Trump Didn’t Tell People to Drink Drano or Inject Lysol!

Of course Trump didn’t advise drinking bleach and I doubt anyone here believes he did. However, independent of Trump, the concept of medical use of ‘bleach’ deserves some defense. Chris ‘Fredo’ Cuomo’s wife recently suggested adding a half cup of household bleach to a bath. Although I don’t endorse her new age rationales for that I also don’t endorse the knee jerk rejection of the ‘bleach bath’ concept by medical ‘experts’ who appear to have done no research before pontificating.

Bleach baths at that very concentration have been a common suggestion by Dermatologists, like me, for years. It’s discussed on our website. Most often used for kids with eczema, but also for some other rashes including some in adults. Sodium hypochlorite’s medical use goes back to WWI where a 0.5% solution, Dakin’s solution (look it up in Wiki!) was the biggest medical advance of the war. Grossly contaminated wounds were rinsed out with it resulting in dramatically lower death rates compared to similar wounds in earlier wars. Antibiotics with even better results had pushed it aside, but with growing resistance to them old resistance free Dakin’s is getting renewed attention. For an ‘average’ adult bath using 40 gallons of water that half cup 5.25% bleach would be diluted 128 times to 0.04%. For small kids I guesstimate half as much water used, so halve to 1/4 cup bleach. Their hypersensitive skin tolerates that dilution well.

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