Javier’s skepticism was shaped by a similar experience. It started during high school. He had always been a rowdy kid, playing sports to keep his energy in check, but in his sophomore year, Javier's doctors and mom decided his hyperactivity needed to be addressed medically. He ended up on a combination of four psychoactive drugs. The side effects were disastrous: He lost 30 pounds, became depressed, and suffered narcoleptic paralysis—waking up without being able to move his body. “It scared the crap out of me,” he says.

Javier is now 36 years old and living in Hartford, Connecticut, where he keeps up a hodgepodge of odd jobs, usually as a substitute teacher or musician. To fill the gaps between work, and for company during his long nights (he’s a serious night owl), he listens to the radio. Local shows sometimes, but also a lot of Infowars, his source for political and medical advice. It was during one of his late-night radio sessions that Javier first started hearing ads for colloidal silver.

When a bad flu was going around a few years ago, most of Javier’s friends who got sick ended up taking antibiotics. Javier generally refuses to take antibiotics, so he tried colloidal silver instead. He took it every day, doling out an entire bottle until he was healthy, and he believed he got better faster than his friends. Now he takes it when he has a stomachache or if he thinks he was exposed to something while teaching. “You see what works for you,” he says. “In my experience this works.”

Blossom—who has a very different media diet—also keeps colloidal silver handy. She mostly uses it for cuts and scrapes on herself and her dog. “It works incredibly effectively and quickly,” she says. “I've been using it for years.” Like Javier, she thinks the most important thing she can do for her health isn’t to heed the FDA’s warnings but to trust her instincts and her own research. “I don’t subscribe to what the FDA says, nor do I subscribe to what the medical community says, generally,” Blossom says. “I don’t think they are pure in their intentions.”

“The pharmaceutical industries have to raise profit,” Javier says. “So they’ll do anything they can to increase profit, and if that means suppressing information … I'm not going to say lie, but there have been a lot of false things.” Blossom makes the same argument: “The pharma companies' interests are in money, not at all in healing people. It’s a business.”

To many, Blossom and Javier will sound like conspiracy-minded cranks. But Sanford Newmark, medical director of the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, says paranoia about pharmaceutical companies is “not entirely misplaced.” Pharmaceutical companies “do have undue influence over both doctors and the FDA,” he says, pointing to reports of corrupt professors at major institutions receiving kickbacks from Big Pharma and drug companies that publish the results of only the most favorable drug trials. “You can't assume that that's not going to affect how people will see things,” Newmark says.

The Osher Center offers alternative treatments, like acupuncture and meditation, to patients at UCSF. Some are people like Blossom and Javier, cynical about the motives behind their doctor’s prescriptions, but others come because there is no drug that will fix them, or because they don’t like the side effects of what they’re offered. Acupuncture and meditation are treatments that made their way into Western medicine largely via the New Age fringe and have now proven themselves effective enough to be offered at one of the nation’s leading medical institutions.