Right-wing personality Candace Owens is urging her fans to try a quack medical treatment known to turn users’ skin blue.
In an Instagram video posted Thursday, Owens praised the use of colloidal silver as a daily supplement, a treatment that has no legitimate medical uses and poses a lot of health risks.
“Yes, colloidal silver!” Owens said in the video. “I take colloidal silver every day, I love colloidal silver. This is a great one. It’s another thing people probably know nothing about.”
While Owens and others have praised the preventive use of colloidal silver as a way to ward off disease, colloidal silver has no valid medical purpose and poses several potential dangers. In extreme cases, colloidal silver can cause seizures or organ problems, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Owens did not respond to a request for comment.
But colloidal silver’s most well-known side effect is argyria—a condition that causes users’ skin to usually turn a permanently bluish-gray color. Despite those risks, colloidal silver has sometimes been embraced by political outsiders, with some libertarians seeking treatments for various ailments outside the medical system. For example, Montana Libertarian politician Stan Jones turned his skin blue by consuming colloidal silver.
Owens laid out her colloidal silver diet in a follow-up Instagram comment asking for more information about colloidal silver, claiming she “spoonful a day” in a post and “when I I’m sick” previously highlighted by liberal activist William Leggett.
Depending on the concentration of the silver solution, one teaspoon of silver a day may be enough to cause argyria. According to medical research, a 56-year-old man who took one teaspoon daily for “allergy and cold medicine” noticed that his nails were turning blue.
Owens isn’t the only far-right who endorses silver as a fringe medical cure. In 2020, the FDA warned InfoWars chief Alex Jones to stop promising that silver toothpaste and other silver products sold on his website could prevent or treat the coronavirus.
Owens’ colloidal pro-Silver video comes days after a disastrous interview where Owens, who works for conservative commentator Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire, interviewed former President Donald Trump. In a surprise move, Trump shrugged off Owens’ criticism of coronavirus vaccines, praising the results of the vaccines as “very good”.
In the same video in which he praised colloidal silver, Owens downplayed Trump’s support for vaccines, claiming that Trump is “too old” to read anti-vaccine information on the Internet. She attacked vaccination more broadly, claiming, among other things, that the “real evil” is behind tetanus shots.
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