If anyone in your life has or is thinking of buying a product that claims to emit negative ions and is boasted as a health product I would recommend watching this first. Most of the ones in the video are sold on amazon.
(spoiler, they are being doped with thorium)
Yikes! Luckily we don’t go for anything like that…
Far smarter than I expected. Basic snake oil stuff is plenty common and not at all new.
Interesting however that a person I knew in Tucson years ago owned a chunk of desert in the middle of nowhere, where by dint of geography and geology was heavy in that black sand that settles out that is where gold is found if it is there. I suppose he was looking for the gold but did not find much and was selling bags of the black sand as ballast such as holding Christmas trees upright as that was his biggest market,
A mutual friend was asked to analyze some as he had access to such equipment and while most of us expected it to be Iron it turned out to be Thorium, and then I notice that it could well be the black Thorium noted in the video.
Certainly if the granite rocks of the surrounding mountains had even a tiny amount the very weight would concentrate the crystals as they corroded into sand and washed down from the mountains eventually sorting out as it did in his location. We had no idea what to do with the info and that was the last I heard of it.
And now he’s the Thorium King of Nevada. 
Arizona actually, but I never heard he did more than sell hundred pound bags for holding up Christmas trees. If only he encased the sand in Silicone bracelets I am sure he would have made a lot more money.
It could be debated that anyone who buys into the “negative ion” quackery probably shouldn’t reach reproduction age anyway.
All through the southern Rocky Mountain foothills are numerous abandoned mines.
There are usually talus mounds nearby and almost all are radioactive to one degree or another.
Even those pure white Gypsum veins in that area will register on a meter.
Regardless, we get plenty of incidental radiation every day without going out and obtaining a source, heh heh.
Very recently I was at a medical industry trade show. My booth was near a booth selling “negative ion bracelets.” You would think a medical trade show would, I dunno, not let outright &$# quackery on to the show floor, but you would be mistaken.
The carny-like vendors used stupid tricks to demonstrate how just holding the bracelet made you physically stronger. For example, they would have you hold out your arm, and they’d push up while you tried to resist. Then, they give you the bracelet to hold, and try again… except now they are pushing up from a different point on your arm, reducing their leverage, making your resistance more effective.
The booth was packed all day, every day. They were selling piles of $150 snake oil bracelets to medical professionals who should have known better.
It was truly appalling.
So - just to play devils advocate, what’s the difference between say… selling snake oil and a sports psychologist (which is incredibly common nowadays even in young athletes)?
The placebo effect is a real thing.
So long as, “first, do no harm,” is adhered to, I have little problem with most of that stuff. It’s no different than lucky socks or any other good luck charms that people believe in.
I don’t know anything about kids, sports, or psychology, so I don’t have an informed opinion on sports psychology for kids.
If I have a lucky socks tradition that I developed on my own, that is personal idiocy, but it is 100% different than someone selling me magic socks that don’t $&^# work.
The psych isn’t profiting from products that are almost certain to cause cancer.
At least salt lamps function as pretty night lights.
Perhaps you missed the line that said:
Fairly important qualifier.
One thing about growing up in the town where the State Fair is, I got a good dose in skepticism picking my way through the barkers, especially in the varied industries version. The wild thing about it is that the hand-writing analysis computer is still the same one from 1974. I’ve often thought about making my own false front for a computer and incorporate some of the new vision technologies to at least at some semblance of modernity to the enterprise. I think that with some clever random generators and a large data set of descriptions, it would be fun.
It would be profitable without much effort.
I could include a famous George Carlin quote here, but not in open forum…
And Thorium doesn’t even recharge in the light of a full moon like crystals…js…
Oof
That’s all I really have to say. But, totally going to be sharing this with my friends just in case they have stuff like this.
I have to give them credit tho, it is a pretty creative way to export toxic waste.
What it most scary here is that actual doctors are supposed to have some sort of training to make reliable judgement. If someone wants to follow their beliefs instead of science that is one thing but can you imagine discussing a complicated illness much less surgery with a doctor wearing one of those bracelets?
A doctors business is called a “practice”… 
(Yes, I’m aware of the etymology)