Bad Purchase posted:

oh god, my dad has been pushing the boron miracle cure poo poo on anyone who will listen for the past 4 or 5 years. he and my mom both put borax, the cleaning product, in their water and drink it every day to "treat [their] boron deficiency". it's really weird. so far my dad has claimed it cured all sorts of ailments that he never even mentioned having before he started drinking borax, like arthritis. he also claims it makes him feel younger. there's really no end to what he'll attribute to boron. for example, he had a very high score on a calcium test recently, which generally indicates a lot of arterial buildup (in short, atherosclerosis/heart disease), which he brushed off as a harmless side effect of taking boron. in fact, he even claimed it was good... something about the high calcium in his bloodwork meant that the boron was cleaning his arterial walls and shedding it into his bloodstream, so it's actually evidence of healing. he also claimed that he had a "tooth split" where one of his molars fractured due to new growth of some kind in the middle causing the tooth to split and that his dentist had "never seen anything like it". clearly a sign of boron at work! the only thing he won't attribute to it are the new GI/inflammation issues he's been having in the past few years. he can't think of any reason why drinking powdered floor cleaner might be related.

my dad isn't exactly stupid, but he's definitely an idiot. he's got a phd (physics), but he believes climate change is a hoax. he believes that coronavirus is simultaneously a hoax, a man-made virus, and that he already had it in early december when he got sick during flu season. anyway, i tried to figure out whether there was anything to his boron craze when it started, and he linked me a few articles. as far as i could tell back then, they all traced back to a single sketchy paper by an australian doctor. i wasn't able to uncover any large body of evidence or followups. that doesn't necessarily mean that boron deficiency isn't a real issue or that supplementing it could help with some conditions, but the leap of faith required to go from that paper to drinking floor cleaner is too much for me.

i haven't followed up with the science at all in recent years. who knows, maybe there's something to it. maybe someone will win a nobel prize for proving that we all need to supplement boron someday. but for now, i'm sticking with my leading indicator, which is that the more my dad posts about something on nextdoor, the less likely it is to be true.

welp, that's my boron story for this dying gay forum.