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As claimed on page 33 of this MMS book:

  • All pathogens (poison producers) have a negative ORP.

  • All beneficial bacteria have a positive ORP.

    In other words:

    The beneficial bacteria are positively charged.

  • Human tissue cells also have a weak positive charge.

Are these valid claims?


Additional clarification of the terminology:

  • ORP

    All organisms and body cells and even liquids have an ORP (Oxidation Reduction Potential) that can be either positive or negative. The ORP is the electrical charge that cells exert on other things in their immediate environment. Oxidizers also have an ORP, mostly called Oxidation Potential, and all oxidizers have a positive potential.

  • Pathogens

    Pathogens create a waste material that is poisonous to the body.

  • Beneficial bacteria

    Beneficial bacteria do not generate any poisonous material.

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    It's worth to note that the meanings "negative" and "positive" as we use on physics are purely arbitrary and have no meaning as "good" or "bad".
    – T. Sar
    Commented Sep 26, 2016 at 20:41
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    Unlikely: strictly aerobic microbes generally have positive ORP and strictly anaerobic microbes generally have negative ORP. Given that there are pathogens among both aerobic and anaerobic microbes, that leads me to believe that the claim is pseudoscience. Commented Sep 26, 2016 at 21:00
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    That it might be pseudoscience is unsurprising, given the source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Mineral_Supplement Commented Sep 26, 2016 at 21:01
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    Of course, raise the ORP enough and you'll kill everything, but you're asking about it somehow distinguishing between pathogens and beneficial organisms, which there is no evidence for. Commented Sep 27, 2016 at 18:19
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    @kenorb No, it is not possible. See my answer. Commented Sep 27, 2016 at 21:17

2 Answers 2

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The beneficial strain of E. coli K-12 has a negative ORP. Therefore, the original claim cannot be universally true.

Furthermore, E. coli is a facultative anaerobe, which means it can survive in both oxygenated and oxygen-free environments. Since some strains of E. coli are pathogens, this means that the claims elsewhere in that document that oxygen kills pathogens but preserves beneficial organisms are also false.

Source:

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    The beauty of the "falsifiable test" in science is demonstrated by the brevity of this very complete answer. Commented Nov 29, 2018 at 15:50
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Pathogens create a waste material that is poisonous to the body.

The more common definition of pathogen is that it does harm to its host - see abstract of this interesting looking paper "What is a pathogen?" which notes that "pathogen" is mutually defined with "host" - a pathogen for one organism may be innocuous or even beneficial to another. Similarly the location within the host matters: most strains of E. coli are beneficial in the human large intestine e.g. through vitamin K production but are a cause of urinary tract infections. So ORP by itself does not classify the bacteria.

The beneficial bacteria are positively charged.

This seemingly conflates the reduction potential with the electrostatic charge. This extensive table of electrode potentials shows that the reduction of positively charged ions can have either a positive or a negative electrode potential.

human tissue cells have a weak positive charge

Actually the cell membrane surface charge is reported to be negative. However since the context of this claim in the linked MMS book is that the positive charge repels oxygen which "is positively charged" it is probably safe to ignore it since this reasoning would apparently prevent oxygen interacting with cells too, i.e. preventing respiration.

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