Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Borax

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

You'll never believe what people are doing on TikTok now. Borax is a salt you might have in your home: it's an active ingredient in many contact solutions, so it doesn't sound especially good to eat. Dr. Sydnee talks about the different reasons people on the internet are drinking it, the history of borax, and the actual science behind it. But the bottom line is: please do not drink borax.Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers https://taxpayers.bandcamp.com/

Saw bones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books! One, two, one, two, three, four! Hello everybody and welcome to Saul Bones. for the mouth. Wow. Hello, everybody, and welcome to Saul Bones, a marital tour of Miss Gatton Medicine.

I'm Carol Hose Justin McAroy. And I'm Sydney McAroy. And I'm wearing a ball cap today. That's a new energy for me, and I feel like, as I heard my intro in the sort of Fulxy ease, which I was delivering in, I feel like the hat is, I don't know, it feel like the hat is, I don't know, it's, it's,

it's given me a different sort of vibe. I mean, it is a King's Island hat, you know? Where it might be disconcerting to the listener, I'm not disconcerting, but, you know, I want them to know what's happening. I don't want to get a bunch of emails like just, we're worried about you sound like wearing a hat. I am.

Yeah, I think it's too hot for hats. It's really hot today. Too hot for hats. Yeah. Like now the top of your head is hot, isn't it? As I say hats. It's really hot today. Too hot for hats. Yeah. Like now the top of your head is hot, isn't it? As I say that, are you imagining how hot the top of your head is and sweaty? It's getting under there.

No, no, it's perfectly comfortable. I see. The top of my head is hot, so I need to think it up. I actually didn't realize you could physically get hot. I didn't realize that was a tool you had. I felt I feel like cold is the only sort of thing that I hear from you in terms of your current temperature. When we get in bed at night

and I press my ice cold hands against you. God. Sometimes my nose is that cold. Charlie hugged me yesterday and then she went, what is wrong with your nose? That is cold. It's fine. I've always called.

I'm fine. I'm really fine. I just tend to run cold. You run hot. That's cold. It's fine. I'm always cold. I'm fine. I'm really fine. I just tend to run cold. You run hot. That's it. Offset's attract. Don't get weird. Right.

It ain't fiction. All right. Do you want to be MCSKAT Cat? Yes. That is what it takes to get you to begin the episode. I will be your MCSKAT Cat. Justin, you all believe what they're doing on TikTok now. I. It's always a little depressing. I mean, it's fun. It's funny, but not really funny.

It's depressing. It's a little sad. More depressing, for sure. Um, also, I'm not depressed by it because I'm not doing it. And you have to assume, this is what I try to remind myself, okay? My ignorance of something did not impact me the moment before I learned about it. So this was happening just fine without me doing anything. The universe did not ask for me to consult on this. It's just happening. But I was fine before it. So I try to be just fine after I learned about it. I try to remember this is the context in which I try to present this information. Because if I should be able, even though I would never do this thing, I should be able to

learn something from this, I feel. And I feel like many of our listeners probably would never do this. But many of our listeners would never do this. Yes. Many. Most. I mean, I think, I don't know some of. Some of y'all might still be doing a lot of-

Some of y'all are wild out there. I feel I worry that there might be some people who are just dirty dogs that use this as like a discovery engine, like just to get the weirdest stuff surface to them so they can get good give it a whirl. Everyone's in a while. You know, I get some sort of social media interaction or email that I is surprisingly

Vitriolic and I'm like you're still here We know run you off With our with our thoughts and feelings yet. No, okay. Wow. Wow. Yeah, maybe this was the one No, I try to remember that when I see people on t or whatever, whatever social media, somewhere on the internet, we're in the real world doing things that are not helpful for their health that are misguided and that are possibly harmful, that while part of that is that, you know,

in medicine we are not always the best salespeople and there are actual salespeople who are much better at it. The other part of it is that we have not, in our for-profit capitalist medical system, done a very good job of reassuring patients that we are here for them. And there's a lot of mistrust in the system, which manifests as mistrust in us,

the healthcare providers. Whether that's fair or not in the individual provider, that's not, I'm not making that case. I'm not saying like, you shouldn't trust me. I hope you do, you should. But if you don't trust me because I'm part of this system, I have to have understanding for that. And so then when people seek alternative methods that may be dangerous because they don't

trust this system, I can't criticize them too much, right? Well, I can. So I... Okay. Well, I'm going criticize them too much, right? Well, I can. So I, I will. Okay. Well, I'm gonna talk about Borax. Are you familiar with Borax? My wife. Love it.

Love it. Finally, finally, the giant pendulum swings back into areas of my expertise. I know a lot about Borax and Boric acid, borate, boron. Okay, now borate, now you're just messing with me. You mean, bull. These are just different forms of different chemical compounds of boron that I'm referencing.

The reason I know a lot about it is because it is the component in contact solution. That makes slime. That makes slime. So I have to be very familiar, not only with the fact in contact solution that makes slime. That makes slime. So I have to be very familiar, not only with the fact that it is in contact solution, and that is the part that makes the glue become slime when my daughters want to make slime over and over and over and over.

There are certain formulations of all-purpose solution that don't have the appropriate compound in them. They have a different boron thing that doesn't make the cross polymer to make the slime. If you get the wrong one, you never make slime. You just have a big wet bowl of glue and baking soda. That's... Oh, yes. I'm seeing here just as bad as slime. They're both equally bad, it says here.

So anyway, if you're curious, if you ever got, hey, there's my tip for you parents out there who make slime with your kids. And if you're buying those fancy activators that they sell, a slime activator, it's just contact solution. Psst. Or you can get borax. Yeah.. Or you can get borax. Yeah. Actually, you can add borax and water and then you got it too.

That's what the fancy activators are. Anyway, borax you may use in your house for cleaning, like clothes, as a laundry detergent aid. It is used as a pesticide. It's used as a flux in soldering metals. It's in pottery glazes. It's a pharmaceutical alkalizer. We use it as a buffer in various chemistry lab experiment type things. This stuff is great.

Yes. So borax has lots of, it It's a salt by the way, not salt, salt. It's a salt, you know, not salt, not knackle, not an ACL, not knackle, not knackle, different. And it dissolves in water and it's basic when it dissolves in water. So that's borax. You might have some in your home and it has many uses. It feels like old timey. You know what I mean? It feels like when you see, I don't know, I'm trying to think of a good parallel, but it's like, oh, you're just like mothballs or something. You know what I mean?

Like, oh, that's weird. This is to do that, huh? All right. Yeah, I think Borax does have that five, and it is old timey. Like in its most current evolution, it's been around since like the late 1800s. But even before that, like we knew of the existence of borax,

we found it like in lake beds in Tibet. Long, long, long time ago. And like it's main application for a long time was in like the mining industry. That was really where you use the long borax. So this is an old substance. It is if you like use it in your house, it does have that vibe. But recently

People on TikTok have started eating it. Oh, no! Yes, it doesn't sound like good to eat, but these are just high drops. And here we are. No, no Well, that's yeah, but but you're talking about the cookie. Mm-hmm. I understand that high drugs and borax, you know what, that's a good, they both similarly are off-putting name wise. Mm-hmm.

But then from combining the two pure sounding chemicals, hydrogen and oxygen, that is where the name, Hydrox came from because it sounded pure. It's interesting though because nobody thinks of eating hydrogen or oxygen. No, you just breathe it, right? Yeah, but when you hear it, you don't think, mm, hunger. You mean a couple of hydrogens though, mix it up with that oxygen.

I ain't got it some water going on. You still don't think hungry when you don't think that. Do you know where the name Oreo came from? I thought no one did. That's right. No one did. But it would have worked better if you had been like no. And then I would be like neither does Oreo. I guess the national business company.

I'm sorry that I ruined that for you. That's all right. That's my one thing. So, okay. People on TikTok, and then I'm, again, I don't want to blame just TikTok for this. I'm sure there's, actually, I know there are, because I read them. There are blogs.

There are probably zits. Yeah, I don't look at, oh, is that what they're called now? They're called zits. I'm finding this out in this moment. Oh, zits. They're called Z. I'm finding this out in this moment. All the people. So gross. I mentioned air well, can I obey disalba?

Solba. Wait, is this so they're called Z. Since that a tweet. I don't know what a tweet is that all from that app that used to exist. Twitter. Yeah, not that's gone now. I'm yeah, I'm X. Okay, so probably there to exist Twitter, you know, that's gone now. I'm, yeah, I'm ex-all- Okay, so probably there too. And probably if you've got the right milieu of friends on Facebook, I bet there's one of your Facebook friends who's talking about this too.

I bet you they're out there. I bet just somebody's in an MLM and they're also talking about Borax. That's, you know, those Venn diagrams overlap quite a bit. Anyway, what a lot of people and then wellness influencers are getting into this and then just random people who are trying it. I think that's always the breakdown, right? So you have people who use various social media platforms as a way to push their personal brand of them, themselves, as a well-person, as a health paradigm

that you want to be like. And they talk about all the stuff they do to maintain their health and wellness, and then they're trying to get you to follow them and do the things they do, mainly because, I mean, I don't know, maybe they're true believers, they want to help you, but also just because they want you to do the thing,

and then they're going to say you some stuff, and they want the clicks and whatever. But then there are also people who fall into this category of doing some of this weird stuff on social media who I think it's remembered, we have to remember to have a heart for it, which are people who are unwell. They are sick in some way. And they haven't gotten the answers that they have not gotten answers. They feel that address all their issues from traditional medicine. And so they have turned to these other things

for hope when they felt they had none. And they are falling victim to scams. I'm not justifying that this is what should be happening, but that is why that is the motivation. So you'll find both of these kind of groups of people on TikTok. And what they, I watched a bunch of these. So there goes my algorithm forever. I've been talking, I need to set up with another account, just like a nasty research account. All I was watching were gardening and permaculture and food forests and people harvesting.

And now- Those just make you felt bad about yourself. You shouldn't be watching the food forest stuff. That just bums you out about your garden. I don't know. But it was so inspiring to watch everybody's harvests anyway. Now I'm just gonna see people drinking borax. So what they, as far as I can tell,

and they're different, since this isn't real, everybody's doing it a different way. So that you take some borax. And it looks like most people are using 20 mule team borax, which is a specific brand of borax, which I have the history of. I'm going to share with you. I think that's the one that is like in grocery stores.

Yeah. Yeah. This isn't like a specialty brand. It's just the brand that people are using. But they're, so they're taking some of this borax and they're dissolving it in some water and then drinking it. And there are different amount. Like I watched some people who were taking like, I mean like a tiny pinch of borax and putting it water and then drinking it. And there are different amounts. I watch some people who were taking a tiny pinch of borax

and putting it in a water and drinking it. A homey on a homey on a perfect. Yes, homey on a perfect borax used. And then other people who are using more, some people were saying you do this once a day, other people were like, do this with every meal three times a day. There's not more consensus on this. Like, I found so many different recommendations as to how to take it.

And then in terms of why, okay, so then the next question is if everybody's drinking borax, why are they doing it? The reasons are varied. There's a whole group of influencers who are touting this as the natural ozimpic. Ozimpic is a diabetes drug that also causes weight loss. And so the, there are lots of people out there who are saying, this is how you can lose weight naturally, but drinking more X. There are some people who are touting it for like more chronic issues like arthritis.

I saw several people who were taking it in hopes that it would alleviate their arthritis pain. For chronic pain, I saw a lot of people who were taking it for inflammation, which inflammation is a real thing, of course, that does happen in the body. Yes, but there's also a catch all boogey man. Yes, so there are a lot of wellness people who will just sort of tell you that your body is constantly inflamed and you're full of inflammation

and you need to treat the inflammation in various ways. So some people are taking it for these non-specific kind of complaints, like inflammation. Yes. And then of course, there are people who are saying, it will detox you. Detox is, I keep waiting for the detox thing to finally fade because a lot of these like

faux wellness trend things have a half life. Yeah, they've been using it for so long and no one's like saying like, hey, I don't, I'm worried that toxins may not be a thing. Yes. And it's very, and you see people also have expanded what detoxifying means to like, I'm freeing my body of toxins, or they think it's just like, if you poop a lot, you've detoxified yourself.

I see a lot of people who are like, they'll use some substance they say is detoxifying, and really it just gives you terrible diarrhea, and they're like, awesome detoxified. Toxins are out. Yeah, toxins are out. Which is, again, we talk about on the show all the time, medicines that make you poop have been popular

for a very long time. Some people think it cleanses them of parasites. I've seen a lot of people say that they feel they're filled with some parasite that people can't diagnose or see, which probably they've been told by medical professionals, they don't actually have a parasitic infection, but they still remain convinced.

And so they do this for parasites. For the detoxifying thing, I will remind you, you have things in your body that detoxify you. They're called your liver and kidneys, and they are excellent at it. I mean, hopefully, generally speaking, generally speaking, of course, you can get on this, but generally speaking, they do a great job, and you do not need to add borax to them,

to help them function. So these various influencers are doing this or people desperate looking for hope are using these substances and like there are some on there who will tell you like that it's the your standard sort of testimonial for many snake oil. I feel great. It totally detoxified me. All my inflammation is gone. This diarrhea is crazy.

And with some of them, it's not even like an effect. It's just like I feel so much more energy. My brain feels clearer. I just really subject to not specific things. And then there are some people who are like, now I saw some TikToks where people were like, I poisoned myself, don't do this. I like learn from me, I poisoned myself.

And can I say, by the way, thank you for people who are willing to be that honest. Yes, I did get scammed and yes, I did suffer for it, but I want to tell you about it anyway so that you will not repeat my mistake. That takes a lot of bravery. Yeah. And generally speaking, nobody can point to any like,

here's what it did, or here's how it fixed me. And there's a good reason for that. Because it doesn't do, it's not doing anything. It's not doing anything. No, we know that we know. Nothing good presumably. Yes, we know that we know. Nothing good presumably. Yes, we know that we have tried this before

or nothing is new under the sun. We have tried this before, we know Borax doesn't have these kinds of effects and we know also that Borax can be harmful and I wanna tell you about that part, but first we gotta go to the billing department. Does that seem safe? You should just go ahead and say

just like, generally speaking. Don't drink Borax. Let's go to the building department. Does that seem safe? You should just go ahead and say, just like, generally speaking. Don't drink 4x. Let's go to the building department. The medicines, the medicines, the escalate macabre for the mouth. I'm Jordan Morris, and I'm Jesse Thorne. On Jordan Jesse Go,

we make pure, delightful nonsense. We were open Go, we make appear to like full nonsense. We were open awesome guests, and bring them down to our level. We get stupid with Judy Greer. My friend Molly and I call it having the spaceweirds. Pat Naswalt. Could I get a Balrog burger and some air-gorn fries? Thank you. And Kumail Nanjiani.

I've come back with Cat Toothbrushes, which is impossible to use. Come get stupider with us at MaximumFun.org. Look, your podcast apps are already open, just pull it out. Give Jordan Jesse Goatry. Being smart is hard. Be dumb instead. Okay, Zebras, Arangatans, oh. Sorry, hi.

You see animals talking? Where are you? Yes, my name is Carrie Poppy. I co-host a podcast called Ona Ross and Carrie. This is my co-host Ross right here. Okay. We investigate spirituality, claims of the paranormal, and we were wondering if we could get on the art.

You did come to by too, I appreciate that. Thank you. The most of the things I'm letting on the art don't talk. I'm gonna be talking all up on this boat. Do you mind both? I prefer arc or bar. Okay, I'm not listening. But if you let me on

then I will make my really good podcast on your boat. Can you please help clean up all the poop? Yeah, I guess they don't see why not. Well, check out the podcast. Where do I find it? Tell MaximumFund.org. But why Sydney? I already have my borax here. I don know what to drink it. Why can't I have borax? I started digging into like, has borax been used as medicine before? Do we already know if borax is good or bad for you? And I thought this was really interesting. It's called borax. It's got to be bad, right? Like don't tell me we can have some. No, I mean, you really just shouldn't.

Like, there's, okay, some of these influencers will tell you that the problem is you have a boron deficiency. And so you need boron and borax contains boron. Now, one, we do need trace amounts. We believe of boron in our bodies. There are a number of like trace elements that we need little bits of, but there's such small amounts that generally speaking, you get them if you're just like from anything you're eating.

Yeah, I mean, they're not like, it's not like make sure you're getting enough protein in your diet, right? Like it's not something like that. They're trace. The word trace means very small. And- That's so weird though,

because how do you get a trace, naturally? You know what I mean? How do you get a trace from eating? Yeah, but like, I eat different stuff all the time. How am I just happening to get a little borax? Well, and you're, well, no, you need a little boron and it's out there in vegetables. There's plenty of vegetables that contain boron that get, that you can get what you need. Um, and if, if, for some reason, you had a diagnosed boron deficiency, which I'm not saying it's

impossible, but it would be incredibly rare. But if you did get diagnosed with that, we would not feed you borax. We would give you boron supplement. It's like saying, like, copper deficiency is a real thing. If somebody has copper deficiency, we give them a supplement that contains copper. You do not. We don't tell them to swallow pennies. Right, because those are mostly zinc.

Well, yes, but you get the analogy, right? Like, we can give you the actual thing you're deficient in. We don't have to give it to you in a substance that could be damaging to you in some way. So, Borax, a lot of these people will cite that it has been used as a kind of cure all for a very, very long time, like back to ancient times.

Borax has been used as a cure all ever since it was first discovered. I actually can't find a lot of evidence for it as a cure all. I'm wondering if that is maybe not real. He's maybe a myth. Now I did find, like specifically, I saw somebody say dandruff and I looked up and like yes, I have found in multiple, like sort of,

just like health hair blogs, not really like from a doctor's perspective, but just like, hey, here's the thing you could do. Wash your hair and bore acts. It'll make your hair shiny and cure your dandruff. So I did find that out there. It is used in a number of like exfoliants for your skin, so I don't know if maybe that's where that came in,

like you was in there too. I also found some mentions of it for like different, was it used for gastrointestinal stuff? And I can't find that, because if anything, it would make that worse. So I couldn't really find any evidence. I don't know. I'm wondering if it really was a cure all,

or if we just think that everything that people eat probably was a cure all at some point. I mean, yeah, I may have been. But I couldn't find a lot of evidence that Borax was. Now, I did find specifically, I thought this was really interesting. Somebody said it was even used for epilepsy. So I looked back through to see

what borax used for epilepsy. That was true. We did. And I think this probably says more about epilepsy than it does about borax. So epilepsy covers a number of different seizure disorders. And there are different types of seizures and you can have different presentation.

What that looks like looks different, you have different medicines that you might need for those and they can affect your life in different ways but you don't have frequent you have them. So epilepsy is a broad term that describes a number of different seizure disorders, right? And because epilepsy before we understood that it was basically misfiring

of the neurons your brain sells and it misfiring of all of those electrical signals. Before we knew that, we've talked about before on the show, epilepsy was very disturbing for people. They didn't understand what it was, the people who were having seizures, generally afterwards didn't remember anything of what. There was a lot of connection to possession.

Exactly. In early days. Yes, it was tied to a lot of religious, spiritual, mystical types of happenings. And so people who had epilepsy throughout history were treated with a number of terrible things to try to fix, cure, suppress, whatever. We have a whole episode on that.

But I think the use of Borax as a treatment for epilepsy speaks more to the fact that epilepsy is one of those things that we tried we have tried every wild thing in medical history for at some point, right? Because it's been around as long as humans have been around That's not true for every disease. There's some that we didn't do as much weird stuff with Epilepsy is one where we did a lot of weird stuff. But Borax, it was a treatment that persisted, like, it started in the early 1900s, probably not long after it started getting mined and regularly used in the US. But it was used specifically. It was listed as one of the only, like, treatments that was supposedly effective for epilepsy in the

early 1900s. But studies that tried to replicate that couldn't really find it, not that it was making seizures worse, but that it actually didn't really. Yeah. And so what that says to me is they probably weren't like the numbers of people in the study probably weren't large enough. And so, and since seizures were poorly understood and unpredictable at the time,

we gave this person Borax, and we didn't give this person Borax, and that person didn't have a seizure this week, and that person did, that could just be coincidence, and it probably was. Anyway, it was listed as a treatment for epilepsy for a while. It kind of fell out of favor,

and then there was this like renaissance that it got briefly in the 1930s when there was this specific asylum for people with epilepsy in Denmark where a lot of people were given it. And it was suggested that maybe it would work, but then the study said, no, no, no, it didn't, it didn't work. And if you go back and again, and you look over all of these papers and studies and medical records, you can review the charts from these people because we were in the era of charting. What you start to find is, one, it probably didn't work, and two, a lot of people maybe

didn't even have epilepsy because we weren't very good at diagnosing it yet. So, it was used as a historical treatment for epilepsy. It does not work for epilepsy. It does not work for epilepsy. It never did work for epilepsy. I think it's important to know when people start calling on these like, this treatment is as old as whatever, and it's been used for everything from dandruff to epilepsy. When you start hearing that one, is it really, but did it work? No.

No. No, I mean, I think that just, you know, using it for that doesn't mean it did anything. Right, we just try stuff, so we didn't know. Yeah. So. And look at, I mean, look at the exact, it's one to one.

Look at the TikTok thing, right? Like, I tried it. I mean, you convinced people to try it based on thing, right? Like, I tried it, I mean, you convinced people to try it based on that, right? By whatever feelings that you think that you had as a result of it. That's like universal throughout time and space and history. Right.

And it was funny because I was trying to find, one of the studies I was reading to try to figure out like they tried it for epilepsy, it didn't seem to work, and then it went away for a while. And then it came back. And in this study that I was reading, they specifically were trying to uncover the why, which I thought was fascinating. I love that they were asking that question, the researchers.

Why did it come back? And I can't find an answer. The other then, they couldn't find an answer, I can't find an answer now for like why all the sudden, 20-mule team borax, which is the kind of borax that people are mainly using. I don't think they say you have to use that, but that's what I, a lot of the influencers I watch their TikToks, they all had a box of 20 mule team borax. I hope they're not being paid by them. Certainly they wouldn't. No, I mean, 20 mule team borax says on the box, don't ingest this. Yeah. Like they say on their box, please don't eat this. Please don't eat it.

We don't want you to eat it. Like these are hard enough for us over here as 20 meal team borax. Do you? I thought this was an interesting history. Do you know where 20 meal team borax comes from? Can you raise that sentence in a way that is not absolutely unhinged? What on what? Just what you think just because I know the at an anemological origins of high drops cookies and orias and I know every brand on the store shelves. No Sydney. I don't know why they call it smuckers either. So Borax Borax had this like moment when it was discovered in the US in Nevada in the late 1800s and then in later after that in Death Valley.

And there was all this borax discovered and it was great because everybody wanted to use it for all these different, I told you all the applications of borax. So they wanted to mine it for all these different applications and it was pretty easy to mine except they're out in the middle of Death Valley. So now you have to transport it from there to wherever you're going to do whatever with it. So it was like super hot and it was long and there was no railroad at the time there. So what are you going to do?

So they famously, there was one guy who's staked a claim, his name was William Goldman. And he found a way to transport this mineral in these giant wagons pulled by. It's actually what I found was like two teams of 18 mules. That's not very fun. But 20 mule team is what it was called because it would take two teams, 10 days, 165 miles. Now I will say that there were two horses involved too. So I don't know if we're counting the horses as mules

and that's where that 20. Don't count the horses. No, we're not counting the horses as mules. Anyway, eventually like there was a railroad and stuff so they didn't have to do that. But that's where the 20 mule team name came from. And it was like a huge deal by the way. Like there's a Western from 1940 called the 20 mule team. Yeah, yeah, you already knew that no, but it just sounds right.

There and anyway, so that that is where that name comes from. 20 mule team for what it's worth. I don't think has anything to do with this trend because again, they put right there on their box. Please don't eat this. again, they put right there on their box, please don't eat this, that I would bet. But if you're buying the borax, they really care. I didn't call them for comment. I'm gonna go ahead and assume that had I called them for comment, they would say, please don't eat the borax. We never wanted you to eat it. It's like, it's, do the other things.

It does so many things. Make slime, just make slime. Your kid just wants to make slime. So can it hurt you? Yeah. Right? That's the big question. Yeah. I will say that Borax was used for a while as a food preservative. And then it was banned in lots of countries, including ours. So we have decided that it shouldn't be in food. Now, a lot of people argue that it's actually you actually have to eat quite a bit to kill yourself with

it. Which is a wild argument to make about something that you're touting as medicine, right? Like, well, but I mean, you would have to eat a lot to kill yourself. Yeah. And that's true. But what we do know is that even though we think if you rub it on your skin, it won't hurt you.

We haven't been able to find a way to hurt yourself that way. If you inhale it, it seems to irritate airways. I mean, I'm not saying it's gonna kill you, but it's not great to inhale it. And what we have found is that people who eat it, and especially regular exposure to it, can cause nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea. It can cause specifically blue and green vomit. nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea.

It can cause specifically blue and green vomit. I found several people mentioned, which I kept trying to figure out like, why is it just blue? That's not the vomit of a healthy person. Yeah, it can cause some horrible vomit. It can over time cause you to become anemic. So I have a decreased amount of hemoglobin, which can cause a number of problems in your body.

There were several indications that maybe if you ate enough of it, you could have seizures. Oh, so. That's unfortunate. And then I thought this was really interesting. The, it can cause a specific rash on your body. If you eat it for long enough, again, I'm not saying like one ingestion does it, but like if you're gonna,

if you're gonna keep doing this fake medicine thing, it causes this really like bright red, the word that I kept fighting was beefy rash. Yikes. All over you. Um, and your skin can even peel off over time from exposure to it. Yeah, that's rough.

And this rash has occurred anywhere from the palm, soles, buttocks, and scrotum, as well as other places on your body. And then it can cause headaches and lethargy as well. To make you feel just tired. There is, now that in Indonesia, they actually warn of a risk of liver cancer from consuming too much borax.

Different countries have different restrictions on the amount of borax and food. There are actually some countries where it's not restricted as a food additive. So that like, I was reading about this. There are certain kinds of like caviar when they're imported to the US. They have to do things to them in order for us to be able to eat them because they don't meet our borax standard. So anyway, my point is,

just don't eat borax. I mean, there is absolutely no evidence that eating borax does anything positive. I have not a single study that I could find that showed that it would treat or cure literally anything. It doesn't decrease inflammation, whatever that means.

It doesn't detoxify whatever that means. Those two concepts as wellness people often push them are kind of fake. I'm not saying that toxins and inflammation are fake, but I'm saying that those wellness concepts are fake. So it doesn't do that. It doesn't treat arthritis or chronic pain or any other sort of chronic medical condition that is being difficult to manage

and therefore people are seeking alternative solutions. It doesn't do that. It will not help you lose weight except in the sense that it could poison you, I guess. And then when you're poisoned, you don't feel like eating much, but that's bad and unhealthy, please don't do that. Yes. And it could poison you, I guess. And then when you're poisoned, you don't feel like eating much, but that's bad and unhealthy. Please don't do that.

Yes. And it could harm you, even if tiny amounts of borax are safe to ingest. Like why? But no, there's no, I mean, there's lots of poisons out there that if you just ate a little, you wouldn't die. Are you saying?

But nobody is suggesting that you should eat a little. Just don't eat that. Are you saying that the dose in a sense, and I don't know what I'm here, makes the poison. No, I'm saying don't eat borax. Yeah, you're just saying don't eat borax. I'm just saying don't eat borax. I hope this goes away quickly.

I thought it was interesting on a side note. I saw a lot of younger people tick tocks who were making fun of specifically Gen X over this. This apparently is like our generation problem. Is it in a prank? Are the millennials doing a prank on us about Borax? They started and then we all did it. Well, I started wondering at first because you know how well they're comparing it to the

tide pods. You know how like people, they're really wearing all it to the tide pods. You know how like, people, they're really weren't all these people eating tide pods. You know how that was kind of fake. I'm not saying no one ever ate a tide pod. We get it. Yeah. And then I started worrying like,

is the Borax trend fake too? And then I found people on TikTok eating, like I watched them put Borax in their water and drink it. And I was like, well, no. But they are, they are like, honey, they're like people are age. Like this is not, we can't blame the kids for this one. This is, this, yeah, this is on us. But anyway, please don't eat borax. Please tell your friends, don't eat borax. No, I'm prompted. Just like random. Listen, I just want to wear a shirt around

now that says don't eat borax. Don't eat borax. That's going to do it for us for this episode. Thanks so much for listening.'s gonna do it for us for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks for the taxpayers for using their song medicines as the intro and outro program. And thanks to you for listening. We sure appreciate it. Until next time, my name is Justin McRoy.

I'm Sydney McRoy. And as always, don't jello hole it in your head. Alright! Maximumfun.org comedy and culture. Artist-owned? Audience supported.