FEEDBACK is indebted to denizens of the bulletin board for alerting us to a website that must surely be of benefit to all humanity. Go to and you will find it promises a method by which “migraine headaches, bronchitis, diseased teeth, arterio thrombosis, chronic blood disorders such as leukemia, arthritis and related illnesses, neuro physiological paralysis, eczema, gastro enteritis, peritonitis, heart disease, kidney disease, meningitis, and women’s hormonal disorders are completely eliminated from the organism”.
What could be better? Quite a lot, apparently, for it further claims that “in terminal diseases such as cancer, Aids and chronic infections this treatment method has been shown to successfully replace all others”. Users “could potentially live healthy to be 140 to 150 years old”.
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And what could this treatment method be? It consists of swishing cold-pressed sunflower or sesame oil in the mouth: “In the morning before breakfast on an empty stomach you take one tablespoon… move oil slowly in the mouth as rinsing or swishing… for fifteen to twenty minutes.” You may not be surprised to read that when “Dr. F. Karach, M.D., presented a paper before the All-Ukrainian Association” (of what, they do not say) the “results of this therapy invoked astonishment and doubt”.
“Joaquim Figueredo notes that the principal team leader of the Stability and Calibration group at UK-based pharmaceuticals company Bodycote Health Sciences is none other than Suzanne Measures”
An Urban75 user going by the name of “fridgemagnet” asks: “Can I just eat an enormous fried breakfast every day instead?” Feedback isn’t sure, for while the Oilpulling site warns: “The oil must not be swallowed, for it has become toxic,” it later reassures us that “inadvertently if you swallow there is nothing to worry. It will go out through faeces.”
The biggest puzzle is why the site exists at all. It can hardly be there to make money. It isn’t selling anything and the Google Ads it runs can’t generate much income. Do the site’s owners – who appear to live in the state of Illinois – seek martyrdom rather than riches, like that conferred upon sometime psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, whose supporters say he was hounded to death by the medical establishment for claiming he could cure cancer?
Whatever. Thanks, people of Urban75. We owe you a pint, not necessarily of sunflower oil.
READER Robert Tisserand has not been impressed by the lifespan of supposedly eco-friendly domestic light bulbs. The first one he bought a year ago lasted a mere two months, and many more have bitten the dust since. So he was delighted to see recently, in a hardware store, a Feit Electric Ecobulb that proclaims it “Lasts 7 Years Guaranteed”.
Then he noticed, in much smaller print, the words “up to”. So his new purchase is likely to fail at some point between now and 2015, and that point could be in just a week’s time. Very impressive.
ON THE BBC’s online news pages there is a section showing the “most emailed” stories from the site. Sometimes, Chris McManus noticed, the stories listed are months or years out of date. On 13 July this year, when McManus became aware of this, one of the most popular stories was one from 2003 about dog safety.
McManus guessed that this list must be based on very small numbers, so he did a little experiment in which he indulged in the vanity of emailing himself five times with , also from 2003, about a paper he wrote that won the Aventis prize. This was enough to put the story straight up to fourth position on the list.
“As with all rankings,” McManus points out, “these things can be very dubious with small numbers.” He goes on to describe a way people could take advantage of this with a technical fix that would keep their page of choice permanently at the top of the BBC list. But he concludes: “Of course, Feedback wouldn’t even think of suggesting that, I’m sure.” So we won’t.
THE British Computer Society sent Dot Graham a reminder that her membership was about to expire. Nothing unusual in that, of course, were it not that she has life membership of the society.
“Does the BCS know something about my life expectancy that I should be aware of?” she writes. This is, however, the second time this has happened, “and I didn’t die last time, so I am hopef…”
FINALLY, the bottle of St Ives Skin Firming body lotion that Chris Aubrey-Smith photographed for us has the slogan “31 per cent more firmness” emblazoned across it.
Aubrey-Smith asks if we can help identify the scale of measurement on which this claim is based. We can’t, but hope readers might. As Aubrey-Smith points out, it might have applications in other fields.
