Negative Ions for Dummies

Negative ion

When it comes to internet health claims, we generally stay on the sidelines... unless, that is, one of our DotD nominee freelancers writes something that begs for exposure. Well, that's just what happened today: we were wandering the pages of Leaf Group's Sciencing.com niche, which is where we came upon Megan Shoop trying to tell people, "How to Measure Negative Ions."¹ Let us tell you, we laughed uproariously...

Lest we make the same mistake made by Shoop, we'll be honest: we have no earthly idea how to detect negative ions, although half an hour or so of surfing led us to a YouTube video for a DIY ion detector and an old paper-based schematic for an "electric charge detector" that would probably do the same thing. Shoop's advice, however, lies at the other end of the DIY spectrum:

"...test the air with a negative ion tester... Push the power button on your ion tester..." Yup: Megan says that to measure negative ions, you buy a negative ion measuring device. Not only that, but our BA in English-holding freelancer performed a basic copy-reword-paste job on the instructions for one brand of commercial tester. That oughta be useful... ...as useful as this particular step: "Compare the original calibration reading to the reading from the negative ion generator. "

Wait, what? Megan, you never performed a calibration step. Do you even know what "calibration" means?

We were a little curious when we noticed Shoop's assertation that,

"Negative ions in the air can actually boost your alertness and mood, according to WebMD."

Well, we tracked down Megan's reference and followed it to its source. That information came from a blog post in the site's "Heath and Balance" section that was written by... wait for it... someone with a journalism degree. Maybe Shoop never noticed the disclaimer at the bottom of the page: "WebMD does not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment."

Why does it not surprise us that our Dumbass of the Day thinks another freelancing J-school grad is an authority? Feh.

¹ Leaf Group, in their wisdom, assigned one of their crack rewrite specialists to try to fix Shoops's mess, We'll get back to that one later, but in the meantime you can have a look at Megan's original mess with the WayBack Machine at archive.org. Its URL was  ehow.com/how_8488210_measure-negative-ions.html

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