On a recent podcast, the host asked actor and commercial wellness mogul Gwyneth Paltrow, “What’s the weirdest wellness thing you’ve done?” Paltrow shared that she has received something called ozone therapy, administered rectally, and had found it “very helpful.” She told host Will Cole, “It’s pretty weird.”
The problem with rectal ozone therapy, of course, isn’t that it’s weird. Medicine is full of so-called weird but clinically effective and demonstrably safe things, including other rectal treatments, like taking donated feces and transplanting it into the colon of another person to fight Clostridium difficile bacterial infection.
Ozone, however, isn’t one of these things.
The oxygen we breathe is a couplet of oxygen molecules (O₂); ozone is a triplet (O₃). If two is good, three must be amazing, right? The rationale behind using ozone as a health aid derives from the fallacy that if something is good for you, more must be even better.
The rationale behind using ozone as a health aid derives from the fallacy that if something is good for you, more must be even better.
Unfortunately, ozone stinks, both literally (its name is derived from the Greek word for “to smell,” for its pungent odor) and qualitatively as a broadly applied therapy. Though it has a positive impact in the upper atmosphere, protecting us from harmful UV radiation, it is a pollutant at the Earth’s surface where we live, a byproduct of cars and industrial activity.
According to the Food and Drug Administration: “Ozone is a toxic gas with no known useful medical application in specific, adjunctive, or preventive therapy. In order for ozone to be effective as a germicide, it must be present in a concentration far greater than that which can be safely tolerated by man and animals.” In densely populated urban areas and during hot weather, ozone can rise to harmful levels, exacerbating breathing problems and even leading to death, especially among those who work…
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