Ionised water

Charged or ionised H+ and OH- atoms and molecules can be obtained by splitting the water molecule, by passing an electrical current. However it is easier to charge the dissolved minerals. Since the body functions through subtle electrical currents, the availability of charged atoms and molecules can help in health and healing. For example, when you have an injury, the injured cells’ electrical charge is disturbed and this initiates the healing process.

Negatively-charged ions also act like antioxidants, neutralising free-radicals and thus help in fighting disease, ageing, and cancer. Thus ionised water is often called “antioxidant water”.

Energised water

You have seen how energised water can improve its healing power through a change of its molecular structure. But how is water energised? Most water-treatment systems do this though FIR (far infrared) obtained from treated ceramics or other materials. It can also be energised by scalar-energised volcanic minerals or metals.

Finally, it can also be energised by sending life-force (qi, reiki or prana, etc) to it. While FIR and other measurable energy-forms are easily understood, the effects of scalar and qi-enhanced water can only be shown through innovative means.

Secrets of water

Dr Masaru Emoto is the eminent water-scientist who revealed to the world the “Secret Life of Water”. He showed though scientific methods that water not only has memory, but also emotions.

When frozen under controlled conditions, pure and polluted water formed different crystal patterns. Water that had pleasant words and prayers recited formed beautiful patterns, while water that got negative words formed ugly patterns.

Scalar and qi-energised water also formed exquisite patterns. Watching the crystals slowly forming, with the accompaniment of music, is an unforgettable experience. Dr Emoto will be giving his much-awaited lecture on more secrets about water in Kuala Lumpur on 3rd April 2010. You should not miss this experience.

Dr Amir Farid Isahak is a medical specialist who practises holistic, aesthetic and anti-ageing medicine. He is a qigong master and founder of SuperQigong. For further information, e-mail starhealth@thestar.com.my. The views expressed are those of the writer and readers are advised to always consult expert advice before undertaking any changes to their lifestyles. The Star does not give any warranty on accuracy, completeness, functionality, usefulness or other assurances as to the content appearing in this column. The Star disclaims all responsibility for any losses, damage to property or personal injury suffered directly or indirectly from reliance on such information.

In 2005, Kristopher Setchfield from the Natural Science Department at Vermont published a paper[13] that analyzed deeper motives regarding Emoto's study. In his paper, Kristopher writes,

"Unfortunately for his credibility with the scientific community, Dr. Emoto sells products based on his claims. For example, the products page of Emoto's Hado website is currently offering "geometrically perfect" "Indigo water" that is "highly charged hexagonally structured concentrate," and supposedly creates "structured water" that is "more easily assimilated at the cellular level" for $35 for an eight-ounce bottle. Without providing scientific research references for the allegedly amazing qualities of his Indigo Water, Emoto's commercial venture calls to mind ethical concerns regarding his intent and motivation—questions that would not be present if any scientist had published research supporting his claims."

Here, in a nutshell, are a few basic facts that I believe anyone with a solid background in chemistry or physiology would concur with:

"Ionized water" is nothing more than sales fiction; the term is meaningless to chemists.

Pure water (that is, water containing no dissolved ions) is too unconductive to undergo signficant electrolysis by "water ionizer" devices.

Pure water can never be alkaline or acidic, nor can it be made so by electrolysis. Alkaline water must contain metallic ions of some kind — most commonly, sodium, calcium or magnesium.

The idea that one must consume alkaline water to neutralize the effects of acidic foods is ridiculous; we get rid of excess acid by exhaling carbon dioxide.

If you do drink alkaline water, its alkalinity is quickly removed by the highly acidic gastric fluid in the stomach.

Uptake of water occurs mainly in the intestine, not in the stomach. But when stomach contents enter the intestine, they are neutralized and made alkaline by the pancreatic secretions — so
all the water you drink eventually becomes alkaline anyway.

The claims about the health benefits of drinking alkaline water are not supported by credible scientific evidence.

There is nothing wrong with drinking slightly acidic waters such as rainwater. "Body pH" is a meaningless concept; different parts of the body (and even of individual cells) can have widely different pH values. The pH of drinking water has zero effect on that of the blood or of the body's cells.

If you really want to de-acidify your stomach (at the possible cost of interfering with protein digestion), why spend hundreds of dollars for an electrolysis device when you can take calcium-magnesium pills, Alka-Seltzer or Milk of Magnesia?

Electrolysis devices are generally worthless for treating water for health enhancement, removal of common impurities, disinfection, and scale control. Claims that "ionized" waters are antioxidants are untrue; hypochlorites (present in most such waters) are in fact oxidizing agents.

Published : March 28 2010

Here's an example of bunk science in a mainstream newspaper.
http://thestar.com.my/health/story.asp?fil...3910&sec=health

No evidence, lots of scientific jargon to fool the foolish and using the example of a questionable scientist.

The final few paragraphs are a paragon of bunk
This is the rubbish The Star publishes. I think the arguments for these scalar energy and energised water and Dr Emoto has been thoroughly debunked. But if you would like to give you take, please do. Anyone with actual knowledge on this topic please contribute. This article was published today in the Health section of The Star
A little info on wikipedia on Emoto:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masaru_Emoto
And on Ionised water:
http://www.chem1.com/CQ/ionbunk.html
PS : Also the disclaimer at the bottom of the article is funny. Why bother inviting an 'expert' to write about something? They might as well copy and paste the thousands of rubbish articles on the net. It seems to me the health section of the Star is more about the advertisement for health products that have no scientific evidence on their effectiveness. The articles are biased and written solely for the purpose of selling the product related to it.

MLM scheme like the diamond water filter scandal ?

Flower power

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.

Romeo And Juliet

THE famous line about the rose found in Romeo And Juliet, one of William Shakepeare’s famous plays, encapsulates the central struggle and tragedy of the entire play.

Obviously, the rose also means a world of significance to Dr Jean-Louis Sebagh, who has chosen the flower to be his principal ingredient for his latest serum, Rose de Vie.

Rather than just a mere “basecoat” for your moisturiser, Rose de Vie (which means rose of life in French) is presented as a silky serum with a non-greasy texture that leaves a protective, non-comedogenic, non-occlusive film that is said to restore the skin’s suppleness and elasticity, whilst maintaining its healthy condition.

It combines cutting-edge science with the purest ingredients – Symcalmin, an anti-inflammatory, anti-irritant and antihistamine bio-tech ingredient; Delta-tocopherol, a powerful anti-oxidant; and an organic virgin rose muscat oil, which replenishes and hydrates the skin with Omega 3, vitamin E and LNST98, a protective moisturiser for mature, dry skin, providing a high lipidic content for a youthful, healthy glowing skin.

Thanks to its anti-ageing and anti-oxidant properties, it also helps to reduce redness, and protects and smoothes the skin.


Created by Dr Sebagh, who has years of experience as a cosmetic surgeon and extensive knowledge of the latest anti-ageing technlogy, Rose de Vie is the latest addition to his cosmeceutical skincare line.

It is ideal for dry, mature or very sensitive skin, and is claimed to also shorten the post-operative healing process and following laser treatment.

Going beyond its basic role, its versatility as a serum makes it a crucial skincare companion, regardless whether it’s used on its own or mixed with your moisturiser, sun block or night cream.

And so, how does Rose de Vie fit into your skincare regimen, you ask? Well, it can be applied after your usual cleaning routine and massaged into the face, neck and décolleté, or it can be blended with Dr Sebagh Supreme Maintenance or Vitamin C Powder Cream. It can be used morning and/or night under a moisturiser, or just a few weeks at a time as an occasional treatment (for example, during the dry winter months or when your skin’s hydration needs a boost), or specifically as an after-laser or chemical peel treatment to aid the healing process.

Rose de Vie retails at RM750 (30ml) and is available at Suria KLCC and Bangsar Village II, KL.

shouldn't it be spelled skeptics?

Now to keep things interesting, I think having a weekly discussion(or monthly, depends on the contribution on these parts of the forum) on a local news/issue(based in Malaysia or maybe Singapore) that border on the woowoo/psuedoscience/ you know the drill rubbish. I think we'd find a lot of topics that we can discuss about(no real centrality, any domain of knowledge is fair game).

For example a news piece that reports on biorhythm pendants for instance(I've not read any news piece on this, this is just an example).

So we could move on to new topics as new things pop up and to keep things interesting. It has to be local.
Please give suggestions on topics, or format, anything you think would benefit the community here.
PS : I could get this thread pinned if I find enough response to this. I'm looking for feedback first.

Is this still on? I think it'll be an interesting section.

A lot of these things like biorythm pendants and salt lamps are merely products of MLM schemes. I don't think their even organizers believe they work but they need a product to legitimize a shady business. Its so easy to rip off gullible people. Just assign some miracle powers to the product and have a westerner say something about it.

If LYN doesn't have a dedicated thread for scam alerts for consumer products, it might be a good time to start one.

Btw, skepticism is a big area because you can question pretty much everything, including faith. Do you propose to limit it to the pseudoscience behind dodgy products only?

Wanted: Political capital and will to solve problems

June 14, 2010

JUNE 14 — There is mutual frustration between those in government and those who identify themselves as ordinary citizens in Malaysia. The frustration originates from the incapability of both to understand the other side’s challenges. This makes the gears of a huge machine — the government — stuck. It needs to work again.

The period immediately after the March 8, 2008 was supposed to be an opportunity for major reforms. The machine was supposed to work again after years of abuse that exhausted its credibility. The filters were supposed to have been washed, even if partly. Rusted wheels replaced. The joints, oiled.
Grab a Celcom Blue Bear™ and stand to walk away with RM10,000!

That was not enough, apparently. Scepticism against the government — or perhaps more generally, against the state — not only persists but grows. It has grown so much that it is disconnecting the government from the people, and the people from the government. It is threatening the idea that the government is the people, and the people are the government.

Given the record of the Barisan Nasional federal government, however, that scepticism is justified. In fact, scepticism against the state is a good thing to have. It is the first line of defence against tyranny.

Yet, scepticism is healthy only up to a certain dose. If there is too much scepticism, the central functions of the state cannot be carried out. Too much scepticism erodes the reason for a state. And there are signs that scepticism has become a monster in Malaysia, devouring too many regardless of agenda.

In the current political and economic climate, that scepticism has grown to a point that no reform can take place. The size of government is big so that it needs to be cut down so that there is less opportunity to repeat abuses of the past. Unfortunately, efforts to reduce it and put public finance in order are widely seen by many as a deliberate attempt to short-change citizens.

The problem of a big government is very real. Its effects on individuals and society are observable. Its growth over the years in Malaysia is something that cannot be missed. The Abdullah administration committed gross gluttony while the supposed benefits of big government were unseen. Something has to be done now, but nothing moves. Loud popular opposition stands in the way.

Part of the reason is that the challenges associated with big government are far removed from the ground. Public finance, for instance, means little to men and women on the streets. Individuals do not directly face it and hence, they do not see it as problems to solve, at least not soon.

Incapability to see it does not mean all is fine and dandy. The tragedy is this: Efforts to solve it inflicts relatively immediate pain while its benefits will only come relatively later. Furthermore, benefactors of big government will obviously defend it. Coupled with those is the fact that most of us enjoy the idea of instant gratification, so the loud popular opposition is not a surprise.

In justifying their opposition to initiatives to cut the size of government, they do raise very pertinent questions. What about corruption, what about leakage and what about inefficiency in the public sector? These are among the questions many have asked. Why should we pay for their excesses?

Recent allegation by the civil servants’ union, Cuepacs, that nearly half of civil servants in the country were suspected to be involved in graft does not instil confidence. The size of the civil service suggests that the government is uninterested in cutting down its expenditure seriously. Purchases of overpriced defence equipments suggest unwise spending. The investigation of the Port Klang Free Zone (PKFZ) is going unsatisfactorily, if there is any progress at all. Recent large losses of enterprises linked to the government exacerbate the image of the government of the day as incompetent.

Slammed with the idea of a goods and services tax along with the withdrawal of subsidies, rightly or wrongly, taxpayers get the perception that they are picking up the tab for somebody else’s mistake. As far as critics are concerned, the government is swimming in excesses, disconnected from the concerns of the masses.

The boilerplate answer to this two-way disconnect is commitment to democracy: Voters should till the land. Get a completely new captain and crew to staff the bridge.

It is an attractive solution as it removes one disconnect. As with any boilerplate argument however, it is insufficient. A libertarian fear revolves around this: Such a democratic solution solves only one part of the equation. It may build the trust that is required to run the machine smoothly again. What it may fail to do is to address the problem of big government.

The alternative in the form of Pakatan Rakyat has not demonstrated their grasp of the issue. They are happy with mere populism so far, such as promises of free water and bigger subsidies.

They really cannot be blamed for that. It is only expected. The truth is that Pakatan Rakyat needs to run a populist campaign to enter Putrajaya.

That does not negate the fact that economic populist policy tends to run a country down. That does not negate the fact that unpopular moves are required to solve the problems. Clearly, political capital is required to run unpopular policy.

But who has the political will? Who has the political capital?

Putrajaya, so far, lacks at least one of them.

* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.

JULY 20 — Outside of politics, current affairs, sports and business, the last few days have also seen a couple of interesting, almost “esoteric”, news pieces in our print and online dailies.

In the Dewan Rakyat, it was disclosed that the Health Ministry has developed a standard for homeopathic medical studies. Other than the sad fact that the ministry is now very much an accommodationist with regards to alternative medicine (note to the ministry: if a treatment works, it would just be called medicine), one can only hope that it covers trauma and A&E as well because that would certainly make it a world’s first.

Furthermore, the ministry also said it would now entertain homeopathy research allocation requests — definitely a world’s first among government ministries.

Certainly, if any research is to be done on homeopathy, it has to be related to proving its efficacy, not in furthering a discipline whose principles have remained unchanged since Samuel Hahnemann first proposed the “Law of Similars” in 1796, before the Germ Theory of Disease became a cornerstone of modern medicine.

Then on Sunday, an Indian astrologist declared that Malaysia is “very blessed” thanks to its auspicious (notorious word, that) geo-location in relation to the solar system. Pluto’s fairly recent non-planet status in astronomy is not a deal breaker, we can safely assume.

The same seer also said that Malaysia’s future lay in “space research” and that our airspace would be much in demand for other nation’s prototype space inventions due to our 12-hour time difference with Nasa. How exactly that factoid accounted for a favourable review was not immediately disclosed.

Also, the Majlis Ulema Indonesia (MUI) issued a fatwa overriding its earlier March edict that “rectifies” the nation’s qiblat or compass direction facing Mecca. Interesting, considering the spherical nature of our planet should be enough to indicate that one can’t face straight at anything beyond the curvature of the Earth — except perhaps the International Space Station on a good day.

Or, that to be strictly two-dimensional about it once and for all, the authorities could just incorporate inch-perfect global positioning system (GPS) co-ordinates in a fatwa so every other co-ordinate on Earth can easily point to a no-line-of-sight straight line to the Masjidil Haram.

Yup, it’s never a dull moment for people who satiate their news and information gathering habit using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and other Internet-enabled methods of collection available to the super-connected in this day and age.

But it wasn’t just all that. We also had “businessman” Raja Noor Jan Shah Raja Tuan Shah emerge again since his 2005 first-round stunt to renew his claim to the Malacca throne; this time seeking the recognition of the Conference of Malay Rulers ahead of the 500th anniversary of the Portuguese invasion in August.

Great public relations timing, it must be said.

And to top it all off, apparently two Persian cats tragically died in a Penang apartment blaze. Their charred carcasses were discovered by firemen who “took three minutes” to put out the fire on Friday evening.

The local Twitterverse — or should I say, TwitterJaya — certainly erupted with disdain and ridicule at the last two news items, with Twitteratis questioning just how slow a news day it must have been.

Don’t get me wrong. Just like many of you, I’m fully behind the exercise of putting all manner of information out there and letting people sort out their own wheat from chaff.

After all, one man’s meat is another man’s poison.

But in the interest of preserving some degree of incredulity and not to mention quality, there must be types of information that just shouldn’t be classified or treated as serious by our news aggregators and editorial decision-makers unless it’s tabloid appeal they’re gunning for.

Like it or not, the news, because it still continues to bestow clout and credibility on information, can also give false legitimacy when none may in fact be deserved.

It’s bad enough that propaganda does pretty much the same thing — and we certainly had a good dose of it when the government subsidies for gas, petrol and sugar were relaxed last week (see, even I’m doing it here) — but when even questionable disciplines and practices are given equal time and respect in the interest of “fairness,” we’ve got a something akin to a runaway train effect.

Indeed, it was said that the scholars during the time when the Gutenberg press was invented in the 15th century also worried that mass printing was going to mean that people could start printing all manner of stuff and that false information would be the norm.

In light of that argument, I’d take the tragic death of the two Persian cats in a condominium fire in Penang and the royal lineage claims story as legitimate news — not in the least because of readership interest value mind you; but at the most because both are based on fact.

KUALA LUMPUR, 13 JULY, 2010: The Health Ministry has developed a standard for homeopathic medical studies to serve as a guideline to ensure its practise is safe and effective, the Dewan Rakyat was told today.

The standard was developed by the ministry in collaboration with public institutions of higher learning, the Malaysian Qualifications Agency and the Malaysian Homeopathic Medical Council, Health Minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai said.

"The ministry's resolve in enhancing the quality of homeopathic medical studies has been proven when the Cyberjaya University College of Medical Sciences started to offer a degree in homeopathy in 2009," he said in reply to Datuk Kamarul Baharin Abbas (PKR-Telok Kemang).

Kamarul Baharin wanted to know the steps taken to promote homeopathy as well as the provision of research facilities and guidelines.

Liow said that the ministry had not provided any special allocation to homeopathy practitioners to carry out research.

Those interested to do research can download the application form from www.nih.gov.my, he said.

Liow also said that homeopathic medicine should be registered under the Control of Drugs and Cosmetic Regulations 1984 and that to date, 94 homeopathic products had been registered with the Drug Control Authority.

The procedure to register homeopathic products was similar to that of other traditional products because the guideline for the registration of homeopathic medicine was still being formulated, he added.

Liow also said that the Traditional and Complementary Medicines Bill would be table in the Dewan Rakyat in the near future to facilitate the registration process.

So rather than an unbiased research on Homeopathy, the Ministry is mainly basing its decision on the fact that a College is offering degree on the subject? Can anyone smell a case of bribery and collusion here?