How to Spot a Psychopath

A reader writes:

I was wondering if you have come across "Water Ion Technologies" before. My skills tend towards electronics or I.T., and about the most interesting thing I ever did with chemicals probably wasn't that good for me at the time. I know you're not really a chemical science site, although, in fairness, you seem to derive some small amounts of schadenfreude from debunking some of the more obvious pseudoscience shysters that inhabit the 'net. God knows I do when you do it.

So... Should I be super excited about what they're saying, or do I need to take more of those chemicals before their vision will fit into my reality?

Richard

Usually, purveyors of magic water at least somewhat restrict their claims.

Usually, it's good for what ails you. Either it's treated with magnets or dual overhead quantum recipulating sprines, or it's just some mildly alkaline spring water that the seller declares to be Water Of Gladness or whatever. And away they go selling the stuff, come what may.

Or perhaps it's not of medical value, but you can run your car on it.

Or it's not water at all, but separated hydrogen and oxygen that for ill-described reasons has properties far more useful than the hydrogen and oxygen dealt with by boring old scientists.

Water Ion Technologies seem to have opted for "all of the above".

Their main discovery, you see, is a mystic substance called "SG Gas", which is not H₂O but "O-HH", and has a long list of properties that'll pretty much overturn the entirety of molecular chemistry if they turn out to be real.

(The Water Ion Technologies "science" page also, according to ancient psychoceramic tradition, rambles on about the patents they've applied for, as if having a patent on something means that the thing works.)

But wait! If you "infuse" water with SG Gas, you get "Ultra-Pure Polarized Water", also known as the "AquaNew" product Aqua Cura "Watt-Ahh", which combines at least five forms of pseudoscience to provide 100% of your daily requirements of whatever the hell it is they're talking about.

(Actual scientists may find the Watt-Ahh "Studies" page particularly entertaining. Watt-Ahh doesn't have anything but water in it, oxyhydrogen doesn't kill cells, capacitance testing somehow proves they're really making "clustered water", now suddenly their nothing-but-water product is supposed to kill germs although that's not actually what they did with it to reach this conclusion, and now, surprise, it's a treatment for autism! And good for cut flowers. And on it goes.)

If this were the first miracle hydrogen-oxygen gas, or the first miracle water, promoted with a well-tossed salad of quantum flapdoodle, crackpot physics and claims about "hydration", "cellular communication", "detoxification", and so on, then I might be inclined to give them slightly longer shrift. Heck, they've even got one study done by a real scientist at a real university... using their own odd in-vitro protocol. But c'mon, it beats the heck out of the tests in which they forget to tell you the results.

The thing is, though, that mysterious hydrogen-oxygen gases are a long-term crank favourite. Often described as "HHO" or "Brown's Gas", they're forever allowing people to get a thousand miles per gallon or burn the gas to get back more energy than they used making it, except when some tiresome empiricist shows up and tries to actually test these claims.

And as for magic water, well, your one-stop shop for an overview of the surprisingly large number of magic-water products out there is "H₂O dot con". Their page about water cluster quackery goes into claims like the "Watt-Ahh" ones in some detail; Watt-Ahh has its own little entry on the depressingly long list of similar products and devices.

Could this stuff be real? Sure, insofar as the claims made for it are even physically possible.

Since this is another potentially world-changing product that's mysteriously being sold piecemeal to individual consumers rather than turning into a multi-billion-dollar business, though, I see no reason to give it any more credence than any of the many, many, many other products in the same market sector.