Talk:Negative air ionization therapy

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I think the section should be kept separate and renamed Negative Air Ion Therapy. (a) The predominant use of air ionizers is not for mood regulation, but air purification. It would be silly to mix the two topics. (b) There a many kinds of ions, chemical and gaseous. "Ion Therapy" is therefore a confusing misnomer. Mt12 19:38, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Um, all gasses are made up of chemicals, you know. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:53, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Suggest Merge

With Air ioniser Redheylin (talk) 23:54, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Are Air ionisers used for air purification the same machines used for ion therapy?

If not, then I think the articles can remain separate for now.

If they are the same, then I think it'd be a great idea to merge and create some re-direct pages. Yaki-gaijin (talk) 03:23, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it is the same technology. The air-purification is scientifically attested and explained but there is another effect which is statistically attested but unexplained. Redheylin (talk) 17:11, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

More importantly neither article talks about the well known effect of negative ionization increasing human energy/exciteability. Will look around to see if any wiki articles do, including ones ref'd here. I mean the REASON it is assumed this will work is not explained in this article! CarolMooreDC (talk) 17:08, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Nowadays the majority of the ionisers that are used for air cleaning produce both negative and positive ions. These are Plasmacluster Ion generators. http://www.sharpindialimited.com/FINAL_H1N1_English.pdf Negative ionisers can clean the air too but claims are made for the therapeutic effect of negative ions, helping various conditions and improving mood. It is a difficult area of study because many domestic ionisers do not produce significant amounts of ions and many can even produce harmful ozone. --Wool Bridge (talk) 12:11, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

A single extra electron

Not all ions have only a single extra electron, many have 2 or more. 24.236.193.190 (talk) 21:55, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Minu Ion

I think the Minus ion redirect should go to a newly-created Tourmaline Watch article instead. Those darm silicon sports watches are everywhere nowadays!--Phagopsych (talk) 22:49, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Negative

"Negative air ionization therapy". What does the "negative" imply? I would guess that the air is negatively ionized, would "Negatively ionized air therapy" not make more sense? In the current wording the air could be negative or even the therapy. English is not my native language so I can understand that I am wrong here. 2001:610:1908:C000:C876:5A6F:F623:70AD (talk) 14:43, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

Ionization is typically too transient to be of therapeutic use

Negative air ionization therapy is best described as an alternative medicine treatment based on the dubious premise that a macroscopic specimen of air can be given a significant net negative ionization and maintained in that state long enough to be inhaled. In fact, such a net charge, under most circumstances, would rapidly dissipate by conduction to its environment. For example, a negatively charged mass of air, if stored in a metal tank would rapidly convey its charge to the tank; in a glass bottle, the ions would be quickly adsorbed by oppositely charged ions in the glass. By contrast, the well-understood and validated technology of electrostatic precipitation uses a supply of ions to remove solid particles from a gas, but there the ionization is continually replenished and confined to the space between the electrodes, to which the solid particles are attracted by virtue of having adsorbed ions of opposite charge. For this reason, if there is any pharmacologic effect of breathing "ionized air" it is likely the result not of the ions but of some stable chemical change in the air persisting after ions' charge has been neutralized.CharlesHBennett (talk) 07:33, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

Pseudoscience?

The five sources given for the claim "The mainstream scientific community considers it pseudoscience" do not support that claim. The first is a review of studies on the effect of air ions on respiratory function (not on mood). The second and third are about specific wearable products. The fourth criticizes a marketing claim made about a specific air ionizer product without making any broader critique of air ionization therapy. The fifth criticizes various products related in some way to water, none of which are air ionizers.

Moreover, this claim seems inconsistent with the rest of the article, which describes and cites research on negative air ionization therapy by mainstream scientists, published in mainstream peer-reviewed journals. Nostalgebraist (talk) 00:29, 7 January 2018 (UTC)

Sorry, but you clearly do not understand modern scams. The five citations are all about this particular kind of scams that use the term "ion" or derivatives in pseudo-scientific ways to fool the general populace who have no scientific knowledge. If you have basic knowledge in physics and chemistry, you would readily understand that there is no scientific basis to practically all these scam products. The main problem is that whenever scammers get called out they simply change their product name and company name and carry on, so it is impossible to find direct citations concerning the scams in the vast majority of cases.

Furthermore, you do not seem to have actually read the rest of the article, which describes and cites research showing that high-density ion 'therapy' and placebo could not be distinguished, and that bright white light therapy seems significantly more effective than negative ion 'therapy' in treating SAD. And did you notice that three of the citations supporting this 'therapy' are from the same source? And that the last cited webpage is gone? And did you read the comments by CharlesHBennett in the above section? Do you know the science behind what he says?

Finally, if you modify this wikipedia article and cause harm to innocent people by doing so, are you going to take full responsibility for their suffering? If not, please refrain from making such rash proclamations that only serve to help scammers. 115.66.243.47 (talk) 10:52, 8 January 2018 (UTC)

I don't think we disagree about basic science, or about the nature of pseudoscientific scams (which I agree are common and despicable). But I think you are confused about the subject matter of this Wikipedia article. The first sentence currently reads:

Negative air ionization therapy is the use of air ionizers as an experimental non-pharmaceutical treatment for seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and mild depression.

Thus, this is not an article about the general category of therapies that claim to use "negative ions" (I think we can agree that there are various scam therapies in that category). It is about a specific proposed use of air ionizers for treating certain mood disorders. And this specific proposal was made by mainstream scientists and is being studied by mainstream scientists. The idea was originally proposed by Michael Terman, a mainstream psychology researcher at Columbia whose earlier research helped set the 10,000-lux white light as the standard for light therapy. See, e.g., this article from the American Psychological Association about Terman's background and his work on negative ion therapy for SAD. (Wikipedia's article on Michael Terman says nothing about him being a purveyor of pseudoscience; for consistency, it seems like either both articles should make the pseudoscience claim or neither should.)

Yes, this page cites one study that did not find statistical significance for negative air ionization therapy over placebo. It also cites two studies that did find significance. Since statistical significance is affected by sample size (more generally, by statistical test power, which is a function of sample size and other factors), it is common for some studies to find significance and others not to, even when there is a true effect.

That's somewhat of a side issue, though, because we are not disputing whether the therapy is pseudoscience -- we are disputing whether "the mainstream scientific community considers [it] pseudoscience." To the extent that the mainstream scientific community has investigated this topic, it has emphatically not considered it pseudoscience. It has performed controlled studies on it, published them in mainstream peer-reviewed journals, and continues to do so. To argue that the mainstream scientific community has a given opinion, you need to show that opinion being espoused by members of that community -- to give examples of mainstream scientists (not Wikipedia editors on a talk page) expressing this opinion about Terman's proposal for using air ionizers to treat SAD and mild depression (not about other therapies that happen to use the word "ion" in their marketing material).

If you still don't agree that we should remove the claim about pseudoscience from this page, can we agree to leave up the "dubious -- discuss" note with a link to this section? If you can't agree to that, I think I will ask for a third opinion via the dispute resolution noticeboard.

Nostalgebraist (talk) 06:07, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

Also wondered about this sentence ("The mainstream scientific community considers it pseudoscience"). Like Nostalgebraist pointed out the references don't support this sentence, because they are not related to "Negative air ionization therapy". (User:Stoefln) 09:25, 03 March 2018 (UTC)

[First a disclaimer - I'm new to contributing to wikipedia and am likely violating a handful of protocols.] I found another article that appears to be taking this seriously. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3598548/. It was published in BMC Psychiatry, which claims to be an open access peer-reviewed journal with an impact factor of 2.613. The research was paid for by a Canadian power company and the authors are all employees of Exponent Inc. Perhaps we can protect innocent people from harm by pointing out to them that Terman told WebMD "There is a major problem with advertised units" (https://www.webmd.com/balance/features/negative-ions-create-positive-vibes#2). I do want to note my personal frustration: I found this page after running into too many pages praising these negative ions to feel comfortable dismissing them out of hand, and wanting to know which negative ions these were, and where the associated positive ions were. 10^6 ions/cm^3 may sound like a lot, but unless my math is way off it's a lot less than density of (negative AND positive) ions in either water or in the human test subjects. I finally found a page that mentioned the Lenard effect, and the wikipedia page points to the American Meteorological Society, who can actually explain why the air above a waterfall actually has a net negative charge: http://glossary.ametsoc.org/wiki/Lenard_effect. Of course, this also shows that the air below a waterfall will have a net positive charge, a fact that nobody seems to have commented on. Rabbit burrow (talk) 01:47, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

• I found this news article [1] "in the 1800s the English developed seaside resorts to treat the depressed and unwell", and it talks about how the negative ions from the ocean improve people's mental health. This article however isn't about that, its about the "air ionization" machines, which appear to be a scam since either none are powerful enough to do it properly or other factors. I found this place originally while looking for information about negative ions improving health. Wikipedia does not have any article that covers that though. Dream Focus 00:07, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

As someone who is very aware that where there are negative ions, there are positive ions nearby: if there are negative ions in sea air, then the positive ones are in the ocean or closer to it. It seems as though the article should say "go to the sea shore, but whatever you do, don't go in the water". Rabbit burrow (talk) 14:16, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

Too much jargon

Why does the article switch without explanation from “negative ions” to “high-density ions”? If the terms are equivalent, choose one and stick with it. If they are not, explain. And what is an RCT? — ℜob C. alias ALAROB 15:08, 24 July 2019 (UTC)

Reference [10] is not appropriate

Because it concerns experiments with a DEACTIVATED negative ion generator = placebo ! 85.216.197.77 (talk) 09:41, 24 December 2019 (UTC)