Hey Sadsack – All I can go by is the information I have available to me including what was written by Jan Smith on her own web site. If there is information saying that Jan Smith’s samples were examined by MIT, I haven’t been able to find it anywhere. Maybe you have access to information I don't.
However, it is Jan Smith that said on her own website that her samples were given to Dr. Staninger and that Dr. Karjoo examined them - she made no mention of MIT herself. Here is the direct quote from Jan Smith’s site that I posted above:
A year later the second knee was replaced and this time, Concord Hospital in Concord, New Hampshire made a series of pathology slides for Dr. Hildegarde Staninger who was at that time already researching Morgellon’s disease. She sent my pathology slides to Dr. Rahim Karjoo who made the following findings, which were later made public.
Additionally, from what is posted on Jan’s website, Dr. Karjoo’s statement indicates that he didn’t actually identify the silicon / silica using chemical identification with Raman spectroscopy or similar equipment –
it notes that the fragments he looked at were “consistent” with silicon / silica. This clearly indicates that the fragments weren’t actually chemically determined to be silicon / silica – they were evaluated to be “consistent” with silica / silicon which indicates a visual comparison to me. Here’s the excerpt from Jan’s web page (which is linked to the following page):
New Lab Findings Point To Silicone/Silica and High Density Polyethlyene Fibers Causing Morgellons Disease Chronic inflammation with fibrosis, calcification of the bone and surrounding soft tissue of the joint shows presence of crystalloid fragments consistent with silicone and silica. Further, a private study to determine the chemical and biological composition of fiber specimens taken from a second woman in Florida has shown that the fiber's outer casing is made up of high density polyethylene (HDPE). The fiber material is used commonly in the manufacture of fiber optics.
This excerpt also mentions the fiber optics opinion (it is noted that the substance was identified as HDPE and then it is noted that it is "commonly used in the manufacture of fiber optics"
(which really doesn't mean that fiber optics was the actual source of the material at all when you think about it). As I noted previously, HDPE is only one of several materials that are used to “jacket” individual fibers of optical glass fiber. HDPE can be found in practically anything made of plastic which is obviously a huge amount of different things (including Ziploc bags). Silica / silicon / silicone are used in many thousands of products including fiber optics, computer chips, cookware, medical prosthetics, adhesives, sealants, food products (preservatives), beauty products, hair products and the list could go on and on. Thus, I don't see any valid reason that the HDPE and silica they found had to come from fiber optics –
why was fiber optic cable singled out? The only reason I can think of is that fiber optics can be loosely tied to nanotechnology (which to me appears to be making an unfounded assumption to agree with a predetermined conclusion without evidence of either one).
You stated that “Morgellons needs petro to build it's stuff”. How do we know that when no one truly knows what Morgellons is at this point?
I haven’t seen any actual research to indicate that Morgellons has definitively been proven to require petrochemicals as a factor of any kind – in fact, I haven’t seen any definitive information that much of anything is actually KNOWN about Morgellons. As far as your own silicon levels, although I’m not a scientist or a doctor, I think I do have a pretty fair guess about it.
You had noted in a post on a different thread that you had used an awful lot of a product containing dimethicone (far more than recommended from what you posted) – dimethicone is made from silicone oil as is noted in the next link (with a brief excerpt).
Although it is just a guess on my part (not being a "real" scientist), it seems to me that using excessive amounts of a product containing dimethicone might explain the high silicone levels in your system .
* Dimethicone - (Beauty): Definition Dimethicone - a silicone oil used in hair and skin care products. Adds shine to the hair and a slippery feeling to skin products.
Like you and many other people, I read a lot of information from many sources regarding morgellons and I also have done a lot of research personally on the biology of the human body and how nutrition impacts it. I agree with you that answers for Morgellons will most likely come from SCIENTISTS eventually as you put it. However, I also think that laypersons can educate themselves effectively and they often have a unique perspective that scientists and doctors simply can’t have because it is not part of their training – I personally think you underestimate the potential of “non-scientists” being able to contribute valuable information. While I don’t consider myself to be a scientist per se, that doesn’t mean that I have no ability to question the validity of things that are passed off by others as scientific research. I do have a fair amount of education, experience and training in how to conduct valid scientific experiments – based on my own engineering and scientific background, Dr. Staninger’s experiments simply do not meet the basic, established criteria of being valid, objective scientific experiments.
I have found very little if any independent information available on Dr. Staninger’s background and credentials and in the only “published papers” I have found from her, she uses herself and her own work as scientific references an awful lot (which is generally not considered to be valid references in the scientific realm – citing your own work doesn’t provide independent validation).
The “reports” she posted on Rense really don’t hold up to critical examination based on accepted scientific principles if you look at them objectively. The first time I read her “reports” on Rense, they did seem to have an air of credibility, but the more I read the information the more I realized that it really wasn’t very credible based on any stringent scientific perspective. Here are a few things I noted from her “reports” on Rense that cannot be considered to be valid from a scientific perspective:
• Sample integrity was basically non-existent in most cases – samples collected and mailed in by anyone using no established criteria based on the information available.
• In most cases she doesn’t state which lab examined the individual samples. She lists 4 labs including MIT as being used but only one sample was noted to have specifically been tested by MIT.
I personally think listing all four labs in the “heading” of every “report” was to give the impression that MIT was involved in the testing more than they actually were. If she thought the meteorite sample was contaminated, why did she send it to MIT for testing? That doesn’t make any sense to me.
•
EVERYTHING being “tested” was compared to what she called the “original golden-head” – there is no mention where the “original golden-head” came from or why everything was compared to it. Comparing everything to such an imagined “gold standard” prevents objective analysis and inquiry (no valid scientific experiment searching for something would use a predetermined outcome for comparison).
Apparently the decision had already been made by Dr. Staninger that the “original golden-head” (whatever it is and wherever it came from) was the culprit in Morgellons before the experiments were even carried out. Her “reports” seem more to me like she is trying to prove her own conclusions about the cause of Morgellons rather than actually trying to objectively determine what is the cause or characteristics of Morgellons.
• Conclusions are drawn and assumptions are made by Dr. Staninger without real evidence or complete information (for instance, assuming that fiber optic cable rather than the host of other products that contain these substances is the cause of the HDPE and silica that Staninger associates with Morgellons is a prime example of this).
Many samples were mostly made of things common to human biology like oxygen, sulfur, silica, carbon, etc. – this seems to be ignored for the most part by Dr. Staninger in favor of highlighting substances (even in very small amounts) that fit into her own predetermined notions about what Morgellons is or isn’t.
• Dr. Staninger and Dr. Karjoo apparently collaborated on the testing but they apparently reached different conclusions on how to treat Morgellons based on the same testing. Dr. Karjoo appears to have started recommending nutrasilver as a treatment (which seems to indicate he thinks that Morgellons has a “natural” biological component) while Dr. Staninger appears to have started recommending oxyopaline among other things including Far Infrared (FIR) Sauna treatments (detoxification appears to be her real focus for every condition).
If you want to believe that Dr. Staninger has Morgellons all figured out that’s fine with me – I simply have a different opinion than you do apparently. My opinion is based on my own views of how the research is being done and my opinion is formed only from the information that I have access to. As I stated before, I simply hope that someone figures this mystery out soon for the sake of all that suffer from it. At this point, I just don’t personally have a lot of confidence in some of the people that are currently involved or the research they have done based on what has been made public.
January 19th, 2009, 06:09 PM
It seems 
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