These days it's a popular sentiment that big pharma is out to get us. What if they don't want to cure anybody? What if they want to keep us sick, so they can sell us pills that only treat the symptoms? How insidious that would be! Which is what makes it such a compelling narrative that many can't help but suspect is true, regardless of the evidence.
This is what has led regular people across the country to attempt their own home remedies, believing that natural, spiritual alternatives to western medicine are superior. Shivambu is an example of this. It's a school of thought in alternative medicine that human urine has medicinal properties.
Practitioners of Shivambu drink their own urine, or rub it on their gums. Some also inject it into their bloodstream. You read that right! They use syringes to inject their own urine into their veins. These are the same people who believe vaccines are poison. They won't allow vaccines to be injected, but they will inject themselves with their own pee (often aged for several months).
It doesn't take much to convince these people to do all manner of stupid things. You just say you share their belief that western medicine is evil, and offer to sell them something "natural" and "holistic" to cure whatever ails them. The main difference between what you're selling and what big pharma sells is that your remedy never underwent any trials before being approved for human use.
Colloidal silver is another alternative remedy many swear by. It was an antibiotic used in antiquity for cleaning wounds, but today it's ingested by people who promote it as a cure-all for any ailment. The problem? If you ingest enough colloidal silver your skin will turn a greyish blue...permanently.
That's right. Once the discoloration has occurred, you can limit it if you stop ingesting colloidal silver, but it's not reversible. You get to look like a Smurf, or a low budget N'avi/Andorian cosplayer for the rest of your life. It's a highly visible outward mark of stupidity telling everybody that you fell for an alternative medicine fraud, and paid the price.
That's not the steepest price you can pay for deciding you know better than qualified doctors, however. There exists a folk remedy for cancerous growths called "black salve". In fact it's incredibly toxic and even a tiny amount applied to your skin will cause a spreading necrosis which eventually results in the dead tissue either rotting away or having to be surgically removed:
The first case of necrosis from black salve dates back to 1954, but it still happens in the modern era. The woman in that link applied some black salve to spots on the tip of her nose and her forehead. The result? Over the next few days, cell death spread outward from the points of application, eventually requiring the end of her nose to be amputated.
In such cases, usually the disfigurement is rectified with plastic surgery. I wonder if these people learned their lesson, though? Any old bullshit you read on Natural News or from David Avocado Wolf, or Dr. Oz on talk shows like the Oprah Winfrey Show is not even equivalent to actual scientific medicine, much less superior to it.
Playing doctor can have severe, lifelong consequences. Regular people with no medical training or education beyond new age blogs and Youtube videos, larping as "shamanistic healers" more often than not reap those consequences not only for themselves, but also for their children.
Stay Healthy!