Following on from the health benefits of radon mines...

[spudtater]

"Radio-activity is neither a drug nor medicine. It is an element of nature—and therefore accepted as harmoniously in the body as sunlight, fresh air, or the vitamins in foods, and is of like importance."

"it is but common sense to restore it to water that has lost it just as we restore oxygen to a stuffy room by opening a window"

"One should drink water from the REVIGATOR at all times and at least eight full glasses per day."

It's the Revigator; a revolutionary health product from the 1920s. It's just a gallon-sized water jar, really... only it's lined with a thick layer of uranium ore. The "vigor gas" it adds to water is radon, a product of uranium decay.

Here's a PDF file of the leaflet quoted above. It's funny because it's so sincere. And, as its ex-owner points out, it does read disturbingly like the "alternative medicine" leaflets of the present.

Comments

[dsky.livejournal.com]

I guess you could argue that it's a form of natural selection...

And similar things are still happening today:

"Dr James E Johnson MD - because Americans always manage to make doctors sound like soap stars - has had his licence revoked after a string of increasingly bizarre and dangerous attempts to cure what he believed was a yeast infection. He started with garlic but his patient was in a hurry and so he decided to speed things along by administering hydrogen peroxide, a popular pseudoscientific therapy.

On this occasion the hydrogen peroxide was given intravenously, through a peripherally-inserted central catheter into a vein in her arm, travelled all the way up through her armpit and on into her chest where it sat snugly next to her heart. After a few “treatments” her arm became red and painful, and she became dizzy with a headache. Johnson diagnosed a “mini-stroke” and, like a good complementary therapist, initiated intramusucular vitamin C injections. The injection site for these became red and inflamed but instead of using antibiotics which, he told his patient, were “incompatible” with hydgrogen peroxide, he prescribed charcoal poultice compresses. With painful inevitability, things deteriorated further."

[kalorlo.livejournal.com]

*boggle* And here I thought the non-medical treatment for yeast infections was bio yoghurt. Oh, sorry, that probably comes under old wives' treatments and isn't fancy-sounding enough for a doctor...

[dsky.livejournal.com]

I swear, that web-site is at the same time the funniest and most depressing thing I have ever read.

[spudtater.livejournal.com]

That's just mad!