Wednesday, January 17, 2018

#1950: Teri Mathis

The product.
Oxygen Orchard is a company that pushes The Big Pitcher, a device that ostensibly cures Chronic Oxygen Debt Syndrome (CODS). Apparently the product, which belongs to the genus “water woo”, “polishes” customers’ water to enable oxygen to be absorbed through the mouth. This is apparently a good thing, since “the GI tract does not absorb gases.” The result is ostensibly that blood cells are “hypercharged” with oxygen and the body’s pH level maintained at a healthy 7.4. No, the inventor, Teri Mathis, does not have more than, shall we say, cursory knowledge of basic anatomy. If you were ever in doubt, CODS is a fully and completely non-existing condition. But Oxygen Orchard’s claim that people are not breathing enough and therefore have a significant debt of oxygen in the blood, which again is the “primary cause of most major illnesses”, is a relatively common one within the discipline of oxygen therapy pseudoscience.  

The product in question blows bubbles up from the stand to the top through the water inside. Mathis and her husband Lee are very proud of the patent, though – which involves a pitcher with a receptacle for water, air ducts to the top, a button, a light, and a screen. They also have a list of doctors who assert that a shortage of oxygen in your blood is bad, which is true but astoundingly irrelevant to the question of whether buying the pitcher in question is a good investment.

At least the website criticizes alkaline diets. Unfortunately, they completely miss the point, and try instead to argue that “an acidic body pH is really due to an oxygen shortage,” something that blowing bubbles in your water with their equipment will ostensibly (but not) remedy.

Diagnosis: Utter and total bullshit, unfettered by any care for science, truth, evidence, knowledge or understanding of basic physiology. This is, in fact, one of the dumber woo products out there, and the level of incompetence and ignorance behind it is absolutely staggering.

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki.

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