This article was nominated for deletion on 6 June 2021. The result of the discussion was keep.

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Like this whole article is wrong.

It just needs to be deleted.

Evieliam ( talk) 15:45, 10 April 2018 (UTC) reply

Apparently the article was exploded into a litany of extraordinary claims in 2018, and then deleted as a hoax. However, there can be encyclopedic value in describing that there is something out there, even if there's unencyclopedic weirdness associated with it. @ Evieliam:, @ RHaworth: please review the earlier version that I just restored from history. -- Joy [shallot] ( talk) 20:17, 2 October 2020 (UTC) reply

It is definitely based upon a fringe theory (see Naphthalene#Health effects), but we have plenty of articles on fringe theories. The question is whether it is a notable fringe theory. I think not, and have nominated it for deletion. If it survives deletion, I plan on expanding this article so that the article reflects the fact that doing this can destroy red blood cells, cause confusion, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, blood in the urine, dysfunction of the liver, cataracts, and possibly cancer. -- Guy Macon ( talk) 14:09, 6 June 2021 (UTC) reply

In case this is kept, it's a bit tricky: sources like https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/naftalan-oil-resort-azerbaijan/index.html are obviously tourism ads. They are also not WP:MEDRS compliant meaning that wellness claims cannot be made using them. Moreover, Naphthalene exposure is linked with Hemolytic anemia in the actual medical literature, so we should expect some sources to discuss this more critically than tourism-related ads. It may still be notable tourist resorts, but we can't document medical effects or claims without taking this in consideration... — Paleo Neonate – 05:28, 10 June 2021 (UTC) reply

I summarized some of the key historical points from a Croatian scientific journal article found earlier by Silver seren in the AfD. I think the fringe tag is not really warranted, but the previously-existing expert attention tag is, because we need someone who can assess the therapeutic effects claims in sources and summarize those appropriately. And obviously what is the distinction between the effects of the application of the oil as found in the facilities by the Croatian hospital, the Azerbaijani university hospital, and whatever random tourist-focused facilities related to the oil that there may exist in Azerbaijan? It seems quite likely that there will be at least some difference. Guy Macon, you said previously you'd help; please do. -- Joy [shallot] ( talk) 10:25, 19 June 2021 (UTC) reply

OK so randomly removing arbitrary parts of the content was not my idea of help :D but sure. I see that a lot of this revolves around the base naphthalene substance being harmful. Do we have any information about the base definition of this oil, and how much of what is in it, in which location? -- Joy [shallot] ( talk) 15:29, 19 June 2021 (UTC) reply

What do you mean "arbitrary"? in Europe the results from the Naphthalan Health Resort in Azerbaijan were largely unusable because the application of native oil was not considered acceptable What sort of crappy reasoning is that? It basically says "it was not accepted because it was not accepted". Deleting such bollocks did not "make the article objectively worse", as you claim. -- Hob Gadling ( talk) 11:14, 21 June 2021 (UTC) reply

In the meantime, Guy Macon actually started Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 346#Croatian source for for claims about the medical effects of bathing in high-naphthalene-content crude oil, so it's sort of explained, it's not entirely arbitrary, it's based on the claim that the general properties of naphthalene preclude any and all discussion of health benefits. This may or may not be true, however - I expect there to exist sources out there that would avoid forcing our readers to have to have an understanding of chemistry and medicine way beyond the general encyclopedic level in order to infer this.

Hob Gadling it's amusing that you complain about that sentence, because that is actually arguably one of the most topical and uncontroversial things in that source - they explicitly acknowledge that, despite the fact thousands of papers were published in the Soviet Union about the topic, they were based on human experimentation, and unacceptable. This is probably useful for readers to properly frame the historical discussion, as based on happy-go-lucky human testing instead of more appropriate and safe methods?

On a more general note, I'm not sure the way Guy Macon and now Roxy the dog have approached editing here is helpful - removing the Acta article altogether, while keeping some of its claims. We're acting as if there's just no doubt about anything that comes out of Azerbaijani and Croatian facilities that engage with this oil is unacceptable to mention, but there's no apparent proof of that. Certainly one can state that the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and probably also at least some of the governments of Azerbaijan and Croatia, would have a vested interest to promote weirdness that makes them look good because they were authoritarian or something, but this does not mean that it's inherently impossible to find sources about this that would actually state so.

Removing everything altogether, despite the fact it was published in a country with free press in 2003, seems extremely short-sighted. I understand we don't want the general encyclopedia to promote some sort of a minority view per WP:UNDUE, but first let's actually define what the purported minority view actually is.

In the case of the Croatian hospital, whatever happens to be done by medical doctors on a reasonably large scale would probably have caused a scandal already if it was entirely bonkers. I tried searching for it, using e.g. https://www.google.hr/search?q=site:hr%20naftalan%20rak - Googling Croatian websites for the words 'naftalan' and 'cancer' - but I found absolutely nothing negative in the first couple of pages, rather, I got mainstream news outlet coverage that is by and large obviously positive. Obviously this doesn't mean that there's zero chance they're giving people cancer there, but surely *someone* *somewhere* would have noticed something by now, given that it's been going on since 32 years ago. -- Joy [shallot] ( talk) 12:41, 21 June 2021 (UTC) reply

Newspaper stories are generally not good sources for medical content (although a good place to look for positive articles about “alternative” treatments). As for nothing being noticed in 32 years, check out Balkan endemic nephropathy, which was first described in the 1950s but the cause not pinned down until the early years of this century. Or even look at the amount of time it took to establish the link between tobacco and cancer. Brunton ( talk) 13:36, 21 June 2021 (UTC) reply

Sure, that's certainly a possibility, but I'm not sure quite what your point is here as the article Balkan endemic nephropathy explicitly refers to a 1956 journal article published in Bulgaria, which was just as much of a communist one-party state as Azerbaijan at the time. How does the existence of apparently good science in these kinds of circumstances lead to the thinking that there's no way that there's any good science in the 1970s in Yugoslavia (that they would absolutely have to have faked their findings about the lack of carcinogenicity of the oil they extracted at Križ)? Or at any point after 1989, after that hospital was founded? Surely there's supposed to be at least a better chance today that there's someone like doctor Tanchev on this topic, someone to write anything about something going wrong with these tens of thousands of people that come in contact with this oil? Does someone have access to databases of medical journals to look something like this up? -- Joy [shallot] ( talk) 13:50, 21 June 2021 (UTC) reply

No amount of politics (or handwaving) changes the fact that bathing in crude oil for its medical properties is a load of old Tosh, and we should directly label it as such, which we now do. - Roxy . wooF 14:08, 21 June 2021 (UTC) reply

No, we're actually not, because we're spending a lot of time in the article talking about the underlying chemical substance, instead of addressing the idea that it has positive medical effects. -- Joy [shallot] ( talk) 15:21, 21 June 2021 (UTC) reply

My point was that it took about half a century after that 1956 paper described the condition to link the condition to its cause (something the BEN article doesn’t make clear). Note the dates of the references about aristolochic acid. There’s a good account of the story in Geoffrey C. Kabat (2017). Getting Risk Right: Understanding the science of elusive health risks. New York: Columbia University Press, pp 116-143. Brunton ( talk) 15:03, 21 June 2021 (UTC) reply

Right. But surely these days we have more advanced methods at our disposal, like some sort of statistical analysis of a higher incidence of cancer with populations that visited these two sets of places and exposing themselves to this oil, something that could at least inform the readers to take the carcinogenicity possibility seriously? -- Joy [shallot] ( talk) 15:21, 21 June 2021 (UTC) reply

Which is why somebody posted Naphthalene#Health effects as something for you to read in the first answer to your first post to this topic. Those health effects have not changed. - Roxy . wooF 15:35, 21 June 2021 (UTC) reply

There is no need to study Naftalan oil specifically. We not only know the health effects of Naphthalene (see above) but we also know the health effects of crude oil in general from studying oilfield workers and from studying multiple oil spills. For example, see TOXICOLOGICAL PROFILE FOR TOTAL PETROLEUM HYDROCARBONS From the Toxic Substances and Disease Registry [1]. -- Guy Macon ( talk) 16:11, 21 June 2021 (UTC) reply

"It was not accepted because it was not deemed acceptable" is an empty statement, so, no wonder it is "uncontroversial". If it is your paraphrasing of something that is actually meaningful, you should paraphrase it in a way that keeps the meaningfulness. -- Hob Gadling ( talk) 15:58, 21 June 2021 (UTC) reply

I just reverted some apparent WP:COI edit, which wanted to replace references to naphthalene with references to " naphthenic hydrocarbons", saying:

This article contains incorrect information. Substances such as Naftalan and Naphthalene are confused. These are two completely different products that have nothing to do with each other.

That article about naphthenes or cycloalkanes says it's "distinct from naphthalene". There's a separate article about Naphthenic oil. Does any of this actually make sense? -- Joy ( talk) 14:28, 8 April 2024 (UTC) reply

Here's a ping to a bunch of hopefully active people either involved in previous discussions here or edited the other possibly related article: @ Guy Macon @ Hob Gadling @ PaleoNeonate @ Brunton @ Silver seren @ PaulTanenbaum @ Ekisbares @ Michael D. Turnbull - please see above ^ -- Joy ( talk) 14:44, 8 April 2024 (UTC) reply

This is all a bit of a mess! What is clear is that

• Naftalan oil is a complex mixture, not principally naphthalene but mainly various naphthenic acids. This is based on doi:10.1134/S1070363219030459 which seems reliable and which I have read after downloading a copy via The Wikipedia Library.
• Various other articles cover related topics: see naphtha and Petroleum naphtha, for example.
• It will be difficult to find any WP:MEDRS-compliant source for the alleged medicinal claims for the oil. For that reason alone, the claims added by User:Naftalan Products can't be allowed to stand. A recent, freely available, doi:10.59883/ajp.52 is worthless, in my opinion.
• Equally, any section based on the effects of naphthalene should be removed: it is irrelevant to the article.

My advice would be to remove the whole of the "Health effects" section and just summarise the content of the article I linked, whose full citation would be Adigozalova, V. A.; Hashimova, U. F.; Polyakova, L. P. (2019). "Composition and Properties of the Unique Oil from Azerbaijan's Naftalan Oilfield". Russian Journal of General Chemistry. 89 (3): 631–640. doi: 10.1134/S1070363219030459..

More comments welcome! Mike Turnbull ( talk) 15:54, 8 April 2024 (UTC) reply

.... if anyone want to work on the article but doesn't have access to TWL to get the Adigozalova article, then email me (via my userpage) and I'll email back a copy of the .pdf. Mike Turnbull ( talk) 16:03, 8 April 2024 (UTC) reply

It occurs to me that coal tar has very similar properties to those ascribed to Naftalan and the former is on the list of WHO list of essential medicines. It is therefore plausible that Naftalan's effects are real, not WP:FRINGE but finding a good source to cite for the article will be tricky so as to avoid straying into WP:OR. Mike Turnbull ( talk) 10:28, 9 April 2024 (UTC) reply

The confusion regarding naphthalene stems from the report in the NYT (first citation in the WP article) which naively states Naftalan crude contains about 50 percent naphthalene, a hydrocarbon best known as the stuff of mothballs. This is clearly bonkers but NYT journalists are not organic chemists! Mike Turnbull ( talk) 10:51, 9 April 2024 (UTC) reply

So the source that was removed in [2] is actually more reliable than that? -- Joy ( talk) 13:07, 9 April 2024 (UTC) reply

It sounds like it could be a case of bad English - they use the term "naphthalene oil" twice, "naphthene oil" twice, and also note the 1930s term "naphthalan oil" from a Russian author but then recommend "earth mineral oil" - yet continue to use the former term four more times. It could be in part because the Croatian words use different vowels in writing, so naphthalene is naftalen or naftalin [3], but this thing is known as naftalan. Hrčak journal searches for "naphthalan", "naphthalene", "naftalen", "naftalan" are all pretty different. -- Joy ( talk) 13:12, 9 April 2024 (UTC) reply

Yes it's true. Naphthalan oil has nothing in common with naphthalene. Naftalan oil is used in medicine, I have evidence and scientific research. I provided them in the article, but it was rejected. Can you help me with this? Kamilla Garakhanova ( talk) 12:34, 9 April 2024 (UTC) reply

Did you read WP:MEDRS? -- Hob Gadling ( talk) 12:55, 9 April 2024 (UTC) reply

I am working offline now in an attempt to rewrite the article with acceptable sources. @ Kamilla Garakhanova please wait until I have updated it (probably later today) and then comment here on the Talk Page if you can provide further acceptable sources. I assume that you have a conflict of interest as Wikipedia defines that and may need to declare as a WP:PAID editor: please read these linked pages. That doesn't prevent you contributing to the discussion here. Ultimately, we are all trying to improve the encyclopaedia. Mike Turnbull ( talk) 13:15, 9 April 2024 (UTC) reply

@ Joy I've finished for now. Between us, the article now reads much better and is well sourced. Mike Turnbull ( talk) 15:14, 9 April 2024 (UTC) reply

@ Michael D. Turnbull thanks. I'd still be much more comfortable if we could find something more coherent on the topic of health effects, otherwise we might still be giving the impression to the average reader that this is settled medical science, which it might not be. -- Joy ( talk) 15:17, 9 April 2024 (UTC) reply

@ Michael D. Turnbull also I'd appreciate it if you could disambiguate the meaning of "industrial paraffin" here, as paraffin is a disambiguation page. Ditto for "naphthene oils", is that naphthenic oils? -- Joy ( talk) 15:19, 9 April 2024 (UTC) reply

I've added what I think are the most helpful links. It is somewhat ironic that we almost certainly won't be able to find WP:MEDRS sources, despite Wikipedia happily having articles on coal tar, liquid paraffin (drug), petroleum jelly and Vaseline, all of which make similar claims (although some of the claims for naftalan are excessive). Mike Turnbull ( talk) 15:35, 9 April 2024 (UTC) reply

That's probably the reason why people have been so suspicious, there's just so many of these kinds of claims out there. -- Joy ( talk) 18:55, 9 April 2024 (UTC) reply

Re: "Naftalan oil is a complex mixture, not principally naphthalene but mainly various naphthenic acids", our Naphthenic acid article says

"Using Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] protocols for testing toxicity, refined NAs are not acutely genotoxic to mammals. ^[1] Damage, however, induced by NAs while transient in acute or discontinuous exposure, may be cumulative in repeated exposure. ^[2]"

and

"Naphthenic acids have both acute and chronic toxicity to fish and other organisms. ^[1]"

Also see the "Hazards" section of the Naphthenic acid sidebar, which include "causes skin irritation", "Causes serious eye irritation", "May cause respiratory irritation", and "Wear protective gloves/protective clothing/eye protection/face protection." -- Guy Macon Alternate Account ( talk) 02:18, 11 April 2024 (UTC) reply

Good, so let's try to find some sources that explains this possible toxicity in this use case. To what extent are these acids found in naftalan oil? Are they refined or not? Has there been any study of their toxicity inside naftalan oil? -- Joy ( talk) 07:26, 11 April 2024 (UTC) reply

The source already in the article says that napthenic acids make up to 3%. Incidentally, naphthalene itself is likely to be present, as it is in many crude oils: just not the "50%" stated by the NYT and others. I don't think that we will be able to find any WP:MEDRS for toxicity of naftalan oil, any more than we can find WP:MEDRS sources for its effectiveness. No-one suggests that the patients swallow the oil. I don't think we should be hung up over theoretical toxicity of components or of the whole oil. As the longer videos make clear (especially the DW News one), the spa treatment restricts bathing to 10 minutes and the components are not volatile (see heavy crude oil) so are unlikely to be ingested in any quantity. Anyone worried about cancerous components in oil/petrol better stop using their car, since standard gasoline contains benzene, a well-known carcinogen that owing to its volatility is easily breathed in, at least in low amounts. Mike Turnbull ( talk) 09:26, 11 April 2024 (UTC) reply

This article from Pubmed studies the effect of the oil but is not up to WP:MEDRS, I think. Mike Turnbull ( talk) 10:53, 11 April 2024 (UTC) reply

This doctor Vržogić is one of the two primarius dermatologists working at the Naftalan (Croatia) hospital. They obviously have a vested interest with regard to their hospital, at the same time, they're publishing this in a general dermatology journal that is edited by folks from much larger hospitals ( [4]). -- Joy ( talk) 12:12, 11 April 2024 (UTC) reply

One thing that immediately comes to mind with regard to that article is that in the full journal text, readable here, they refer to it as just a Short Scientific Communication, unlike Clinical Articles and Reviews. -- Joy ( talk) 12:19, 11 April 2024 (UTC) reply

I've now used up all the sources that I can find for the article so I'm unlikely to add much else. From my perspective, there are just two questions for us as WP editors to ask. 1) Is the topic WP:N? - My answer "yes". and 2) Does it meet our standards of not making claims in Wikipedia voice that would require WP:MEDRS sources? - My answer also "yes". Someone (maybe @ Hob Gadling since he's not been much involved in the writing) could now copy-edit it if needs be and reclassify it as no longer being a stub. Mike Turnbull ( talk) 14:30, 11 April 2024 (UTC) reply

I think we can safely say that it is unlikely that anyone is purposely drinking the crude oil or putting it in their eyes, but also think that we can safely say that they are inhaling the fumes, and doing so for as long as they are inside the spa building as opposed to the claimed ten minute limit for bathing in it. We have sources for the volatile compoments of this particular type of crude oil, and an abundance of good WP:MEDRS sources for the health effects of breathing the fumes. -- Guy Macon Alternate Account ( talk) 20:41, 13 April 2024 (UTC) reply

@ Bon courage. I'm not clear why you reverted my recent addition, with your edit summary "neither source mentions Naftalan oil". These sources were simply two dictionary definitions of balneotherapy, an unusual word that occurs both in the infobox for the type of alternative medicine being discussed in this article and in the Abbasov source (as balneotreatment). I disagree that providing dictionary definitions for the convenience of the reeader is WP:OR and that pointing out that more common forms of balneotherapy involve bathing in mineral water amount to that either. Mike Turnbull ( talk) 12:09, 10 April 2024 (UTC) reply

See WP:V. Bon courage ( talk) 12:19, 10 April 2024 (UTC) reply

I think the more important verifiability aspect here is that these statements are usually specific to what happens in a few key locations in Azerbaijan, and should be qualified as such, but that's not necessarily universal, and we have a documented example from Croatia where the whole-body-in-oil is not a thing. -- Joy ( talk) 14:15, 10 April 2024 (UTC) reply

In view of these concerns, I've re-written the uses part, with additional references and included an official picture of a naftalan spa. Perhaps Joy would like to expand that section to include details from Croatian sources. Mike Turnbull ( talk) 10:36, 11 April 2024 (UTC) reply

I have also added the topic to {{ Alternative medicine sidebar}} based on the guidance at WP:BIDI. Mike Turnbull ( talk) 11:54, 11 April 2024 (UTC) reply

Wikipedia:Fringe theories/Noticeboard#Naftalan oil again

Please comment there, not here. -- Guy Macon Alternate Account ( talk) 17:20, 10 April 2024 (UTC) reply