When 15-year-old Rhys Morgan was diagnosed with Crohn's disease a few months ago he turned to the internet for help, and came across the Crohn's Disease Forum, a website offering support to patients. "I was looking for a support forum, a community of people with same illness as me and some on the same meds as me."

He followed the site for a while and noticed a disturbing undercurrent of people trying to push alternative medicines to members. One product in particular was called Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS), and its website claimed it cured cancer, Aids, malaria, and basically most things short of actual death.

Curious to know more about it, Rhys decided to Google it, and came across the following US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warning:

"The product, when used as directed, produces an industrial bleach that can cause serious harm to health. The product instructs consumers to mix the 28 percent sodium chlorite solution with an acid such as citrus juice. This mixture produces chlorine dioxide, a potent bleach used for stripping textiles and industrial water treatment. High oral doses of this bleach, such as those recommended in the labeling, can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and symptoms of severe dehydration."

In other words, MMS is extremely nasty stuff, and the medical advice given is that anyone who has this product should stop using it immediately and throw it away. In Canada it was banned after causing a life-threatening reaction.

Intrigued, Rhys returned to the MMS website and found some helpful instructions: "Basically, after making it up, you take a few drops of it. You judge if you're getting better by how nauseous you feel after taking it. Seriously."

Seriously.

The inventor and chief advocate of MMS turns out to be one Jim Humble, a man who neatly contradicts the theory of nominative determinism pretty much every time he speaks. In a video transcribed and commented on by blogger Noodlemaz , he declares "I developed a technique for healing by touch," before going on to compare himself favourably to Jesus ("What was it that Jesus Christ did first of all, always? He healed the sick. That is what we will be doing but there is a lot more to it than that.")

In the MMS newsletter (Straight Talk with Jim Humble) he outlines an innovative strategy that will allow him to spread his medical ideas across the world while evading any government interference – setting up a church:

"Look at the Catholics. Their priests have been molesting women and children for centuries and the governments have not been able to stop it. If handled properly a church can protect us from vaccinations that we don't want, from forced insurance, and from many things that a government might want to use to oppress us."

I'll give him some credit, it takes a lot of imagination to look at the Catholic church's handling of child abuse and see it as a useful example of how to run your own affairs.

How much damage can this guy do? He claims to have "treated" 100,000 victims of malaria in Africa, across Uganda, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Malawi, but comments in the video that:

"A couple of missionaries decided I was evil and told all the missionaries in the area ... so that sort of slowed things down ... They quit using the MMS. People didn't get treated."

Whoever those missionaries are they should be awarded a medal. The figure of 100,000 people could be an exaggeration, but it's terrifying to imagine how many Africans may have been subjected to this brutality.

Most shocking, though, are his descriptions of dealing with cancer patients in Mexico and elsewhere:

"We gotta give him just enough [industrial bleaching agent] that he don't get sick but he's on the edge of getting sick! So we've got to keep him just on the very edge and therefore it's pretty intense for cancer, he needs to take it 4/5 times a day, small amounts instead of a big batch."

The case studies he presents are patients with pancreatic and lung cancer, and for some of them he claims to have followed this methodology for weeks on end. This isn't treatment, it is sustained torture. I can't even begin to imagine what his victims have gone through.

There's much more to this story than I have space to tell you here, and for a fuller picture I'd recommend these two recent link roundups from the brilliant Noodlemaz:

http://noodlemaz.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/link-roundup-bleachgate/ http://noodlemaz.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/bleachgate-link-roundup-2nd-and-last/.

Rhys and others have been campaigning hard to have this menace dealt with in Britain, documenting those selling MMS and reporting them to the relevant authorities. Rhys is a brilliant kid, and if any of his teachers read this, he deserves the highest possible recognition from his school, Kings Monkton in Cardiff, and local community for his willingness to ask intelligent and challenging questions, and his achievements in bringing this to wider public attention.

In the meantime, Jim Humble and his followers are free to roam the developing world, visiting the sick, the desperate and the dying, and making them sip water treatment chemicals for days or weeks on end. And that should make us all unspeakably angry.

• This article was amended on 21 September 2010. The original referred to Miracle Mineral Solutions (MMS). This has been corrected.