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A couple of weeks ago, Jann Bellamy wrote about “legislative alchemy” in the new year, in which CAM mischief works its way into state legislatures. Specifically, she mentioned the case of legislators in Vermont trying to declare in law that naturopaths are primary care physicians, who can serve as a patient’s medical home without supervision by real doctors.

Rosemary Jacobs, whose life was altered irrevocably when she developed agyria due to colloidal silver noticed another aspect of this new proposed law:

I recently learned that Vermont licenses naturopaths, NDs, as physicians and that they have a state sanctioned formulary, a list of drugs they can prescribe and administer to patients. To my horror, the 2009 formulary includes “colloidal silver preparations” to treat eye infections and “silver” which they can administer intravenously.

http://www.vtprofessionals.org/opr1/naturopaths/info/Naturopathic Physician Formulary 20091211.pdf [pdf download] I was horrified because of the danger this poses to patients, the incredible ignorance it shows on the part of naturopaths, and because NDs had, without my knowledge, been licensed in Vermont to administer prescription drugs and other strange substances like silver and tin, do physical exams and order the same diagnostic tests that MDs order. How had this happened without my knowledge? I have been following alternative medicine for 15 years and warning people about the danger of ingesting silver, an alternative “remedy”, because I don’t want anyone else disfigured by it like I was over 50 years ago. Silver drugs were used by medical doctors before the advent of antibiotics. Although they didn’t work, they permanently turned many people blue and gray. The condition is called argyria. It was formerly common, and is well documented and understood by scientists. If NDs had known as much about medicine as I, an educated consumer, do, they would have searched the medical literature before including anything in their formulary. If they had done that, they would have seen that: there are no studies showing that ingesting silver in any form or amount offers benefits; colloidal silver does not treat eye infections; taking silver internally or putting it in your eye can result in permanent discoloration.

Colloidal silver is nonsense. There’s no evidence that it is good for anything. Rosemary also revealed to me something I didn’t know before, namely that there’s another woo-friendly Senator that I didn’t really know about: Bernie Sanders, who, according to her, helped naturopaths become players in the medical marketplace.