Paul Karason's skin turned blue after he used colloidal silver to ease his ailments.
(Megan Robertson/ABC News)For 40 years, Paul Karason of Oregon was fair-skinned, with freckles and reddish-blond hair.
Like most people who grow older, Karason's hair turned white. But that's not all that changed color. His skin is now a bright shade of blue.
Karason said he hadn't even realized it until an old friend came to visit.
"And he looks at me and he says, 'What have you got on your face?' 'I don't have anything on my face!'" Karason said. "He says, 'Well, it looks like you've got camouflage makeup on or something.' And by golly, he came in and he was very fair-skinned, as I used to be. And that's when it hit me.
Karason's blue skin is the result of a rare medical syndrome known as argyria, or silver poisoning. He began using silver as a form of alternative medicine, not realizing what might happen to his skin.
It started a decade ago, when he saw an ad in a new-age magazine promising health and rejuvenation through colloidal silver.
"It was a daisy in a glass of water," he remembered. "The story was that the daisy had been desiccated before it was put back in the water. And [now] it looked like a fresh-picked daisy."
Karason sent away for a kit for making colloidal silver -- a home brew of microscopic silver particles suspended in water. For a while, he was drinking at least 10 ounces a day.
In those first months, he didn't notice a change in his skin color. But there were changes in his health.
"The acid reflux problem I'd been having just went away completely," he said. "I had arthritis in my shoulders so bad I couldn't pull a T-shirt off. And the next thing I knew, it was just gone."
As for whether it was the colloidal silver that had cured him, Karason said, "there's not the slightest doubt in my mind."
But there is plenty of doubt among mainstream doctors. These claims, they say, have no basis in science.
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