The scientists mention in their study that no substance in medical literature – they were perhaps not aware of Spermidine – has such an extreme life-prolonging effect as Buckminsterfullerene: C60 dissolved in extra virgin olive oil. The oil by itself only added three months to their lifespan. Rats are the most popular animal as subjects for medical tests not only because they are easy to keep, small and cheap, but also, contrary to popular belief, if something works on a rat, it is a rule of thumb that it also works on a human. And if something is toxic to a rat, it usually is toxic to humans too. You can put a rat to sleep with “human” sleeping tablets, get it drunk with alcohol, sedate it with opium and poison it with cyanide, so rats are not at all unlike ourselves from a basic biological point of view. They need the same vitamins as we do and they suffer from the same old age ailments and aging effects as we do – telomere shortening, oxidative stress, glycation etc. It has been found that fullerenes increase the lifespan and enhance the growth of 4 classes of simpler organisms as well, so the effect appears to be universal for all life.

Fullerene C60 greatly increases the lifspan of rats, even though they were given a mere 24 doses, most with a long interval, starting when they were already ten months old, comparable to being around 25 years old in human terms. If we allow ourselves to extrapolate to humans, a person would need 1000 doses to achieve the same effect. It is of course highly questionable that a human being would benefit as much as a rat, rats having a much faster metabolism than we have. Although lab rats (and people) may live even longer when dosages are modified, or when the C60 fullerene is administered more often. And the rat study is not a fluke – a similar C60 study on mice reported not just an increased lifespan – also very greatly improved learning and memory. Very old mice (near end of life) performed as young mice (6 months old).

C60, when properly prepared, appears to be a true miracle drug – at least in rats so far. But also mice with familial ALS lived longer, when given a water-soluble derivative of Buckminsterfullerene. C60 protected mice against gamma radiation, by improving their damaged immune system and mitochondrial function. Whereas all mice in the control group died, 73% of the C60-mice were still alive after one month. As with many inventions of great benefit to mankind, this one came as a complete surprise. The purpose of the study was to establish an LD50 dose. Instead, they discovered that rats given C60 were all still alive when the entire control group had died of natural causes. C60 is a very extraordinary molecule. It is known as Buckminsterfullerene or “bucky balls” because it is nearly a perfect sphere, reminding of the geodesical structures which the genius Buckminster Fuller patented. Many soccer balls are accurate molecular models of C60. If you would place a carbon atom where the vertices meet eachother, you’d have C60.

C60 is an amazing molecule in many respects. As a crystal, it can be harder than diamond. It is a superconductor at temperatures substantially above absolute zero. It is a 271 times more powerful antioxidant than vitamin C, and it preserves salmon twice as long as vitamin E does. It is so liver-protective that rats, pre-treated with a high dose of C60 and then injected with a normally lethal hepatotoxic chemical, suffered no adverse effects and their livers looked normal, wheras the control group died rapidly due to massive liver failure. And perhaps the most mysterious property of C60: It behaves both as a wave and a particle. Even though there is yet relatively little known about the medicinal effects of Buckminsterfullerene, it is already known for its multi-faceted cardiovascular health effects.

If we were religious, we would be tempted, with the information we have about C60 dissolved in olive oil at this time, to call fullerene C60 a “miraculous elixir of life”. If we believed in voodoo, we would call it a “magic immortality potion”. But we are scientists, so we decided to manufacture and sell the exact same product: Highly purified C60, fully dissolved in extra virgin olive oil. Stirred for two weeks, centrifuged and filtered just like the solution in the original research. People are already buying C60 and dissolving it at home in olive oil and taking it (an unwise thing to do due to the nanoparticles that have to be removed with specialized equipment) and they’re already claiming beneficial effects.

We spent a lot of time researching possible toxicity issues and, finding none, decided to start selling the C60 life extension product soon. We are equipping our lab to produce the buckyballs-in-oil solution, with equipment such as a stirrer that can handle viscous solutions and stir them for weeks at a time, a centrifuge that can handle relatively large quantities of product and centrifuge it with 5000 g, a vacuum pump with filtration glassware and filters and a microscope to verify that there really are no nano-particles left in the end product, because C60 nanoparticles can be toxic. Contrary to C60 suspended in water, fully oil-dissolved C60 has no toxicity whatsoever – on the contrary, as twelve “Methuselah rats” testify to. A Japanese research team found that oil-dissolved C60 was non-toxic in any dose. The interesting aspect of their study is that the C60 they administered to the mice was polluted with nanoparticles (undissolved C60) and that did not have a negative effect on the mice: “All doses, even the lowest dose of 0.1 mg/ml, did not completely dissolve in corn oil, and included visible and invisible residues..“. The rats were given particle-contaminated C60, up to 1000 mg/kg with no ill effects. So the jury is still out on the toxicity of nanoparticles. Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not, depending on many factors, such as their size and shape. Carbon nanotubes can damage DNA by piercing the cell nucleus (Pantarotto et al., 2004a; Singh et al., 2005; Lovat et al., 2005; Foley et al., 2002; Goho, 2004; Hoet et al., 2004; Lam et al., 2004), so it is important to use a source of C60 without CNT contamination.

The researchers said that their batch of C60-in-oil kept remarkably fresh for the entire duration of the experiment. They tested several bottles of the product monthly during all those years, to verify that the C60 remained in solution and did not precipitate nanoparticles into a suspension. This indeed did not take place, but neither did the oil get rancid, not even after having been kept for several years. The C60 prevented the peroxidation of the oil. A liter of olive oil can reportedly at most dissolve 909 mg of C60 at room temperature, but there are other oils that can take a larger amount. Clove oil holds the record with 3.8 g/l at room temperature (Russian study). Linolenic acid is also a better medium to dissolve C60 in, but we will remain true to the original rat study and not tamper with any parameters, because it is not even known whether the health benefits come purely from the C60, or whether the C60 merely acts as a vehicle to bring long chain fatty acids into the cells. Or whether there is a synergy at play. We will not go higher than 0.8 mg/ml because with saturated concentrations, when the temperature drops, the C60 will  precipitate and form nanoparticles. We filter the solution with a 0.22 nm filter to remove nanoparticle. This fine filtration also removes all bacteria from the product, because the two-week stirring stage, even though done in a capped, boiling-water sterilized, alu-foil wrapped erlenmeyer at low temperature, still holds a small risk of bacterial contamination.

It is not yet known why C60 prolongs life and prevents cancer and the diseases of old age – at least in rats. That this is a fact – at least in rats – is beyond doubt, as the statistical likelihood that this was all a strange coincidence is nigh impossible. When the last rat in the control group died, all rats in the C60 group were still alive – and they kep on living – for a very long time. None of them died of the tumors the control group died of. They maintained a body weight normal for rats in their prime. For all practical purposes, they simply stayed younger for longer. Even though there were only twelve rats getting C60 (6 orally and 6 peritoneally), the fact that all those got amazingly old can not be a coincidence. The study calculates the probability that a rat gains an extended lifespan on olive-oil-diluted C60 as 0.999, or a 99.9% likelihood.

The team considered four possible reasons why C60 has such a profoundly positive effect on life expectancy, and after rejecting three, they concluded that it was most likely that C60 protected against the damage done by free radicals. We are sceptical towards accepting this explanation, since there have been countless trials done with antioxidants on rats, none gave even a remotely comparable result as C60. There must be something else hitherto undiscovered about this unique sphere-shaped molecule. C60, when dissolved in olive oil and ingested orally, gets absorbed and the C60 mulecules become distributed – albeit in small concentrations – throughout the body and intracellularly, even beyond the blood-brain barrier in minute amounts. There could be myriads of modes of action that we have no idea of yet, because the origial study was merely a toxicological study, a LD50 study, so no investigations of any kind have yet been done to establish fullerene C60′s mode of action in prolonging mammalian life. All we have are wild guesses, and all we know is that this is so far the only substance known to man with an extreme negative toxicity. The rats in the study were only treated for seven months, so it appears likely that there is some kind of cumulative effect at work. Most of those seven months, they received only occasional doses, in the end only once every two weeks. A possible mode of action could be that C60 resets the mitochondria to a younger age.

Fullerene toxicity is a relatively new field of interest since fullerenes are been added to cosmetics, albeit in infitesimal amounts. More would be a costly affair because C60, the simplest and most “perfect” fullerene, is priced – retail in low quantities – roughly the same as gold, gram-for-gram. But then they can still legally put “Buckminsterfullerene” on their fancy labels, which cost sometimes more to produce than the product in the jar. Lawmakers wanted to know whether fullerenes could somehow be harmful to the environment. And the pharmaceutical industry is very interested in their potential use and toxicity as well. Plenty of toxicity trials have been done and it is now known that fullerenes C60 and C70 cause bad side effects and toxicity when they are ingested as nanoparticles only. This happens when they are suspended into water, as opposed to dissolved in oil. So it’s important to dissolve the buckyballs fully and filter out any stubbornly remaining nanoparticles. C60 does not dissolve in water, so all watery suspensions of C60 are toxic. Chemists have designed and created modified versions of the C60 molecule, with a skippy-ball like “handle”, so that that protruding “handle-molecule” with its hydrophillic end facilitates the solution of the C60. However, also these modified fullerenes are more or less toxic, so far. Medicines are usually more toxic than the natural substance they are based on.

Another problem with fullerene C60 is that solvents are used to dissolve, extract and purify them. Some of these solvents, such as Tetrahydrofurane, are highly toxic and some of them are not. An initial suspicion of fullerene toxicity was later deemed to be the result of this solvent, not the fullerene itself. Such solvents can remain locked (typically 1% to 3%) into the C60 crystal matrix and only sintering under a vacuum can remove most of it, so it is important to use non-toxic solvents, and/or properly remove them, in the production of C60 (products) for human use. Our C60 has been purified using Ethyl acetate – a low-toxicity solvent used in decaffeinating coffee, and naturally present in fruits and wine in very much higher concentrations than our C60, in which only molecular traces remain, after drying in a vacuum oven.

Big Pharma is working to patent a water-soluble designer-fullerene and sell it extremely expensively as a life-extension drug. They will have little trouble persuading the FDA, their enforcer, to ban all other natural fullerenes for being “toxic”, just like the FDA still claims natural Stevia is “toxic” but they allow synthetic Stevia to be sold as the Truvia brand. C60 is naturally produced by camphor flames so they can’t patent it. Camphor is widely used in Hindu religious ceremonies. Hindus worship a holy flame by burning camphor, which forms an important part of many religious ceremonies. Camphor is used in the Mahashivratri celebrations of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and (re)creation. As a natural pitch substance, it burns cool without leaving an ash residue, which symbolizes consciousness. Big Pharma “assumes” that only water-soluble Buckminsterfullerene will be bioavailable, but that’s a ruse to rake in the dough on a patented and trademarked, monopolized drug for the happy few. The cell walls are lipids and lipofullerene (C60 with adducts of the long-chain fatty acids of olive oil) therefore is readily absorbed by the cells and ends up where it is most needed – provenly in the mitochondrial bilayer membranes, where it will neutralize ROS (reactive oxygen species) like no other molecule, because C60 can function as an antioxidant in all perpetuity, it is not “used up” by performing its antioxidant action because it can capture high-energy electrons all the way up to Beta-radiation level, reduce their energy in the C60 matrix and drain them by electrical instead of chemical means.

Although Big Pharma benefits more by people being sick, instead of living a long life in extraordinary health. Big Pharma wants to embed medicines into fullerenes. They don’t seem to be interested in using fullerenes to keep people healthy. It would be the first time.

We’ll start selling 8 mg of 99.95% pure C60 in 10 ml of Turkish extra virgin olive oil for $9,-. For that price you get high purity, the absence of harmful solvents and guaranteed no nanoparticles. Cost of daily supplementation will be 30 dollars a month if one takes our recommended daily dose of 1 mg/day. Turkish olive oil has nearly the same high percentage of long chain fatty acids than Tunesian oil, and Italian oil is reported to be clandestinely cut with cheaper oils so we’ll give it a wide berth and use the best ecological Turkish oil. Mixing should be done in the dark, so we’ll use aluminium foil around the erlenmeyers. 8 mg would be sufficient for approximately a week of daily dosing for the average adult, if we use allometric scaling to the average adult human, and if that human takes a smaller daily dose, instead of taking two weeks in between, as eventually done with the rats. There is no data on what the optimal dose is, or the lowest sufficient dose. It may be much lower than the dose used in the rats. The researchers were trying to poison them to death with C60. If you’d want to take the rat-equivalent dose of the study, you’d need to take 3 mg/day every day, but we advise taking 1 mg because it is unlikely that the therapeutic dosage would be identical to the dosages used in a LD50 study. More importantly, is is unlikely that the large doses used in the LD50 trial would be fully absorbed. Better absorption happens when smaller dosages are taken more frequently. People are already experimenting with home-brewed C60 solutions and one chronically ill person took 2 mg for two days and reported a near-instant (four hours after ingestion), pronounced increase in energy and stamina:

As I’ve only been taking it a few days, I’m a bit reluctant to mention the results, but what the hell. Just take this with a saltshaker of salt. I’m just one person with a certain medical history, and these are essentially single data points…

Background. I’m 60 years old and fifteen to twenty pounds above my ideal weight. Ten years ago I could run three miles to the gym, work out for two hours, and run back. Then I made the mistake of taking statins for high cholesterol. After some months I realized I was being chemically poisoned, so I stopped. My recovery was slow and incomplete. Years later I still suffered from it, but PQQ was a big help. The effects were noticeable in two days, and reached a plateau in one week. Still, I couldn’t run more than 100 yards without feeling I’d run a marathon. I couldn’t get enough air. Residual mitochondrial damage, in my thinking.

Then, four hours after ingesting 2 mg of C60 in olive oil, I went running. And kept on running. My god, I could breathe! The next day was the same. I ran a mile and a half, and I hadn’t done that since before Crestor. The effects seemed too quick to be the result of mitochondrial biogenesis, but it must have something to do with the mitochondria.

This is the analysis report of our Buckminster fullerene (average the two channels’ purity results to obtain 99.947%):

The same principle is behind most laser rejuvenation treatments, acid peels and other invasive skin rejuvenating methods. The laser either evaporates the top layer(s) of the skin entirely or it evaporates only fractions of the skin (“Fraxel laser”).

A closeup of this procedure being performed:

A dermaroller creates microinjuries (tiny vertical channels in the dermis) mechanically, while fractional laser treatment makes them thermically. But the principle is the same. The resulting collagen production will slowly  progress even months after the treatment.

When you sting yourself with a needle, you mechanically damage some skin cells. Those cells are too damaged to function properly and our body will immediately start removing those cells. These cells are then being replaced by new cells.

So based on this principle, dermarolling speeds up the turnover of the skin and thus speeds up the diminishing of pigmentations, post-acne spots, age spots etc.

The skin’s top layer is the epidermis, with a thickness of 0.05 to 0.2 mm, depending on its location. Below that lies the dermis, with a thickness of 0.5 (eyelids) to 2 mm (on the back). The soles of the feet have the thickest dermis, around 4 mm. In order to trigger collagen production, you have to reach the dermis. A 0.5 mm dermaroller reaches the top of the dermis and improves the overall skin texture and skin tone. Dermarollers shorter than 0.5 mm enhance the penetration of skin care products into the skin, improve very shallow pigmentations and thicken the epidermis.

How dermarolling and needling in general works on stretch marks and scars:

Scar tissue, whether raised, flat or indented is usually abundant in collagen but the scar collagen is thick and typically woven in a different pattern than in the normal skin.

Scar tissue isn’t really too different from normal skin, it’s only the thickness and patterns of the fibers that differ.

Crushing the scar tissue will crush the scar pattern of the fibers and the body will often remodel the scar into a smoother, better looking, softer scar.

Our body does not expend effort on fixing things does not consider “broken”. Scar tissue is just a cosmetic problem, it is not perceived as an issue worthy of fixing further by the body. Dermaneedling is a strategy to force the body to remodel the scar. The trick is that making tiny pricks is not sufficient damage to cause a scar but it is enough for the body to consider needled skin as “broken”. Dermaneedling triggers healing processes. Unfortunately, our body usually does not bother replacing the scar tissue completely with normal skin – especially when the scar is deep – but it often replaces it with a mixture of scar- and normal tissue, producing a better looking scar.

So dermarolling triggers healing processes and the body tends to heal the area in a way – at least partially – as normal skin should look like. Indented scars fill in and raised scars flatten. It does not work in all cases, but in most people it does work.

Acne scars don’t contain much scar tissue but they are atrophied (missing tissue). The scar will slowly or partially fill in with collagen triggered by a dermaroller, dermastamp or single needle. Wrinkles will also partially fill in.

In addition, needling a hypopigmented scar will facilitate the migration of melanocytes (skin-pigment producing cells)  from the surrounding skin into the scar and improve its color.

The advantages of dermarolling over other methods:

Dermarolling does not remove any skin layers. It only makes pricks into the skin. That is why the skin heals rapidly from dermarolling comparing to methods that remove skin layers. Dermarolling is for that reason also much less prone to infection or healing complication and it has a very short downtime.

Dermarolling can go very deep into the skin, up to 2 mm. If you went that deep with ablative methods (acid peels, ablative lasers) you could easily end up with scars or serious skin damage, because a laser physically removes part of the skin by evaporating it, and a needle only pricks the skin without actually creating a real “empty” hole where skin tissue has been removed.

Lasers or IPL use heat and heating up the skin is prone to collateral damage such as burns, hyper- or hypo-pigmentation and even scars.

Dermarolling is cheaper than other rejuvenating/remodeling methods.

Dermarolling thickens the skin.

Dermarolling can be used anywhere on the body, including the areas with thin skin such as the neck or the top of the hands (except for the area of the upper eyelids and right below the lower eyelashes due to the risk of  eyeball injury).

Dermarolling highly enhances the penetration of skin care products into the skin. In order to protect us, the skin is almost impermeable. Dermarolling makes the skin temporarily very permeable for skin care products.

Because an ordinary tattoo machine is too harsh on the skin, as it deeply penetrates the skin 50 or 60 times a second (depending on your mains frequency). So our idea was to design a machine that would needle much slower  (at least ten times slower, a bit like like a sewing machine) and have a set of needles instead of just one. After some experimentation and brainstorming, we came to the conclusion that this was not an easy task. Practical design considerations required a needling speed equal to the mains frequency (50 or 60 Hz). But that would be too fast for optimal results in our opinion, and moreover, it would require enormous power if you’d want to drive a dozen needles into the skin simultaneously. A slow-moving, powerful needling machine with multiple needles would cost a lot of money and be heavy to handle, so we abandoned the idea.

However, there have been a lot of such devices offered for sale lately, so we bought one and tested it:

This is not the “Dermapen” brand but a similar device. This device claims to needle to a maximum depth of 1 mm, but we found it nearly impossible to penetrate the skin. We had to press hard onto the skin at the maximum power setting to get some redness occurring, and that only on the inside of the wrist and other such places. The device, with a suggested retail price of hundreds of dollars, did not come with a European power plug or even a user manual. Its manufacturer spent a great deal of effort making the thing look expensive – it comes in a fancy case – but the device itself is of poor quality. Rotating knobs have a stuck feeling to them and the device feels like a cheap plastic gadget. The chrome looking part is made of plastic. The switch halfway the cord does something to the speed or power of the device – we were unable to ascertain exactly what, as on no setting it properly penetrated the skin.

We think that the concept is interesting but we will not purchase other such devices to test because firstly, we’d have to pay hundreds of dollars per model and secondly, we do not believe that the other models have a significantly better performance. The problem is that in order to drive twelve needles through the skin, you’d need a lot of force. To do this fifty times a second requires a lot more force than a light, thin device can muster. So these devices, in spite of the needle lengths of up to 2 mm, don’t actually push their needles that deep into the skin. The pen-needler would have to be much heavier for the electromagnet to be able to be that strong.

Spare needle heads are very expensive, so needling costs about the same as with a dermaroller or dermastamp. One spare needle head has a suggested retail price that comes close to the price of the dermastamp we sell. They are sold in bulk to companies like us for a couple of dollars a piece, but as it is in this business, most vendors are only interested in cold, hard cash and will charge outrageous prices, as usual.

One of our concerns with such devices is that they may tear the skin, when not expertly operated. When working as advertised, its 12 needles are “down” into the skin about 50% of the time, 25% quite deeply. Now, with a derma roller, you roll the needles in and out, but with the derma pen, you move the needle head sideways, so the needles will be moved sideways while they are still inside your skin, with no way to get out of the skin until the needle head is pulled upwards again by the machine. This means that if you move the machine too fast, it will cause micro-tearing (lateral shearing) of the skin. And if you move too slowly, it will make too many holes in the skin (50 Hz x 12 needles = 600 a second in Europe and 720 a second in countries with a 60 Hz mains frequency such as the United States). So you need to know exactly how fast to move the device, but that depends on your mains frequency, the make and model of the device, the selected needle length and the electromechanical particulars of the way the needle head moves in and out (the “duty-cycle”).

If anyone has purchased a different model that actually works as advertised and does not cost an arm and a leg, we’d be happy to hear about it so we can add it to our assortment. What we are looking for is pinpoint bleeding on the 1.5 or 2 mm setting without the need to push down hard, and preferably a speed that can be regulated to far below the mains frequency. We don’t think such devices exist yet. Please – if you mention brands or post links – only do so when you have actually tried it, the product is available for sale to ordinary consumers and has a needle length of at least 1.5 mm.

Conclusion: Interesting concept but not yet ready for prime time. We’ll definitely will start selling them when we can find one that actually works, and when it’s reasonably affordable (this one would have to cost $300,- retail). At the moment we decided we can’t resell anything that’s available for bulk wholesale purchase (all these devices are made in China) because we are certain that a significant percentage of customers would want their money back. The manufacturer promised that there will be a user manual soon, but dismissed our complaint that the device was too feeble for its intended purpose.

Not all crows’ feet respond to dermarolling

Many of our customers reported a reduction of wrinkles and improved skin texture. From my own experience, I reduced the wrinkles between my eyebrows (11′s) with single needling and on my forehead and around the lips (this area was really painful to roll) with dermarollers. The wrinkles are still visible but they filled in noticeably. Unfortunately, my crows’ feet are not responding to dermarolling. Perhaps due to the fact that they are constantly reinforced by muscle activity by smiling (I do not use Botox). Do not expect that all your wrinkles will respond the same way to dermarolling.

The advantage of wrinkles being filled in by the collagen production triggered with dermarolling or needling is that the results are really long-lasting compared to injected fillers. Restylan, Perlane or other fillers based on cross-linked hyaluronic acid are very expensive and they are relatively quickly metabolized by the body, so they have to be re-injected every few months. The results of dermarolling, a cheap method, will last for years, although they are not “permanent” because a dermaroller can’t stop aging and the wrinkles will eventually start to re-form. Dermarolling maintenance is necessary.

You should know that a dermaroller and other microneedling instruments such as dermastamp or the single needle can only affect the skin itself and not the underlying structures (fat, muscles etc). For this reason, they cannot for example improve “hollowness” under the eyes caused by fat recession (as we age, the subcutaneous fat recedes), neither it can significantly improve the nasolabial fold because it is not a wrinkle but a fold caused by a drop of the facial structures. Long-term dermarolling thickens the skin, fills up wrinkles, lines and scars but it has a limited effect on the nasolabial fold.

Dermarolling can’t fully remove stretch marks

Don’t believe claims that it can. Neither can any laser-based device. Stretch marks are deep scars in the dermis and there is currently no method that can remove them. Dermarolling or needling can very significantly improve the appearance of stretch marks but it cannot make them disappear.  What you can expect after many months of dermarolling and needling of stretch marks:

• improved texture
• improved color – the color blends much more with the surrounding skin
• slightly less indentation and/or width
• tiny areas of normal skin appear in the stretch mark (islets of normal skin)

Especially when dermarolling is combined with single needling, you can expect a combination of at least a few of the above.

I am often asked whether needling can gradually replace scar tissue with normal tissue, e.g. when done monthly, for years.  My honest answer is that needling scars is a new method that has not been around long enough to know the answer. So far, none of our customers achieved a complete resolution of their stretch marks. Also not of surgical scars, nor scars that resulted from serious injury. A couple of customers said that some of their smallest, shallowest stretch marks had disappeared (initially, the stretch mark broke up and became fragmented and the fragments gradually disappeared after more needling). The most common feedback is that their stretch marks improved but have not vanished; not even after one and half year of monthly needling.  Since scars are merely a cosmetic issue, our body does not bother to replace scar tissue with normal skin. Skin microinjuries (which is what needling or dermarolling does) are a clever trick to force the skin into remodeling and regeneration. The microinjuries are not big enough to cause more scar tissue but they are big enough to trigger healing processes and regeneration. Unfortunately, the induced regeneration doesn’t completely replace scar tissue by normal skin; it normalizes the skin only partially.

Whether partial normalization of scar tissue is the terminal point of microneedling or whether the scar tissue will gradually be replaced by normal skin until the scar is gone is still unknown. Until we know, it is unethical to advertize a dermaroller for stretch mark removal. Nonetheless, any improvement of a stretch mark or scar is a victory. Until very recently, there was no method able to achieve even a noticeable improvement.

It may be possible, but it is also still unknown whether or not dermarolling can partially prevent stretch mark formation in pregnancy.

Dermarolling can more-or-less reverse skin aging

The skin consists of two main layers. The epidermis and the dermis.

The epidermal cells turn over quick. The epidermal cells are constantly being produced at the bottom of epidermis, and then they travel up and are eventually sloughed off from the skin’s surface. It takes about twenty days for the cells to get from the bottom of the epidermis to the skin surface where they are sloughed off. This continuous process slows down as we age but it is still extremely rapid, compared to the turnover of the dermis.

The cells in the dermis have an extremely slow turnover. The half-life of dermal collagen is about fifteen years!

What does this mean:

You are born with millions of collagen cells in the dermis.

• When you are 15 years old, 50% of the original collagen cells remain (the rest were replaced).
• When you are 30 years old, 25% of the original collagen is still in your skin.
• When you are 45 years old, 12.5% of the original collagen is still in your skin.
• When you are 60 years old, 6.25% of the original collagen is still in your skin.

And again, the newly formed collagen has a half-life turnover of about 15 years.

When you are for example 60 years old, some of the original collagen you had as a newborn is still in your skin. This collagen has been subjected to sun damage and other damage for 60 years. It is no wonder we get wrinkles and sun-damaged skin! Elastin has an even longer half-life turnover. It is about 70 years. Sigh.

When collagen gets damaged, the body immediately repairs it but unfortunately, as we age, the repairs turn out rather provisory and to make matters worse – we’re faced with diminishing collagen levels.

This extremely slow turnover of the cells in the dermis is the reason why a tattoo in the deep dermis (>1 mm) lasts a lifetime. A Tattoo will slightly lighten over the years but its pigment weathers the decades. “Permanent” makeup is not inserted that deep so it doesn’t last as long  as a tattoo.

The big deal with dermarolling is that you can trick the body to trigger collagen and elastin much sooner than the natural rate of turnover.

Dermarolling with needles that reach the dermis causes tiny microinjuries in it and the body sees it as a high priority to fix them. These microinjuries will trigger new collagen. But sadly, the skin will never be as perfect as when you were young.

Ablative methods, such as acid peels or ablative lasers can’t be used to reach the dermis due to the risk of scarring and hypopigmentation. But a dermaroller very easily can go that deep, because it does not ablate the skin, it only pricks it. Since the pricks are surrounded by untreated skin, the regeneration happens very quickly. It takes long to achieve results because every time you roll, you only prick small fractions of the skin. Be patient and repeat the microneedling procedure on yourself as often and as long as it takes.

Dermarolling will speed up the turnover of dermal cells and this can slow down (but not stop) the signs of skin aging. Maybe not all signs but at least some.

Dermarolling and hyperpigmentation, melasma

Usually, hyperpigmentation is the result of locally uneven/excessive melanin production. Melanin is the pigment that determines the color of our skin. When our skin is exposed to the sun, it produces more melanin as a natural protection – melanin absorbs UV. Unfortunately, melanin is not always produced totally evenly, especially in individuals with darker skin.

Uneven/excessive melanin production can also be the result of skin trauma – sun burns, acne, cuts, bug bites etc. If the hyperpigmentation resides in the epidermis, it responds very well to dermarolling. If it is in the dermis (deeper part of the skin), it also responds but it takes much longer. Hyperpigmentation in the dermis is too deep for acid peels but not too deep for a dermaroller. You have to avoid excessive sun exposure and always use a sunscreen. Ignoring this advice may lead to a reappearance of  the pigmentation.

Using a dermaroller to facilitate the skin penetration of skin whitening creams can be a very successful treatment for persistent or deep hyperpigmentation or melasma but you have to be careful with hydroquinone (a common skin whitening agent). The long-term usage of a high percentage of hydroquinone in combination with sun exposure can cause dark pigmentation. Do not apply high concentrations for a very long time.

I hesitate to recommend a dermaroller for melasma. Dermarolling triggers inflammation and inflammation or any kind of skin irritation can in principle worsen melasma. For the same reason, a dermaroller should not be used on Rosacea. Always do a test patch first if you use a dermaroller for melasma.

Dermarolling works against hypopigmentation

Treating hypopigmentation with dermaroller and needling showed very good results. Hypopigmented skin has malfunctioning or absent melanocytes (melanin producing cells). Skin needling triggers melanocytes production and enables migration of melanocytes from the surrounding skin into the hypopigmented area.

Dermarolling acne scars – patience rewarded

If you got what it takes – the patience and perseverance for long-term dermarolling, dermastamping and single needling – you are destined for success. Major improvement of acne scars was the most common feedback we have received.

Some of our customers combined dermarolling with other methods such as saline injections or the suction method. Both methods are explained on our forum.

Dermarolling to reduce pore size – not really

Not many customers were successful in reducing the pore size. Pores are not scars, pores are ducts in the skin and there is currently no method that can reliably and permanently reduce them. Dermarolling however often helped normalize acne prone skin and post-acne pigmentations.

Dermarolling sun-damaged skin works well

You can expect excellent results in renewing the sun-damaged skin of the face, décolleté and to a lesser extent of the forearms and the back of the hands.  Application of Tretinoin (Retinoic acid or A-Ret) further boosts improvement.

Needling sagged skin – works but no miracles

Dermarolling can improve mild skin laxity and crêpey skin on the face, neck and body or a wrinkly post-pregnancy abdomen, provided there is not too much excessive skin. The bulging, sagging abdomen after pregnancy is often due to the abdominal muscles not having gone fully back to their original position – this can only be fixed by a tummy tuck.

You can greatly improve a tummy tuck scar or a C-section scar by needling. The scar will soften and becomes less visible. Dermarolling cannot get rid of excessive skin after major weight loss. Skin folds can only be fixed by plastic surgery.

In the process of aging, the face and the neck start to “hang” due to:

- loosening of ligaments that attach the skin to the bones
- gravity
- loss of fat and descending of fat
- loss of elasticity.

Dermarolling can improve mild skin laxity but it cannot fix severely “hanging” skin.

The situation is even more complex on the neck. There is a muscle running from the collarbones to the jaw (Platysma muscle). This thin muscle holds the subcutaneous fat and everything else tightly in. When fat deposits accumulate in the platysma muscle area, we end up with a double chin. As we age, the platysma muscle slightly falls which causes jowls and a hanging neck. In addition, the muscle often starts separating in the midline of the neck, which allows fat protrusion that further contributes to a sagging neck.

Dermarolling cannot fix the problems related to the platysma muscle – it can only improve skin texture mild skin laxity of the neck.

Wild claims to sell more rollers

Some websites say that dermarolling reverses gray hair, completely removes cellulite, helps with slimming, enhances breast size and so on. It’s all nonsense.

I remember my grandfather who was almost completely bald at the age of twenty told me that when he started getting bald at such an early age, he was extremely depressed. Shortly after, he met my grandmother who did not care about his baldness and they lived happily together for sixty years!

Chronic stress and unhappiness about one’s body can lead to clinical depression that is difficult to improve without medication.

The culture of  being “perfect” and young is very distressing for many of those who do not feel “perfect” for whatever reason. While I certainly do support looking after oneself, I do not support the advertizing industry’s overblown ideal of eternal youth, the ridiculous cult of beauty which only purpose is to make you feel bad because the worse you feel the more money you will spend on looking and feeling better.

Bombarding you with “beautiful” people, “perfect” skin and heavily photoshopped glamor models is good business. You will spend more in increasingly desperate, but largely fruitless attempts to look like the shiny people in the shiny magazines.

The same with fashion. Let’s be honest: Fashion is for those who want to look like everyone else! Surely, wearing new clothes is enjoyable and I don’t say you should spend twenty years wearing the same shoes, but do not lay waste to your mood and bank account by succumbing to the pressure of always having the latest mobile phone, hair – or heel style.

To be honest, Big Cosmetics is not even the main cause of this vicious circle of trying to throw money at the inevitable forces of nature. They simply abuse our instincts to their advantage. Our genes are programmed to reproduce – everything in nature submits to this prime goal. This whole issue of feeling the need to be sexy is nothing else than our genes bullying us into doing what they are programmed to: To procreate.  We are slaves of our own DNA. What’s at play is a survival-of-the-fittest scenario and the struggle to become the alpha male/female, a desirable procreation partner in an environment of competing genes. If you realize this and manage to more or less resist playing this game, you will be relieved and can enjoy looking good without the need for extremes and perfection.

Lots of supposedly physically “perfect” people have unhappy relationships anyway.

A daughter of a friend complained to her brother that she was ugly and he said:

“You are quite pretty but you are not gorgeous. That’s actually an advantage because that will keep superficial people away from you.”

Don’t obsess over things that can’t be changed. Or else you’ll suffer through your life. Focus on what you can change.

There currently is no method that can remove stretch marks. You can only improve their appearance, for example with dermarolling. Concentrate on achievable goals such as staying or becoming slim and toned (unless you really feel OK as you are), waering hairstyle that fits you and especially: Being pleasant to be with.

Why do you want to be perfect? To find a loving partner? Who do you think has a greater chance to find a nice partner? Who would you prefer as a partner?

Someone with stretch marks who’s overweight, depressed and usually snappy and in a bad mood?

..or a person with stretch marks who’s mostly in a good mood, has done his best to look good but who ignores his stretch marks, is a pleasure to be with?

I don’t blame stretchmark-afflicted people when they become depressed. Not at all. I totally understand it. It is extremely difficult to withstand the competitive environment we’re in.  I only say that you should try to change what you can and decide to ignore the rest and that will likely result in finding an agreeable partner and it will also prevent your life being “suffered through”.

I’m not promoting a plattitude like: “Don’t worry about stretch marks, it can always be worse”.  It’s not a competition of what is worse. It is about the approach you decide to have.

Important to remember: Living with a person who’s merely covered with stretch marks is very easy but living with a person who has low self-esteem is extremely difficult. Low self-esteem ruins everything.

There are billions of people on this planet. You just need to find one good, loving person for yourself who will not care about your stretch marks.

A tip for summer:

When you go swimming, make the decision that you will not look at the others at all, decide that you will not spend the entire day observing how many stretch marks others have or don’t have and how unlucky you are., etcetera. People with many stretch marks usually don’t go to the beach anyway. They stay at home and write desperate emails how they stay at home, cry and overeat, which makes me sad.  If you don’t feel comfortable  exposing your stretch marks in a swimsuit, cover them with UV swimwear. I have written a forum posting about it:

http://forum.owndoc.com/showthread.php?400-Swimwear-to-cover-stretch-marks

“The scientists said the Fukushima prefecture, as a whole, “is highly contaminated” – especially to the north-west of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/japan/111115/japan-radioactive-soil-unsafe-farming

Update: Food in entire northern hemisphere polluted with Plutonium:

Update: Tokyo radiation levels exceed those in Chernobyl exclusion zone:

Update: Dangerous levels of radioactivity measured in Oklahoma City dust / rain:

Update: Japanese Government refuses to evacuate or test Fukushima radiation victims:

Full Internet Censorship of all Fukushima facts:

http://www.examiner.com/civil-rights-in-jersey-city/japan-passes-law-to-cleanse-internet-of-bad-fukushima-radiation-news

Massive radiation levels in Canada – covered up by government:

http://www.straight.com/article-415211/vancouver/fukushima-brings-big-radiation-spikes-bc?page=0%2C0

We would like to explain the seriousness of the Fukushima nuclear accident.

Common misconception:

“The amount of radioactivity dispersed by a major nuclear accident such as Fukushima is negligeable in comparison to that of a nuclear bomb such as the one dropped on Nagasaki”.

Let’s look at the Plutonium isotope Pu239:

In “Fat Man” – the codename of the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki, about 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of the 6.2 kilograms (14 lb) of Plutonium in the pit (about 17%) fissioned. [1]

This means that the radioactive fallout, the “leftover” of the nuclear explosion of “Fat Man” over Nagasaki was made of about 5 kilograms of Plutonium 239 and the nucleotides it spawned.

Fukushima reactor #3 was a MOX (Mixed Oxide Fuel) reactor [2], at least 5% of the fuel being a mixture of 80% Plutonium 239 and 20% Plutonium 240. [3]

Fukushima #3 contained 90 tons of fuel. [4] Since at least 5% of that fuel is Pu239/240, the total amount of Plutonium in its core is at least 4500 kilo, or roughly a thousand times more than the Plutonium fallout caused by the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki.

So on the back of the envelope, if 100% of Fukushima 3′s reactor core exploded, the fallout would have been about 1000 times worse than Nagasaki. How much of Fukushima-3 did end up in the atmosphere?

You be the judge:

This looks like a gigantic explosion to me (YouTube deleted the original, clearer clip due to a Japanese TV Copyright claim), but I’m no expert, so I went to nuclear engineer and expert witness for the Three Mile Island accident Arnold Gundersen’s blog, where he says that in his opinion, the explosion was a “detonation, not a deflagration as happened in the other reactor building”, and he thinks the spent fuel has been instantly vaporized and turned into black dust due to a prompt criticality as the fuel rods melted and reached critical mass. He says that the Plutonium powder is now being carried over the Pacific and will reach the continental US.

So if we just look at how much Plutonium isotopes are released into the environment, the Fukushima accident is comparable to a thousand 21 kiloton nuclear bombs going off. Mr. Gundersen debunks the claims that “little radiation” was released due to a “Hydrogen explosion”. The dark color of the cloud points to vaporized fuel rods. The extreme upward energy of the explosion points to a high-energy detonation, not a gas explosion. If we believe in a less serious explanation of events – only the reactor core and not the much larger spent fuel pool went up into smoke – then most, if not all of the reactor core vaporized and was dispersed as a fine dust high into the atmosphere – five tons of Plutonium powder blowing East.

In Plutonium fission bombs such as the one dropped on Nagasaki, 98% of Pu is Pu239. [5] In reactors, only about 80% of the Pu is Pu239, 20% is Pu240. Not all isotopes of Plutonium are the same radioactive. Pu240 has a half-life of 6563 years [6], making it 3.7 times more radioactive than Pu239, which has a half life of 24100 years. [7].

So if 100% of Fukushima number three nuclear reactor core exploded, 900 kg of Pu240 would have been released, with an equivalent radioactivity of 3300 kilo of Pu239.

This is the truth: Fukushima #3 could have released 1380 times more Plutonium-related radioactivity into the environment than the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki. This is excluding all the nasty isotopes such as Iodine 131, Cesium 137 and Strontium 90. Plutonium is mainly an alpha-radiator. Alpha particles are the most dangerous of all radioactive radiation. One alpha particle typically knocks 100,000 electrons out of their orbits. In more practical terms this means that a single alpha particle can easily damage DNA enough to cause cancer. The cheapest commercially available radiation monitor that can adequately detect alpha particles in food and soil costs around 3000 dollars (e.g. a Ludlum alpha scintillation counter/scaler combo), making it impossible for people with an ordinary Geiger counter to detect them, because specialized mica-windowed pancake tubes or scintillation counters are required. This is far beyond the capabilities of the great majority of devices sold online. To detect alpha radiation in air requires even more complex devices. Note how we assumed that only the reactor core exploded – something proven in the pictures published on Cryptome.org. If Arnie Gundersen is to be believed however, the explosion occured in the spent fuel pool. Spent nuclear fuel contains an even higher percentage of Pu240 than core fuel. And 40 years worth of spent fuel was in that pool. If it all went into the atmosphere, we’re looking at more than ten thousand times more alpha-radiation in the Plutonium fallout than happened at Nagasaki. At Nagasaki, the Pu particle sizes were extremely small, as they were created by a nuclear explosion. You would need to breathe in many of such particles to be exposed to a lethal dose. The particle sizes created at Fukushima 3 are of a range of sizes, and many particles have been created with sizes easily spread by the wind and ultimately lethal when inhaled. Four reactors have suffered a full meltdown, fuel pools are on fire and there is no end in sight.

Meanwhile, radiation levels in rainwater in the US are incredibly high. This man uses a pancake mica-windowed Geiger tube that is the only Geiger counter that can acceptably detect Alpha radiation:

 
And it’s getting rapidly worse:

 
In Tokyo, there is severe radioactive contamination:

As we have come to expect of our governments, radiation monitoring networks worldwide have either shut down or stopped releasing data to the public. Alpha radiation levels in airborne dust are not disclosed to the public. The “open source” networks of volunteers with Geiger counters show not much cause for alarm – but that’s because their Geiger counters can’t detect nearly any alpha radiation. It is irrelevant what the background levels are. All that counts is how much of which radionucleotides end up in your body. You can’t find that out by using a Geiger counter. You’d need much more sophisticated equipment than a Geiger counter. This is why we rely on the authorities to inform us. The EPA announced it would stop all radiation monitoring for the next three months! Since the half-time of Iodine 131 is only eight days, that means if a massive contamination of milk would occur tomorrow, there would not be a trace of it left three months from now! Fukushima has half a dozen fuel pools and reactors in full meltdown, the radiation there breaks records every day, the entire site is a smoldering pile of smoke-spewing rubble, releasing gigantic amounts of radiation each day, but the EPA decided to cease monitoring. We would like to provide a link to this scandalous announcement, but it is on their “latest news” section without permalink provided, and their notice will be gone by the time you read this. Here is a copy:

The EU has 20 times less strict radiation level limits for edibles than Japan [11], so Japan will start exporting their contaminated cattle feed to the EU soon. Even when their feed is above EU limits, it can be mixed with uncontaminated feed to just pass. Eventually, Plutonium particles will enter the human food chain. Meanwhile, the EU stopped monitoring Plutonium in food/feed imported from Japan: “It is appropriate to restrict the obligatory controls to iodine-131, caesium- 134 and caesium-137.” [12] In Japan, Web hosting companies and ISP’s have been asked by the government to censor “illegal information that could cause unrest” [8]. The man in our picture at the top of this article is a crying Toshiso Kosako, chief nuclear advisor for the Japanese government. He said that school children in Fukushima province are under serious threat due to the nuclear fallout and that the government has covered this up [9]. Mr. Kosako said that his conscience forced him to resign. Meanwhile, radiation far from the Fukushima power plant greatly exceeds the levels above mandatory relocation at Chernobyl – and the Japanese government is covering it up [15].

Fallout simulation with the voice of nuclear physicist Michio Kaku:

Last but not least, we offer here for free download the book (it has been made available for free by its authors) that claims almost a million people worldwide died of cancer due to Chernobyl, of which 270,000 people in the US. They used 450 scientific studies to arrive at that conclusion. The book has 349 pages and is pretty hard to digest, as it is a scientific work. The Fukushima accident already released radioactivity on a par with Chernobyl and will likely turn out worse [10] [13] [14].

Chernobyl killed 980,000 people (PDF eBook)

Updates:

Fukushima reactor #4′s reactor fuel storage pod is on fire:

This fire is spreading enormous amounts of radioactivity and is very much worse than a mere core meltdown:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16fuel.html?_r=1

For more in-depth facts about the Fukushima disaster go to:

http://enenews.com/
http://www.fairewinds.com/updates
 
Update:

Tepco now admits that the meltdowns exceed Chernobyl:
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-05-25/fukushima-containment-vessels-may-be-leaking-tepco-says.html

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/06/201161664828302638.html

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man
[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12724953
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel
[4] http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/03/how-much-fuel-is-at-risk-at-fukushima.html?rss=1
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pu-240
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_plutonium
[8] http://japanfocus.org/-Makiko-Segawa/3516
[9] http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/04/government-adviser-quits-post-to.html?ref=hp
[10] http://enenews.com/experts-fukushima-going-kill-200000-increased-cancers-worse-chernobyl
[11] http://www.owndoc.com/pdf/EU-radiation-limits.pdf
[12] http://www.owndoc.com/pdf/EU-secret-radiation-food-scandal.pdf
[13] http://enenews.com/wikileaks-representative-climate-scientist-studying-radiation-fukushima-worse-disclosed
[14] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/01/fukushima-chernobyl-risks-radiation
[15] http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201105070143.html

Novartis says that Lufenuron has no interactions with other medications, the substance is very stable and chemically inert, apart from functioning as an anti-catalyst to Chitin synthesis. So I always say: “Sure, you can combine the two”.

I never knew what MMS really was. I had read it stood for “Miracle Mineral Supplement”, so I suspected it to be a mineral supplement containing Magnesium and Phosphorus or something. I do not frequent alternative health forums and never visit sales sites for “miracle” products – they are a dime a dozen and it’s impossible to keep up with the latest scam – so I had no idea what MMS was, until yesterday.

It turns out that MMS, instead of curing cancer, causes cancer!

MMS is Sodium chlorite, a common form of household bleach, a toxic industrial disinfectant, a powerful oxidant (= free radical) that causes cancer when ingested in small quantities and massive organ damage or death when taken in significant quantities. There also is a “MMS2″, containing another form of bleach, used to scrub swimming pools’ walls for disinfection (it’s not added to the actual water because it would make people sick).

I thought: “How come people haven’t been dropping dead from that stuff in droves – it’s so heavily promoted that it must be killing off gullible folks left, right and center?”

The answer is simple: One bottle contains only 4 fl. oz. (118 ml), of which 22.4% is Sodium Chlorite (better known as household bleach):

You’d have to drink a couple of those small bottles to be lethally poisoned, so I guess that is rare, since the instructions say not to take more than 15 drops per day. Not that we should pay much attention to the treacherous FDA but just to show that it’s not just me who says MMS is poison: The FDA said this about Miracle Mineral Supplement:

“The product, when used as directed, produces an industrial bleach that can cause serious harm to health. The product instructs consumers to mix the 28 percent sodium chlorite solution with an acid such as citrus juice. This mixture produces chlorine dioxide, a potent bleach used for stripping textiles and industrial water treatment. High oral doses of this bleach, such as those recommended in the labeling, can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and symptoms of severe dehydration.”

Even the FDA sometimes says the right thing, like a broken clock showing the correct time twice a day. Canada banned the sale of MMS because a Canadian who took it nearly died. Other countries banned its sale as well. By itself no proof of a bad product, as Stevia is illegal nearly everywhere as well, as a sweetener.

25 mg of Sodium chlorite per bottle. That would make the bottle and its packaging an order of magnitude more expensive than the cost of the bleach it contains.

When I see products heavily advertised using terms like “miracle”, I always look at their profit margin. When it is above a thousand percent, alarm bells go off and I investigate. I did that with the $4 dermarollers sold for $80 (2,000% profit) and I am now doing it with a tiny bottle with 20 cents of bleach sold for $20 as “Miracle Mineral Solution” or “Miracle Mineral Supplement” (MMS). 10,000% profit – you’d truly expect a miracle.

Let’s not dwell too long on the man behind MMS, “Bishop” James V. Humble. He usually appears with a gemstone on his forehead nowadays, to appeal to magical thinkers. He bought his Bishop title from a religious title mill “Church” of which both the founder and his successor were criminally investigated for child rape. He needed that title so that it was easier for him to start a tax-exempt “Church”. Instead of attacking the vendor, we should judge his claims on their merit: James Humble claims that MMS cures all disease known to mankind including Malaria, Diabetes, Influenza, Crohn’s disease, Herpes, Arteriosclerosis, Tuberculosis, CFS, Hepatitis A, B and C, Cancer and of course AIDS. Everything except dying of old age. MMS enlarges breasts too! “A teenage girl, overweight with depression and failure to develop breasts, was given MMS. The next day her breasts started to grow.” Yes people, MMS truly works wonders. If not for your health or breast size, then certainly for Mr. Humble’s finances. Bishop Humble the Bleach Healer. Funny how he had a massive spinal tumor removed in early 2009. MMS clearly didn’t work for him.

A cure for all ills, where have we heard that before? Every couple of years someone becomes wealthy with a miracle cure. It seems none of these miracle cures work, because millions of people keep buying one after the other and they still feel the need to email me and tell me they tried all those magical potions – fruitlessly. When they, with a mixture of hope and scepticism inquire about Lufenuron, I nearly always tell them not to buy it. You can try it yourself. Email me, pretending you are sick, you think it’s Candida and you’ve tried everything. I’ll tell you that unless there is strong medical evidence that you indeed have Candida, don’t buy Lufenuron. I’ll tell you that what is commonly thought to be Candida is often not Candida at all. I’ll try to discourage you from buying Lufenuron if you have no positive  antibody test or visible sores. People should first get educated on what could be the cause of their health problem, instead of wasting money on “miracle solutions”.

I have not been able to find any references to studies done with MMS that suggest that even one sick person has been cured, neither did I find any evidence based in science that would suggest that MMS could kill pathogens in the body, as opposed to on surfaces. The ravingly positive testimonials are fake, published by spammers, MMS resellers and affiliates. In fact there is ample evidence that MMS (bleach) taken orally causes, not cures, cancer. MMS contains hundreds of times more bleach than allowed in drinking water and that rule is for a good reason: Bleach is a powerful oxidant and free radical, and the reason people are advised to eat antioxidants is because they neutralize oxidants. Why do oxidants need to be neutralized? Because they cause cellular damage. Cellular damage leads at best to premature aging and at worst to cancer. Oxidants ravage RNA, leading to cell apoptosis, tissue necrosis and, if the immune system has a bad day – cancer. More about how MMS causes cancer here.

Mr. Humble the magical potion millionaire says that MMS “kills all bacteria, pathogens, viruses, cancer cells” and whatnot, but – another great miracle – the gut flora is left in peace! Mr. Humble abuses microbiological terms like “aerobic” and “anaerobic” to make you believe that that’s actually possible. As far ar Mr. Humble is concerned, the invention of Penicillin was a waste of time. A few drops of bleach in your lemonade cures Tuberculosis, Cancer and AIDS and enlarges your boobies too.

From http://www.health-science-spirit.com/MMS.html

“Jim Humble, a chemist and metallurgist accidentally discovered the MMS by using a whole bottle of Stabilized Electrolytes of Oxygen (S.E.O.) to immediately cure a companion of malaria during a jungle expedition. S.E.O. contains about 3 % sodium chlorite. Humble gradually realized that S.E.O. is too weak”.

Let’s ignore the fact that Jim Humble is no chemist, but focus on the claim: Malaria was instantly cured by drinking a 3% bleach solution, but 3% was too weak. It was in fact extremely much too weak, since Jim increased the concentration in his Miracle Mineral Supplement roughly tenfold. Then how come Malaria was instantly cured? That page contains so much baloney and downright ridiculous gobbledegook that I could debunk every sentence as hilarious nonsense but it would take an article ten times this size. Just as one crazy man can ask more questions than ten wise men can answer, it takes quite some scientific reasoning, backed up by references, to refute the baloney in those claims. Such as the claim that Lyme disease is caused by a virus, instead of the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi (s.l.) And that bleach can’t damage body cells. The abject advice is given to rinse out burns with the MMS bleach, causing of course even deeper tissue damage, increasing the risk of permanent scars. There are countless web pages devoted to the crapolic MMS cult. Literally every sentence is nothing but lies, disinformation, pseudoscience and psychological manipulation.

Mr. Humble bought his Bishop title from a religious title mill. Hoping to get rich quick, he started as a gold prospector in Africa, but he found a richer goldmine in sick people’s gullibility and he now is a billionaire. He says he has more than 5 million customers.  Say that each customer buys on average 5 bottles during their lifetime, that’s 5,000,000 x 5 x $20 = five hundred million dollars. Tax-free, since “Bishop” Jim Humble owns the “Genesis II Church of Health and Healing”. Yup, if you don’t want to pay taxes, do as Ron Hubbard of Scientology did: Start your own cult. James Humble made at least twice that amount and is a billionaire because it’s not just bleach he sells. Books, DVD’s, ebooks, courses, seminars, consultations, the lot.  On top of that, he sells pastor titles. His pastors give away MMS on street corners, but they “solicit donations” in return that go to a numbered offshore account belonging to Mr. Humble. For his “legal defense fund”. Sick but rich individuals are asked up to donate up to one million dollars to the “Church” as a sign of gratefulness for their “cure”.

Because various countries would like to arrest Mr. Humble for causing the deaths of their citizens, he exiled himself to the Dominican Republic, a country without extradition treaties. Imagine the splendor of his mansions and the beauty of his mistresses. The man is more liquid than Bill Gates. The best Cuban cigars are but a short yacht trip away. Mr. Humble can afford the world’s best lawyers, wealth managers, and tax attorneys, search engine optimization experts, web designers and forum spammers. He employs his own private army of affiliates – ready to rip their enemies – anyone with a brain – to shreds. I think I should also launch a “miracle supplement”.. Caustic soda, anyone? (Kills all pathogens stone dead, leaves the body alone because “its got electrolytes!“)

Why MMS does not kill pathogens in the body, but the body itself

On the MMS disinfo pages it is claimed:

“When a chlorine dioxide ion contacts a harmful pathogen, it instantly rips up to five electrons from the pathogen, in what can be likened to a microscopic explosion… harmless to us, but terminal for pathogens.”

The big lie here is the “harmless to us” Because this also happens with the first human cell the bleach ion encounters. Since the chance that those ions touch a body cell before they touch a pathogen is almost infinitely high, in reality, when you drink bleach, all it does is cause cell damage to your own body, leaving virtually no bleach left to kill any pathogens.  So it’s a double lie. All damage is done to your own body, and none to any pathogens – except perhaps some in your throat. Bleach indeed kills pathogens – but the catch is that bleach absolutely can’t distinguish between your cells and bacterial/viral/fungal/parasitical cells. It kills the first cell it stumbles upon. It denatures the first protein it sees, cuts through DNA like a hot knife through butter. The problem is that the average person just doesn’t grasp this simple scientific principle. When confronted with the incessant barrage of lies coming out of James Humble’s multi-level marketing machine, it’s all too easy for a little seed of hope to grow and from there it’s a small step to pulling out a credit card.

“Bishop” James Humble is a criminal, plain and simple. Megalomaniac liar as he is, he claims to have saved the lives of 100,000 people. I say on the contrary: He undoubdedly has contributed to the death of many sick people who could otherwise be saved. By promising them that MMS cures all disease, he encourages patients to cease unpleasant, but life-saving treatments in favor of his bleach. With his admitted 5 million customers, if just one in a hundred suffered from cancer and only one in a thousand of those decided against that extra treatment that could save their lives, then we have over four dozen poor sods who died because they believed that quack’s lies. Such cynical, yes psychopatic liars must be cut out of society. The damage they do is too great. It’s not the billion dollars stolen from the weakest in our midst. It’s not the spreading of magical belief systems-for-profit on an industrial scale. It’s the globally spread hope and faith in a poison that makes the sick sicker and bereaves children prematurely of their ailing parents and grandparents – not to mention those deluded individuals who administer this vile broth to their toddlers in the hope they’ll stop crying – because that happens too. We occasionally get people who want to feed their babies Lufenuron “just in case” so it’s inevitable that they’d do the same with MMS because it’s good for you and totally harmless, right? And when it’s harmless and good for you, the more the better, right?

Several countries have already put out arrest warrants for this ruthless thug.

“Jim Humble is wanted in Malawi Africa and other African countries surrounding it, and has at least two arrest warrants out for him, regarding the poisoning and death of several people who have died due to taking this procedure and giving them false information. On his websites he is careful not to say it cures just helps conditions, but in Africa he says it does cure all, the problem is he has been saying it cures everything from aids to hep and more, these peoples immune systems are already compromised so if they take this in heavy doses they become very ill or die!”

From that same page:

“I’m a chemist, and I can tell you for a fact that chlorine dioxide will attack anything that it can grab electrons from. That includes healthy cells in the body, such as the stomach and gut lining. That causes irritation which results in nausea, vomiting and diarrhea as the body desperately tries to rid itself of the poison you have ingested. Chlorine dioxide cannot tell a toxin or a bacterium from a healthy human cell, it will happily damage any of them. If you took enough MMS to get blood concentrations of chlorine dioxide high enough to kill a single pathogen, you would probably die, though that would take about 400 ml or a couple of bottles full. Antibiotics are far more potent at killing bacteria than MMS, and far less toxic. Dicloxacillin, for example, is 100 times more potent at killing bacteria than MMS, and 20 times less toxic.”

Noone knows exactly what this man is up to. He say he’s working with prison authorities in African countries to do experiments on prisoners, to give but one example.

MMS affiliates and magical thinkers alike will be saying: “Bishop Humble is the victim of a Big Pharma/FDA witchhunt, they want to neutralize him because he found the cure for all disease!” Sure. When I start selling caustic soda as the cure to all ills, I’ll also eventually be “witch-hunted”.  The real witch hunting is done on MMS forums. Anyone who speaks against MMS is immediately banned, like Rhys Morgan, a boy with Crohns disease who explained why he thinks MMS can’t cure disease – on the contrary.

MMS doesn’t work, period. It can’t work, because it would have to violate a few laws of nature to do so. Ions would have to have brains and legs to direct them to pathogens, instead of random body cells. Of course you can believe in miracles and believe “Bishop Humble” on his honest-to-God word, since this do-gooder, in his own words, descends from a line of priests all the way to Jesus.

Articles debunking MMS:

http://healthwyze.org/index.php/component/content/article/460-the-debate-between-healthwyzeorg-and-jim-humble-about-whether-mms-is-a-fraud.html?showall=1

http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Editorial/Miracle%20supplement%20dangerous%20to%20Kenyans%20%20/-/440804/1014118/-/1luiwo/-/

http://www.smh.com.au/national/deadly-chemical-being-sold-as-miracle-cure-20100108-lyvl.html

http://lizditz.typepad.com/i_speak_of_dreams/2010/08/bleachgate-or-mineral-miracle-solution.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/15/miracle-mineral-solutions-mms-bleach

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/sep/17/miracle-mineral-solutions-mms

http://noodlemaz.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/bleachgate-the-plot-thickens/

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/213275-MMS-Miracle-Mineral-Solution-or-Trojan-Horse-Your-Body-and-DNA-Decide

http://blogs.plos.org/takeasdirected/2010/09/19/bleachgate-more-miracle-mineral-solution-madness/

http://www.nation.co.ke/News/Malaria%20drug%20endangers%20Kenyan%20lives%20/-/1056/1012418/-/11e26ja/-/

http://cenblog.org/terra-sigillata/2010/09/20/bleachgate-uk-and-kenyan-press-raising-awareness-of-miracle-mineral-solution/

http://noodlemaz.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/link-roundup-bleachgate/

http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/investigations/2010/10/the-miracle-mineral-solution-c.html

http://parafort.com/ri/?p=1154

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/207643-Down-the-Rabbit-Hole-The-Assassination-of-JFK-Bishop-Jim-Humble-And-The-Nexus-Conference

http://curezone.com/forums/am.asp?i=1109319:

“Anyone on the board been cured of cancer, herpes, AIDs, hepatitis? I haven’t read about it. And as for the 1000′s of people cured of Malaria in Africa? I’m a researcher. I research everything, and I’m good at it. I have spent months trying to find info on the Malaria cures in Africa. The government of Malawi knows nothing about it. It isn’t in any of the African newspapers. There is no evidence whatsoever, other than Jim Humble’s word. And how is it that it can cure Malaria in 4 hours, AIDS in a day, and you guys have been taking it for months and nothing but nausea and diarrhea? People keep saying, “Jim Humbel says that it’s pathogen die off”, or “Jim Humble says to increase the dose” He isn’t a doctor, he isn’t even a chemist. He hasn’t seen the patient, how does he know? I think that the referral to a cult comes from the book that Humble wrote about him having lived 100′s of previous lives and the difference between him and others is that he remembers.”

The articles of association of the “Genesis Church of Healing” of this criminal genius show that it’s nothing but a tax-exempt multinational corporation that intends to aquire real estate and business holdings worldwide:

http://genesis2church.com/articles-of-association/

If you have at least 1200 dollars to spare, the sleazeball will relieve you of your cash in a “private consultation”:

http://www.mareaweb.net/mms/NEWS011.htm

Jim Humble in his gold-digging  days:

Update

Humble’s army of affiliates have gone into full-blown attack mode and even come with threats of violence. In an attempt to educate this poor ignorant soul, I was sent a PDF made by Jim Humble. That PDF purports to explain exactly how MMS destroys pathogens on a molecular level. After reading it, I became strengthened in my belief that Mr. Humble knows full well that his MMS is a fraud, because someone who’s able to use all the scientific-sounding terms such as “electron shell” and even draw a (falsified) 3D model of one, clearly has done some research into the chemistry involved. Meaning, he is educated enough to know the truth, but he chose to misrepresent it in order to sound credible. If he would merely have come with vague claims that could still be attributed to ignorance. Someone who publishes a very scientific looking PDF full of three dimensional models of the quantum mechanics of molecules and who uses all the applicable professional lingo, but who lies about the facts every step of the way clearly is a deliberate fraudster. Me calling him a ruthless thug was appropriate, and I am not taking it back. People are dying because of this scam. I fervently hope that Humble will sue me, because the outcome will prove once and for all that his whole setup is a scam:

1. Humble claims that electron shells fully envelop covalently bonded molecules (or polyatomic ions). That is a gross misrepresentation of basic chemistry that nicely helps draw the wool over our eyes.

2. Humble claims that by pulling some of the electrons out of their outer shells, that the entire molecule will disintegrate into separate atoms. That is nonsense for many reasons, one of them being the threedimensional electron orbital structure of molecules and hence the need of a lot of electron-pulling in many places simultaneously- impossible to do unless half of the blood serum would be replaced by MMS.

3. Humble claims that part of the MMS “curing mechanism” involves the creation of free oxygen atoms, and that that free oxygen is totally harmless because “it can not oxidize things but become part of the water or carbon dioxide in the body”.  This is complete nonsense. An oxygen atom will immediately destroy the first random molecule it comes into contact with – whether it be that of a pathogen or that of your body.

4. Then follows a claim on how oxygen “can’t do damage to the body”, because its oxidation strength is “only 0.95 Volts”. This claim is patently false. Oxygen is very harmful – so harmful in fact that breathing pure oxygen for just a few hours will result in permanent brain damage due to central nervous system oxygen toxicity. Every IC ward nurse knows this, and adjusts the supply of supplemental oxygen such that the patient never breathes pure oxygen, or even 50% or 40% oxygen. The devices used are designed in a way that the patient can never breathe pure oxygen, because it would kill in less than a day. Under higher pressures than atmospheric pressure, Oxygen can kill in minutes. Every NITROX SCUBA diver knows that. Even the 21% oxygen in our air damages our cells and  tissues all the time, and our body has to repair that damage all the time. It has even been postulated that the oxygen in the air we breathe is a small contributor to causing lung cancer.

5. Humble also says that the Chlorine split off by his carcinogenic concoction is nothing to worry about, because it “turns into harmless table salt by combining with Sodium in the body”. Well, no. There is no free Sodium (Na+) in the body for the Chlorine atom to attach to. Instead, it will severely damage the nearest protein molecule or DNA strand or anything else it touches.

6. Humble claims that there is a big difference between the proteins in bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites and in the proteins in our bodies. He says that MMS kills only the proteins in the pathogens, but not in our bodies. But he is wrong. There is no such fundamental difference. All proteins react the same to free radicals.

There are many more wild, unsubstantiated claims and plain untruths in that PDF. For the layperson, it looks like an impressive explanation of fundamental biochemistry principles. For anyone with a basic knowledge of highschool chemistry, it is unadulterated baloney.

They call it “Anti Aging Acupuncture Breast Enhancement treatment”. This is of course complete nonsense, as dermarolling  thickens the skin only – and by less than a millimeter. Dermarolling  or microneedling certainly can’t in any way, shape or form increase breast size. More about that later in this article.

Apparently to maximize profits whilst at the same time being able to defend themselves against the exposure of the absurd claim that microneedling can increase breast volume, they say: “It is essential that the roller is used with the Anti Aging serum, the herbs are vitally essential to the process”. Amazing. They have a magic potion that can make your breasts larger. Magical thinkers may believe such claims, but us scientific folks prefer to see some evidence before we pay 85 + 30 dollars for a tiny bottle of self-made liquid and a roller which familiar design looks identical to that of the worst dermaroller in our dermaroller review.

White Lotus Anti Aging presents some pictures, for which we found strong evidence that they are fraudulent:

They go through great lengths assuring us that their images are in no way manipulated, and that 99% of all images online are Photoshopped but theirs aren’t. They are in fact correct in saying that their images are not manipulated. But that is the only truthful thing they say about those pictures that we republish here, for review purposes (fair use). The breast pictures are deliberately misrepresented, and do not at all show breast enhancement, if anything at all, they show in fact breast reduction, as we will show below.

First of all, we need the original photographs on their website, not the reduced versions that you see in your browser. In order to save an image in a browser, you right-click and select “Save”. However, White Lotus has disabled that, because when you right-click, this message appears:

That’s strange.. The common way of protecting images is to put a Copyright message on them, the so-called “watermarking”. That way, if people reuse your images, they’ll be advertizing for your site, so that is an effective deterrent. Of course, putting a copyright message on an image that is in fact copyrighted by someone else is an illegal act, so if you do not really own the copyright, you can’t do that and have to resort to other means. The message gives the impression that White Lotus owns the copyright, but in fact it only says that they are “copyrighted”. Clever.

We do not have the same budget as White Lotus but our badly paid webmaster is not born yesterday and knew a way to download “their” photo’s anyway: He simply did “File – Save page as HTML”. Then he had the actual images as they are stored on White Lotus’ server, and a timestamped copy of their entire “dermarolling before and after” page. He said we needed it in case they would deny our evidence or even sue us, or take them offline or alter them. Update: We received a legal threat from White Lotus, saying they consider suing us for defamation-related damages. They did not explain how their “before” picture is dated after their “after” picture.

Misrepresenting pictures

Our webmaster told us something we were very surprised about but it is true: When you make a photo with a digital camera, the camera embeds a lot of information into the image. Invisibly. This is called EXIF and the details can be read on Wikipedia here. If you have a way of retrieving that EXIF information, you can see when the picture was taken. The camera puts the date and time into the Jpeg image. Digital camera’s have an internal clock, like video recorders etc. have. And that information survives image editing – it keeps being preserved, even when you cut and paste it into Photoshop. This is to make the life of professional photographers and media people easier. They need to have a reliable method of verifying the “credentials” of the photo, so to speak. Scanners also embed EXIF data. EXIF data is reliable – it has been used as evidence in court cases involving the manufacture of child porn.

There is an online service where you can paste the URL of an image and get some of that EXIF info:

http://regex.info/exif.cgi

I encourage you to go to White Lotus’ before-and-after pictures and verify for yourself that what say is true. Here is the “before” picture, taken from

http://www.whitelotusantiaging.co.uk/dermaroller_before_and_after_s/68.htm

Update: White Lotus has removed the evidence, as was to be expected.

..and here is the “after” picture:

Update: White Lotus has removed the evidence, as was to be expected.

The “after” picture was taken 33 days before the “before” picture!

We asked our technical wizard webmaster to go through all before-and-after pictures on that page and he told us the following:

- Almost all photographs are made with the same camera, the Olympus FE210. Meaning, they were not submitted by individual customers of their dermarollers but rather their source is a clinic of some sort.

- The photo’s that have (sometimes obscured) faces on them are in his opinion not created with a camera or scanner, but they have in his opinion been copied from a PDF displayed on screen because they lack EXIF data and they are of much lesser quality than the other images.

Conclusion: These photo’s are likely not copyrighted by White Lotus. In our opinion, those photo’s were neither made by White Lotus, not were they submitted by their customers. In addition to that, White Lotus’ assertion that they portray “before” and “after” pictures is demonstrably false.

White Lotus has crossed the line of what can be tolerated when they started to claim that dermarolling can increase breast size. It’s scamming, plain and simple and we do not want our customers to tell us that there is something wrong with our rollers and our vitamin creams because “Their breasts didn’t get bigger, as they do when White Lotus’ products are used”.

Another reason is that White Lotus has crossed another line when they started to spread deliberate nonsense on their site. Nonsense intended to take sales away from bona-fide, ethical competitors and move those sales to them. White Lotus spreads the rather monstrous lie that using vitamin A products in association with microneedling may cause “liver damage”. They keep stressing that their serums are “natural” and that anything else is “artificial” and “toxic”. This FUD is part of their business strategy – vitamin creams are much more expensive than self-made herbal potions, and their business model requires big profits in order to be able to  grow large, using affiliates and agressive, expensive marketing.  They claim many things and most of it is utter nonsense, but those wild, unsubstantiable claims serve to move customers away from us consciencious, scientific-oriented small-scale vendors and towards their multi-million dollar business with their magical Chinese herbal potions that make your boobs bigger. Their pictures prove it – or do they?

We have no problem with healthy competition, but White Lotus is a cynical company. They peddle quackery. They charge outrageous prices for dirt-cheap, low-quality products and they spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about competitor’s products. They use every dirty advertizing trick in the book to win confidence and to increase their Google ranking – including paying seedy search-engine-optimization companies to spam the whole internet with links to their sites. White Lotus does not care about your skin – they care about their bottom line. If they truly cared about your skin, they would not bash proven vitamins in favor of their unproven “herbal serums”. White Lotus runs a multi-level marketing business, where you can sign up as an affiliate to peddle their wares. Such a scheme is only feasible when there is a huge margin on the products. That’s why they sell the cheapest dermaroller on the Chinese market. That roller costs around three dollar fifty, bulk wholesale. It has such a floppy handle that it’s impossible to apply constant pressure or even hold a steady course, to give but one example why this is a bad roller.

The claim that dermarolling enhances breast volume by increasing collagen is ludicrous.

Breasts consist mainly of fat. There are also mammary glands, blood vessels, nerves and fibrous tissue but the main “structural material“ in the breasts is fat and the size of your breasts depends on how much fat you have in them.

Breasts themselves have no muscles (apart from nipple muscles to erect the nipple and nodule muscles). That is why you cannot enlarge breasts by exercising and female bodybuilders have almost no breasts (most of them have implants) due to their extremely low body fat content.  There is a muscle behind breasts and underneath breasts but not in breasts.

There is no way a dermaroller can cause the production of fat or anyhow enhance breast volume. A dermaroller cannot even reach the fatty tissue. A dermaroller affects the skin only and to the depth of the needles used. That means that not even if White Lotus magical miracle potion would do everything it claims to do such as “increase blood circulation”, it would only increase blood circulation for a while in the skin.

Dermarolling increases collagen production in the skin and can thicken the skin somewhat, but microneedling can’t possibly increase breast size by more than half a millimeter or so. Half a millimeter of gain is a great improvement for the skin because the skin itself is only a couple of millimeters thick.  Thickening the skin by for example 0.2 mm will noticeably reduce wrinkles, scars and improve overall skin texture but anyone claiming that this will improve the volume of your cleavage is trying to fool you.

Microneedling can improve the skin texture of your breasts, it can improve the appearance of stretch marks on the breasts, it can improve pigmentations, sun damage and other skin related problems. Dermarolling/microneedling is excellently suited to improve scars that were the result of breast augmentation surgery though.

But there is no way it can enhance breast volume or lift the breasts – regardless of what expensive “serums” you roll into the skin on your breasts. Contrary to what the miracle serum peddlers want you to believe, increased blood flow and other phenomena can’t possible result in larger breasts, even if their claims were true about increased blood flow in the breast tissue, which they are not.

Silicone/saline solution implants, or injections with one’s own fat are used to enhance breast size. Microneedling can’t help you with that, and if your goal is to enlarge your breasts, you should not buy our products. Neither should you buy from White Lotus.

How to recognize the scammers

You know how you can immediately recognize dermarolling scammers? They sell their own “miracle serums” instead of clinically proven vitamin creams and ointments. Vitamin creams are expensive. They are made in pharmaceutical companies and sold in pharmacies. They have proven themselves in countless medical studies and conform to strict quality requirements. Such vitamins are expensive and not much money can be made with them, hence the need to sell self-produced “serums” that cost nearly nothing to produce and can be sold at a huge profit margin. The most expensive part is the bottle and the cost of sending. Stay far away from those peddling their own serums, potions, herbal extracts and essential oil mixtures. More on how to recognize dermarolling scammers.

Scammers are recognized by how much they spam on forums and on how many “spammy” sites link to them. We do not post on forums. We do not advertize. We do not sell magical miracle lotions that cost half a dollar to make. If you want bigger breasts, don’t try dermarolling – it’s a waste of time.

The common meaning of “normal” is “of the standard type”. But according to the dictionary, “normal” can also mean “natural”. In biology specifically, “normal” can also mean “of natural occurrence”.

After long and careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that most personality disorders are in fact not just “normal”, they are better than “normal”: They are nature’s way of optimizing group survival. For an evolutionary standpoint, having a small percentage of personality-disordered individuals is long-term advantageous to a tribe, compared to a tribe that has significantly less (or more) of those individuals.

This article brings good news to many of those diagnosed with a personality disorder. You may have been born with specialized, rare characteristics that are so important for the long-term survival of your society and the welfare of the human race that evolution has provided society with “disordered” people such as yourself. Just like any modern society needs specialized professions, human civilization, from the Papua’s in the rain forest to inner city Copenhagen needs you – that is the reason you exist in virtually all populations and have existed in a sizeable percentage since the beginning of written history and likely since time immemorial. The interesting aspect about all PD’s I’ll be covering below is that those diagnosed with it consider themselves normal and the others “strange”. Some people with Aspergers for example don’t understand how others can tolerate living in what they perceive to be a mess, a chaotic, disorganized state of  life. A psychopath sees people with a conscience as flawed, weak, sheep. Schizoids think of emotions as irrational, annoying, counterproductive reflexes. “Aspies” call us “neurotypicals” and Schizoids call us “normies” and they don’t envy us at all.

Unrestrained by an education in psychology or psychiatry, and with a strong skepticism of both almost-to-be-called pseudosciences, I divide personality disorders into hereditary PD’s and acquired PD’s.

In this piece, I will talk about the so-called “hereditary” or “genetic” personality disorders, leaving acquired PD’s such as Borderline Personality Disorder (often caused by an absence of love in childhood in the presence of abuse) and ADHD (may be caused by food chemicals, medications, environmental toxins, infections) out of consideration. I also won’t talk about late-onset brain diseases that aren’t PD’s at all, such as Schizophrenia – I suspect that this disease is caused by a brain infection or (semi) autoimmune reaction. Of course the cause of PD’s is still controversial, but here’s my view for anyone who’s interested.

The word hereditary suggests that such disorders somehow are inherited from the parents, as in an unlucky genetic combination, resulting in a personality disorder. I think that perhaps such PD’s are not truly hereditary at all, but that there could be a deeper mechanism at work that ensures that no matter who your parents are, the fundamentals of the DNA replication mechanism or perhaps the protein synthesis from that DNA ensure, in a “Russian Roulette” fashion, that you may later end up having being diagnosed with Aspergers, Psychopathy, Schizoid Personality Disorder or Homosexuality.

Mentioning Homosexuality here is deliberately provoking yet in my opinion correct. I reclassify homosexuality as a PD because it is a hereditary aberration from the norm, and I think that homosexuality has the same cause as the other hereditary PD’s. There is overwhelming evidence that homosexuality is a result of gene expression. That should not be the controversial part. The remarkable aspect is that I claim that homosexuality is “normal” in the sense that evolution ensures a healthy 5% homosexual subpopulation in, likely, every population group, from Azeris to Zulus. With “healthy” I mean that at least in our recent evolutionary past, a roughly 5% incidence of homosexuality gave a tribe an evolutionary advantage over a tribe with a lower or higher percentage. The figure of 5% would yield a survival benefit of the tribe that would more than offset any lowered reproductive rates. Primitive tribes were largely polygamous and strongly culture-driven, so having a modest percentage of homosexual men abstaining from intercourse would not result in a lowered birth rate, and it is unlikely that lesbian women would be able to resist peer pressure, cultural expectations and being “given” to some brute and his brothers.

It is likely that homosexuality, in the past, had little to no evolutionary disadvantage in terms of raw baby-production. But what would its evolutionary advantage be? Think of the strong cultural limits and boundaries that have traditionally existed in primitive tribes that dwelled the savannah or rain forest. We know from plentiful anthropological research that the roles were strictly gender-divided. Strong, semi-religious taboos prevented women from participating in hunts, for example. The “female brain” of a homosexual man could have been of a small average benefit, in a hunting party. Call it the benefit of “female intuition”, although that is an oversimplification. Homosexual men have partially female brains, in spite of the fact that those brains are bathed in Testosterone instead of Oestrogen. Sex hormones are powerful modifiers of behavior and even intellectual prowess.  Homosexuality breaks cultural gender taboos and basically forces a modicum of male POV into female society and vice versa. This can’t be a bad thing. Gay computer scientist Alan Turing played a role in an allied victory of WWII with his revolutionary intuition that “by finding contradictions we can deduce the truth”. His algorithm cracked the Nazi code. I suspect that the unique combination of a partialy “female brain” plus Testosterone plus talent can result in amazing scientific discoveries, due to the fact that female brains have more connections between the brain halves and Testosterone helps with certain mental tasks – or perhaps Oestrogen impairs them. I say this because I have talked to transgendered men receiving Oestrogen. One told me that he suddenly had become remarkably worse at map reading and much more emotional to boot. Remember:  I’m only voicing some ideas here – no references to studies – even though they do exist.

What about the evolutionary advantage of having a few percent of psychopaths (euphemistically called “Antisocial personality disorder” nowadays) in the tribe? Surely, such antisocial, egotistical folk would hardly be missed? Certainly, psychopaths aren’t the most loyal of friends, neighbors and citizens, but we should not ignore the possible tribal-evolutionary benefits of their particular character. Tribes were often engaged in warfare. Tribes were in constant competition with each other and fearlessness was highly prized. Tribes abducted each other’s women and the most respected hunters were the most fearless ones. The most successful hunters and warriors were richly endowed with the favors of women. Psychopaths make excellent warriors and hunters because they are nearly fearless without necessarily being reckless. The most successful warriors are those without conscience or mercy. A conscience precludes one from efficient genocide – meaning one leaves competing genes in the gene pool – and mercy allows possible future enemies to remain alive. Hence the psychopath gene does not only perpetuate itself but it also contributes to tribal survival by supplying the tribe with the meat of larger animals, slaughtering its enemies and providing it with fresh women. Contemporary psychopaths are spreading their genes far and wide – they are greatly overrepresented in politics, business and finance. Most of the world today is ruled by them. Psychopaths make excellent surgeons because they are not affected by the death of their patients – allowing them to remain in the profession, approaching each operation without distracting nervousness. It is a widespread myth that all psychopaths are murderers and thieves. Many of them have leadership jobs and the majority never even get into significant trouble with the law. It is estimated that as much as 4% of all people are psychopaths. Psychopaths in positions of power are often revered by their tribe, electorate or subjects as heroes, defenders of the nation and enforcers of progress, unity and prosperity. Even though this is not always the case, there are examples where mass-murdering psychopaths such as Mao Zedong, at the great expense of human life and liberty, imposing harsh decrees, pulled a country out of poverty and into a leadership role. I’m not defending the psychopath’s psychopathic actions – it merely shows that their genes can be favored by evolution by the sheer consequences of their often nefarious actions towards other gene pools. A good example on how psychopaths can work for the general benefit of their tribe or gene pool, whilst cynically sacrificing the lives of hundreds in another gene pool, is this article on the Japanese meltdowns. US top officials want “suicide cleanup teams” to go into the area to sacrifice themselves, otherwise the jet stream will bring pollution to the US. Psychopaths can do maths with human lives and coldly make life-and-death decisions pertaining other’s lives. Ordinary people would get emotional and the loss of live would be far greater. And one wonders what kind of “disorder” turns some seemingly ordinary people into heroes – the kind of heroes battling now to contain the radiation in Fukushima.

Another common PD is Schizoidism. Schizoid PD has nothing at all to do with Schizophrenia. Schizoid people are benignly “anti-social” in a rather interesting and often highly productive way. A schizoid person can’t form strong bonds. They often won’t marry or have kids. They have no empathy in the sense that they do care, but they don’t understand other people’s emotions. A Schizoid won’t feel very affected when you praise or reproach them. They are extraordinary emotionally stable people. They do care about others and maintain stable but generally shallow long-term relationships. They can’t “read” emotions because they don’t understand emotions and they think emotions are often exaggerated and irrational. Schizoids are analytical, generally risk-averse and emotionally cold. They don’t care about what others think of them. And they prefer to be alone. Not the type of person to produce much offspring. Why would nature ensure a modest yearly production of Schizoids, if it were bad for the population? After all, evolution has become pretty efficient after all those millions of years? It is highly unlikely that evolution is so flawed that it keeps producing societal misfits, useless miscreants millennium after millennium. Bad genes eventually leave the gene pool one way or the other. If Schizoids were a liability they would have disappeared a long time ago.

Schizoids often have jobs that other people would find mind numbingly boring. Someone has to do the boring jobs. Schizoids can spend a lifetime doing them conscientiously. They are overrepresented in scientific research as well as menial jobs such as cleaning. The special benefit that Schizoids bring to a primitive tribe could be that their personality is excellently suited for the responsible task of night sentry. They like solitude and have a very strong sense of responsibility. They often prefer boring jobs. Typical Schizoids are very responsible people and they crave job security. Intelligent Schizoids – and most Schizoids score above the average – can be found in the highest echelons of scientific research where they use their special talent for tenacious attention to meticulous detail. Where others would have given up already due to a waning interest, a Schizoid could spend her entire productive life looking for a way to cure cancer or to find a commercially viable method for chemically assisted nuclear fusion. Franz Kafka was Schizoid.

Asperger Syndrome: I am convinced that these people fulfill an important role in society. They always have and they always will, in spite of the fact that they are frustrating to deal with. People with Aspergers are also known as “highly functioning autists”. The “highly functioning” often refers to functioning on a higher level than neurotypicals in certain fields. The very best computer programmers in the world are often those with Aspergers, because Asperger Syndrome makes it easy to hyperfocus on one topic for days on end. The most complex computer algorithms can be imagined, created and refined by a programmer with Aspergers. Errors are intolerable to their rigid mind. Things have to be perfect. If I ever had to fly to the moon in a space rocket, I would prefer to have an Aspie assemble and test the live support equipment, tighten the nuts and bolts and supervise the safety procedures during launch. Asperger people can become the world’s biggest experts in complex fields because their mind has the unsurpassed ability to focus. Like Schizoids they are loners, but unlike Schizoids they can be very emotional. Many have a relentless drive to learn everything there is to know about a certain subject and then apply that knowledge with laser-like focus. Things have to be done to schedule. Things have to be arranged properly. In tribal days, these authorative, neurotic sticklers to protocol and detail would have made sure that the preservation of foods would be done properly, thereby preventing spoilage and the starvation of tribe members. It has been suspected that Albert Einstein had Aspergers. This twelve year old boy also has Aspergers, and is treading in Einstein’s footsteps.

People with Paranoid personality disorder (again, we are not talking about paranoid schizophrenics!) would have been the proverbial guard dogs of tribal society. Due to their unusual attention, their raised awareness to whatever may be subtly wrong, they are often wrong but also sometimes right when the rest of the tribe is still unaware of the danger. Perhaps they sensed a hidden maliciousness during the last visit of a powerful rival tribe’s chief. Not the slightest detail escapes them. They have a sensitive nose for danger. They’re sometimes wrong and sometimes right. Even if they were often wrong – it wouldn’t matter much in terms of tribal survival. But if one of them could ever sense serious danger (floods, food poisoning, surprise raids) and avert disaster then that would be to a great evolutionary advantage. Perhaps we’re not listening enough to our ever-so-slightly “paranoid” fellow men, because some of what they suspect may actually be true.

Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder also aids tribal survival. They likely were priests, enforcing religious morals upon the tribe, such as to avoid the tribe from perishing due to sexually transmitted diseases like Syphilis. Wikipedia says that this PD is characterized by rigid conformity to rules, moral codes and excessive orderliness. Exactly what a tribe needs: The enforcement of hygiene and other beneficial behavioral code amongst its members to the benefit of all. The enforcement of the social contract, in spite of the fact that it may not be apparent why it is enforced. The obsessive-compulsive does not care – things are enforced because “they are the way they are because they always have been so” – end of discussion. Religious fundamentalism has powerful genetic roots. They were the enforcers of moral/religious rules of chastity and monogamy, where deviation of those rules would have meant the eventual demise of the tribe.

Conclusion:

We should stop trying to treat many of the “personality disorders”. Most PD’s are nature’s way of creating a small quotum of non-ordinary people to do what isn’t done by the average Joe or Jane. Many personality disorders are hereditary and can’t be “treated” and it would be counterproductive for society to do so. People with PD’s should be considered fully functional members of society and not thought of as having a flaw in need to be treated. No matter how hard people with PD’s are to deal with in at work, privately or in school. They have unique strengths and the society that doesn’t take advantage of them does it to its own detriment. Some personality disorders should not be regarded as disorders but as natural, helpful character properties created by God or evolution. Not normal as in conform the norm, but natural as in nature producing these “disorders” for a very good reason.

This picture is from March 2011, after five months of needling. The customer is very happy with the results and posted them originally on our forum.

Dermarolling before and after pictures – 2

This photo is taken before microneedling, but after acid peels that had no significant result. The photo is taken under halogen illumination inside a bedroom.

And this photo is taken one and a half year later, in September 2010, outside in a sunny garden. The photo was taken six weeks after her last needling.

She has needled her stretch marks every 4-6 weeks for one and half years and she will continue. She has used a 1.5 mm dermaroller and the single needle, topical vit. C and Infadolan. She densely needled the stretch marks from different angles, to various depths up to 2 mm with quite some pinpoint bleeding.  No other treatment was employed. Stretch marks are still there but the overall improvement is amazing. The stretch marks tanned for the first time since they had formed. (The straight red lines are caused by swimsuit pants). The photos are not manipulated in any way.

Dermarolling before and after pictures – 3

This customer has her own blog.

This picture is from her blog. She bought our dermarolling products. “Sarah and John Vaughter” can be made out on the instructions:

This is a “before” picture:

This is a picture after three rolling sessions and two agressive single-needlings:

Such improvement usually takes more needling sessions. Click on the picture for an enlargement.

Dermarolling before and after pictures – 4

The  next customer’s photos are of a vaccination scar, treated with the single needle. The scar is 35 years old.

The same vaccination scar immediately after needling with the single needle:

And here is the same vaccination scar after four needlings, one months apart. The photo is taken five weeks after the last needling.  The hardened collagen scar tissue is mostly gone and the scar tanned for the first time since it had formed. She has used the single needle, topical vit. C and Infadolan.  The scar is much less visible now.  No other treatment was employed.

The middle photo was taken inside, the others outside in full summer light.

You can use single needling to improve both atrophic and hypertrophic scars, stretch marks, surgical scars (including liposuction, breast augmentation and tummy tuck scars), scars resulting from accidents including burn scars, acne scars, etcetera. You should not use it on keloid scars.

You can also improve individual wrinkles, especially the ones between the eyebrows and on the forehead.

The needle has to be very thin with a long taper. Our single needles are custom made according to our own design.

The “stretchmarked” skin is usually thinned both in the epidermis and the dermis (skin layers). Stretch marks/scars usually have abundant collagen in them but that collagen is in the form of a scar – the collagen layout is different from that in normal skin and the elastin fibers are abnormal as well.

Pricking the stretch marks densely with a single needle will crush the hardened collagen bundles and that should smoothe the texture of the stretch marks and make them less bright and shiny. With repeated needling, the indented scars fill up a little. Although the scar will never completely disappear.

If you are lucky, the repeated micro injuries caused by pricking the skin will make the stretch marks heal with a better collagen layout and a fiber configuration that is a little more “normal skin”-like. Old scars usually have poor blood supply. Needling often triggers angiogenesis – the growth of new blood vessels. Needling can also induce melanocyte production and that will enable the stretch marks to tan or partially tan. All this is individual, so we can’t give hard guarantees.

If your stretch marks are very shallow (unfortunately, most of them are not), they could even disappear entirely but so far, no current method can totally remove deep stretch marks. All we can do is improve them over time. Remember – there are no silver bullets or magical solutions. All real improvement takes time, effort and the endurance of some pain.

Dermarolling before and after pictures – 5

This customer tried to improve her skin texture – successfully.

Before (Sep. 12, 2011) and after dermarolling (Jan 14, 2012).