Colloidal Silver is an incredible remedy and FREE!

First of all, my qualifications, so you can judge my credibility. I am not a professional scientist. I am a student of biology and rhetoric at Willamette University. I make a habit of studying pseudoscience (superstition, propaganda, and other nonsense that masquerades as science) and debunking it. I am not, nor do I ever intend to be, associated with the FDA or big pharma. I largely hold big pharma in contempt for price gouging and falsification of data and the FDA for failing to rigorously test new medicines. Now, on to the substance of the debate. I concede a single point of yours: silver is capable of killing bacteria. In fact, silver nitrate (not colloidal silver) is still used in neonatal centers to prevent eye infection. Silver can interfere with certain pathways that bacteria use to produce ATP, the chemical used by cells to harness the energy derived from breaking down sugars, fats, and proteins. (If you have the background, my source is http://aem.asm.org..., but it's unfortunately rather technical.) To be perfectly clear, I concede nothing beyond what was in the previous paragraph. The FDA bans the promotion of colloidal silver as a drug (it's available as a supplement) for one simple reason: they're required to by law. Not some specific law aimed at colloidal silver, not even one targeted at "alternative medicine." Just the normal, everyday requirement that a drug be proven in clinical studies to be effective. In fact, not one study has ever shown it to be effective in treating, preventing, or otherwise benefiting people suffering from, any disease. In fact, colloidal silver has been shown to be largely ineffective against bacteria. In 1995, an advocate of colloidal silver tested various brands available. Only half of them showed any ability to halt bacterial growth on a petri dish, and none of them showed any strength beyond that of hand soap. Secondly, aside from there being no evidence that silver can attack viruses, there is no possible mechanism for it to do so. Viruses are not living organisms; they are fragments of DNA that hijack other cells' processes to reproduce themselves, and each one uses very specific chemical pathways to achieve this. Because of this, antivirals are extremely specific to the diseases they can treat—Tamiflu, for instance, is useless against AIDS but very effective against influenza. If somehow silver did screw with the pathway that one virus uses, there are literally millions of others that don't use that pathway. Third, silver is dangerous. There is a condition called argyria caused by too much exposure to silver. It is generally not life threatening. It simply causes you to irreversibly turn blue as silver accumulates in your skin, and can affect your vision as silver becomes deposited in the fluid inside of your eye. (There may actually be more serious effects. Since argyria is rare, few human studies have been done, but experiments on guinea pigs suggest that they may interfere with normal growth if used before maturity.) And, as a note specifically toward Solarman, making it on your own increases the chance of getting argyria compared to buying "professionally" made concoctions. My sources were the Wikipedia articles on colloidal silver, argyria, and antiviral drugs (http://en.wikipedia.org..., http://en.wikipedia.org..., and http://en.wikipedia.org...), Quackwatch (http://www.quackwatch.org...), and my unverifiable memory of biology lectures and labs. Sorry about that last one, but it's all fairly basic biology and easily researchable on the internet.