No Lynne, COVID-19 is not cured by mouthwashes

        Lynne McTaggart is editorial director of the publication What Doctors Don’t Tell You. Nobody could accuse her of modesty—on her website she tells us that she is known as as a ‘metaphysical rock star’, ‘the Madonna of the Quantum World,’ ‘the Malcolm Gladwell of the New Science’ and even ‘The Dalai Mama.’ She proclaims her newsletter as "the world’s No 1 health magazine". Clearly, she needs no help at self-promotion, but Coast to Coast AM nevertheless gilded the lily with "She is consistently listed as one of the world’s 100 most spiritually influential people."

        This was advance copy for her two-hour appearance last night with host George Noory. I confess that I nodded off at some point during the two hours, but I heard her say that "alternative medicine cures all those illnesses that conventional medicine cannot". (Emphysema? Asthma? Diabetes mellitus? Creutzfeld-Jacob? Polio? Ebola? I'd like to see your data on those some time, Lynne).

        I'm not the only one with a skeptical view of McTaggart and other "alternative medicine" loonies. In an article in The Guardian^{note 1} on 17th February 2016, Ben Goldacre took McTaggart to task for confusing Tamiflu with a vaccine for bird flu in her "World's No.1" newsletter. McTaggart's article recommended, for treatment of bird flu, vitamins A, C, and E, homeopathy^{note 2}, and the herbal remedies echinacea^{note 3}, Hydrastis canadensis^{note 4}, Andrographis paniculata^{note 5}, and Phytolacca americana^{note 6}. Goldacre summed up:

« Seriously. It goes on for pages and pages, rehashing the Tamiflu information leaflet's safety data, in the most scaremongerish tones they can muster, quoting scientific journal articles - with the full citation, journal title, page number, year, issue number, all in the main body of the text - all to make themselves look as authoritative as is humanly possible, all while cursing and mocking the medical profession. And all the while they are blissfully, beautifully, wonderfully ignorant of the fact they have got the most important thing, at the heart of the matter, completely and utterly, pathetically, stupidly, obviously wrong. This isn't bad science. It's performance art.»

        Last night on C2C-AM McTaggart excelled herself by claiming that ordinary mouthwash is a cure for COVID-19. What a whopper of a misunderstanding!!! There is not the slightest evidence of this. What has been said, quite authoritatively,^{note 7} is that the use of commerical mouthwash may possibly reduce the transmission of the Sars-Cov-2 virus. Since COVID-19 patients typically have a very high viral load in the mouth and throat, that's almost obvious.

        What with this and the shameless monthly infomercials by "Doctor" Joel Wallach, Coast-to-Coast AM marches on in its mission to misinform its audience on medical matters.

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[1] "How to be beautifully, blissfully wrong about Tamiflu: just call it a bird flu vaccine". The article was in the Guardian's long-running "Bad Science" series.

[2] Since the principle of homeopathy is the treatment of a disease with a dilute solution of the disease's known cause, this suggests immersing a small bird in a jar of water and shaking it.

[3] Purple coneflower, sold OTC as a cold remedy

[4] Goldenseal, sold OTC as an anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory

[5] Chiretta, with controversial claims of relief of AIDS symptoms

[6] Pokeweed, toxic to humans

[7] "Mouthwashes could reduce the risk of coronavirus transmission, study shows". Science Daily, 10th August 2020.