Anna was just home from her first year of college when her parents introduced her to a new health fad that they had learned about at church. It was called Miracle Mineral Solution. And taking it was a lot like taking your vitamins. It could prevent (and cure) a host of illnesses.
In reality, when Anna began taking it, she was slowly poisoning herself. MMS is comprised of sodium chlorite and an acid, which when mixed together basically make bleach. And ingesting bleach is not only toxic but potentially deadly.
Anna, who wanted to only use her first name to protect herself and her parents, found this out the hard way one day when shortly after her daily dose of MMS she began vomiting violently.
“I remember texting my mom at some point, I was like, ‘You need to come home right now and get me and take me to the ER because I think I’m dying,” she told me.
She didn’t call an ambulance, which would’ve cost a fortune by the time it reached her in a remote part of rural Texas. She didn’t have insurance, and neither did her parents. In fact, she thinks this is one of the things that drove them to MMS in the first place.
“If you’re someone who doesn’t have health insurance, it’s a lot easier to just go online and buy something like MMS,” she says.
Lack of trust is the main reason people seek out quack cures. When you don’t trust the medical establishment, it’s only natural to go looking for something else. Not having medical care also contributes to distrust.
“That opens the floodgates for a lot of this misinformation and a lot of this kind of pseudoscientific stuff that’s peddled on the extremes,” says Dominik Stecula, a political scientist at Colorado State University who studies health misinformation.
Sellers of quack cures prey on those sentiments. “Smoke Screen: Deadly Cure,” a new podcast by Bloomberg, Neon Hum Media and Sony Music Entertainment hosted by me, is all about one such group. The last episode is out today.
In the end, Anna was fine. But her MMS health scare didn’t dissuade her parents. They took it for several more years.
“I’m not sure they would be honest with me about it if they were still taking MMS,” she told me.