An unlicensed and untrained wellness practitioner is injecting bleach into people's tumors — and now, he's trying to enter an American market more primed for such unproven treatments than ever before.
As Wired reports, Chinese "inventor" Xuewu Liu's alarming mix featuring chlorine dioxide, a highly toxic bleach compound, is injected directly into cancerous tumors in hopes of shrinking them.
Though he counts 20 success stories for his high-dose bleach injections, one woman who actually underwent Liu's treatment, which costs about $20,000 and is currently only available at clinics in China and Germany, suggested the purported cure may have exacerbated her illness.
In an interview with Wired, the woman said she contacted Liu via WhatsApp — his apparent messaging platform of choice, given that he also uses screenshots from it in testimonials — and suffered near-immediate side effects when administering the so-called "treatment" herself.
"It was fine after the injection, but I was woken up by severe pain [like] I had never experienced in my life," the woman, a Chinese national living in the United Kingdom, said. "The pain lasted for three to four days."
Still, she chose to inject herself again a few months later and then traveled to China to have the solution administered by Liu, who isn't licensed in China or anywhere else to provide medical care. Unsurprisingly, things only got worse from there.
"The tumor shrinks first, then it grows faster than before," the woman said. "My tumor has spread to the skin after injection. I suspect it is because the chlorine dioxide has broken the vein and the cancer cells go to the skin area."
In his own interview with Wired, Liu rejected the woman's claims and said her side effects stemmed from her failure to complete a full course of the injections. He also told the magazine that he's injected himself with the solution more than 50 times with no side effects, a "personal data point" that "encouraged" him to move forward with his quest to inject the brew into other people.
Liu now has his sights set on the United States, where Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has emboldened the so-called "bleacher" community. He claims that he wrote to the Health and Human Services secretary about conducting more clinical research into chlorine dioxide — and indeed, the FDA did remove a warning about the practice earlier this year.
"Without the FDA’s heavy-handed warnings, it’s likely my therapy would have been accepted for trials years earlier," Liu told Wired, "with institutional partnerships and investor support."
Those same sort of "heavy-handed warnings" were, notably, used to try to dispel the notion that people should use hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 — and given that tens of thousands of people are estimated to have died from taking the horse dewormer, we're probably gonna stick with the experts on this one.
More on pseudoscience: Scientists Just Found Something Hilarious About What Actually Happens When Muscle Bros Take Ice Baths
Share This Article