"The next stage in clinical evaluation involves detailed clinical studies and toxicity testing."
No, the next step is just toxicity testing -- long before any sort of clinical study.
I'm not sure that's a reasonable comparison - this is a substance with local repute and a history of successful use.
Nobody is claiming that bleach is useful in similar applications.
If you swim in a chlorine pool (diluted bleach) as much as I do, nothing lives on your skin for long. Swimmers don't suffer athlete's foot.
Au contraire!
Sodium hypochlorite is available globally at exceptionally low cost as household bleach in concentrations of 5%-6%.... Sodium hypochlorite has been used as an antiseptic agent in dentistry for more than a century and remains a widely used root canal irrigant at concentrations ranging from 1.0%-5.25%..... The American Dental Association Council on Dental Therapeutics has designated dilute sodium hypochlorite a "mild antiseptics mouth rinse" and suggested its use for direct application to mucous membranes.
By similar application we mean completely injested so that it goes into your digestive system and/or bloodstream and selectively kills "bad" stuff only, even in low concentrations. That's what antibiotics do and that's what's so great about them.
Nobody uses bleach for that. Bleach and alcohol kill everything they touches at high enough concentrations and barely anything if it's too low.
I'm not claiming it is any kind of substitute for antibiotics.
It's worth noting this in this context, because the mechanism the clay kills by is unknown. It maybe more similar to bleach and harmful to everything, or it maybe more targeted.
>> When suspended in water, the clay killed 16 strains of ESKAPE bacteria.
Suspended, not dissolved. This is millions of tiny rocks stirred up in water. If that were injected into anything all manner of negative processes would start, all ending in massive clots/strokes. Perhaps this has some application externally, maybe on burns, but it isn't going to be injected into anything anytime soon.
Eeeehh not necessarily, it just needs to be better than not using it or not being trivially linked to the stuff.
Romans used lead as sweetener both indirectly (making defrutum and sapa in lead pot which they'd found gave them a sweeter taste than brass — because of the lead leeching into the boil) and directly after discovering the extraction of lead acetate from litharge using vinegar. And lead acetate remained in wide use as a sweetener well into the european middle-ages as the only alternate sweetener was honey which wasn't that common. Sugarcane sugar imports from India only started after crusaders brought sugar home from raiding sugar caravans in the middle-east, followed by the triangular trade's massive sugarcane exploitations in the new world — and even then it would remain a luxury in most of europe until the 18th century.
Eg, Lincoln took mercury pills ( http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/07/0717_lincoln... ) , radium cures were the thing in the 1920s ( http://www.museumofquackery.com/devices/radium.htm ), and in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8701117 I mention an account 1931 account of a man who had been "prescribed tonic pills that contained both elemental phosphorous and strychnine". After taking them for 27 years later, he had an advanced case of phossy jaw from the phosphorous.
Well, mercury is a fairly effective antibacterial agent, it's just that we don't use it much anymore because it's also very toxic to humans. I think it still does have some (limited) medical applications.
This is why I wrote 'elemental mercury'.
I am not aware of an effective medicinal use of elemental mercury, and Lincoln's pills contained that form of mercury.
Moreover, all the therapeutic clays and earths I've heard about, namely bentonite clay, activated charcoal and diatomaceous earth, are suspended in water and drunk.