My mum recently asked me advice on whether to purchase a hydrogen inhaler, her friends claiming that there are multilple health benefits to inhaling hydrogen gas / using a hydrogen gas mask on your eyes.
Of course I think that's bullshit. But I need some good articles to call out the hydrogen inhaler scam (preferably from an offical health organization, like FDA,Harvard health, etc.)
500Mana reward to the person that posted the best article on evidence of hydrogen inhaler in the comments
Related questions
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A separate comment: although I'm skeptical that hydrogen therapy is worth doing, your question is worded too broadly. It can probably never be stated definitively that hydrogen therapy has NO benefits. It would be better to ask about a specific benefit, or to ask whether hydrogen therapy will have high-quality evidence supporting its use by a certain date. Also, it could be that it has benefits in people with certain illnesses (e.g. a recent heart attack) but none in healthy people. It seems your mum is in the latter category, so it's unclear how your quesiton should resolve in that case.
From my 15 minutes of reading on this topic, the advocates of H2 therapy don't seem to consider inhaled hydrogen fundamentally different from other forms of hydrogen consumption, such as hydrogen water. The article Gigacasting links suggests that it's harder to control dosing in a solution, but they present dissolved hydrogen as a legitimate dosing possibility.
I wasn't able to find anything arguing against hydrogen inhalation specifically, but there are articles extant about the lack of evidence for hydrogen water. A good example would be a few pieces from Science-Based Medicine (a blog run by physicians focused on debunking medical practices). There's the original:
and a follow-up: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-evidence-for-hydrogen-water/
Hydrogen therapy typifies a large class of purportedly effective interventions that suffer from underpowered research and selective reporting. You will find studies in support of a nearly infinite number of such things. It would take an entire lifetime to read evidence about and reject every puported miracle food or drug, and it's not always worth addressing each individually. John Ioannidis has a great article about problems with this sort of thing in general: https://academic.oup.com/advances/article/9/4/367/5055939.
A final comment: one of the detractors of the original Science-Based Medicine articles argued that there IS randomized data supporting hydrogen therapy! And they linked to this article: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32699287/. Just reading the abstract here, we have a tiny (n=38) randomized study which had no pre-specified primary endpoint. They looked for differences between control and intervention across a large number of measures. They found differences with some measures and no differences with others. They do have a rudimentary statement about a statistical power calculation, but it's quite obvious that they made no correction for multiplicity. I think this study has use for researchers in the field -- it might to which measures of hydrogen therapy effectiveness deserve further stdy. But it should by no means be considered evidence that hydrogen therapy is effective.
Trust the science (whether or not the inhaler works it’s clearly positive to neutral, though perhaps more fiber and intestinal health are the main source of H2 in the human body and a better route)
This guy thinks so:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Botek+M&cauthor_id=35206179
Small studies, but positive results.
