disease-causing organisms. It promoted major growth of bone and accelerated the healing of injured tissues by over 50 percent”. In his research, he discovered cell types that looked just like the active bone marrow of children. “These cells grew fast,” he wrote, “producing a diverse and surprising assortment of primitive cell forms able to multiply at a great rate, then differentiate into the specific cells of an organ tissue that had been injured, even in patients over fifty years old. This ability overcomes the main problem of mammalian regeneration”.
Dr Becker also discovered that silver profoundly stimulates healing in skin and other soft tissues, unlike any known natural process, kills the most stubborn infections of all kinds, including surrounding bacteria and fungus. He concluded, “What we have actually done is to rediscover the fact that silver kills bacteria, which had been known for centuries when antibiotics were discovered, clinical uses for silver as an antibiotic were discarded.”