pH Strips for Dummies

pH test strips

Just when our staffers here at the Antisocial Network think they've found the dumbest rubbish ever posted to the internet in hopes of picking up a few extra pennies, along comes a new candidate. As you might expect, our research team has once again gone to that apparently inexhaustible well of dumbassery, the intersection of STEM and eHow.com. For today's demonstration of scientific illiteracy we're calling on an English major (and wedding planner) named Tiesha Whatley, who astounded one of our team with what she had to say about "How to Use pH Strips"¹ at Healthfully.com.

Yep: a wedding planner holding forth on chemistry: what could go wrong here? Well, plenty, starting with Tiesha's very first statement:

"pH strips are used to monitor the body's pH balance."

Say what? We wondered where Whatley found this bullbleep, but she didn't supply a reference. In researching, we learned that some people carry around their own pH test kits to "monitor their body's pH balance," although the first 'leventy-'leven entries in Google search were for companies selling... you guessed it: pH test kits! But why? Well, according to Tiesha,

"Most individuals do these tests from home to monitor the amounts of acid that is flowing through the body."

"...acid... flowing through the body"? WTF? Although clearly out of her depth with all this science-y stuff, Whatley faithfully reworded the instructions from one or another website. That means readers of her post will learn all about how to pee on a pH test strip or shove one under their tongues (we'd assume, not the same strip). Tiesha "informs" her readers that "...In healthy people, the pH should be 6.4 or above..." Although she didn't say pH of what: urine? saliva? blood? sweat? tears? And does that mean that a saliva pH of, say, 11.3 is healthy? After all, 11.3 is above 6.4... After blathering about test methods for several hundred words, Whatley lets her readers on on the secret of just what you're measuring with your pH test kit:

"A basic pH scale is 1 to 14. A healthy pH is 6.4, but that doesn't mean that you won't still have some problems like acid reflux, poor energy levels or acne. A pH of 6.8 should start to make your [sic] feel better and look healthier. A pH of 7.1 or higher means that your body is mostly alkaline. Anything under 6.2 means you are incredibly acidic and need to take actions to change this."

"A basic pH scale" is, we say, an unfortunate word choice, but we suspect Whatley doesn't know enough about pH to understand why that's the case. In looking through her oeuvre at eHow, we saw that she published dozens of how-to articles for computers... wanna guess who'll be featured in the Dumbass of the Day computers week edition? Yep: that's a rhetorical question...

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_4709524_use-ph-strips.html

copyright © 2016-2022 scmrak

SI - CHEMISTRY