A Post-Christmas Visit from The Angel of Water
Dip your toe into the surprisingly wide world of medical equipment
Listed for $25,000
An almost brand new Angel of water open colonic system. Typical models are around 35,000 the last time I checked which was a while ago. It’s been serviced by the manufacturer and checked and it’s in very secure shipping packaging and ready to be transported! It’s a beautiful machine and the company that makes them are super helpful and responsive if you have any questions about the machine. There’s lots of info on their website as well!
Most of Facebook Marketplace’s offerings form an endless yard sale or flea market, a digital sea of individual sellers cleaning out their closets and garages to make a buck. But then you run across a bulky, expensive medical device like the Angel of Water open colonic system, and, well, you must concede that the Marketplace is more than casual personal belongings.
We should get the most loaded word of the description out of the way: almost. This device, which uses warm water to clean out the long intestine (the manufacturer has helpfully assembled this animated video demonstration, if you’d like more details), is almost new. If you had hopes that this was a scratch-and-dent colon fountain, or that it had been ordered but never used because the purchaser turned out to have the wrong water hookup, abandon your naivete. This Angel of Water has graced the butthole of a mere human with its touch.
I’m not particularly curious about why this seller is moving on from their Angel of Water. The simplest answer – they have some sort of wellness spa, and demand for colonics has been less than they anticipated - also strikes me as the most likely one. These are the parts of the American economy that the Bureau of Labor Statistics simply can’t see. What good is a chicken in every pot if you don’t have the money to fully rid yourself of that chicken on the other end?
But why is Facebook Marketplace the venue to find the Angel of Water’s next owner? Are fellow entrepreneurs setting up their own colonic businesses likely to come to Facebook for equipment?
To be fair, this colonic machine is not the only medical device available on Facebook Marketplace. In a casual search that definitely has my account flagged out of concern, I found an anesthesia machine, an x-ray machine, a unit that can help you perform electrocautery, and dental chairs ranging from $14,000 to “free if you pick it up.” Perhaps there is a thriving market for this kind of regulated equipment, even if “LASIK laser” yielded no results.
And sure, if you buy a new Angel of Water, it’s only never-been-used for your very first customer. After that, you may as well have bought this one and hoped all your customers assumed you purchased it through the usual channels and not, you know, from the same website where your old high school teacher posts 15 paragraph political screeds. Maybe it’s worth the savings to buy a gently-used Angel.
On the other hand, it’s going to be a real pain in the ass (I’m sorry, I really couldn’t help it) if you buy this, haul it to your wellness center, install it, and then find out something’s wrong. It’s one thing to buy a leaf blower off Facebook that doesn’t work after a month. Dropping $25,000 on a colonic machine and hoping the manufacturer will just be cool with you feels much dicier.
We should also consider another possible sort of buyer. Just as not all art is acquired to be hung in a museum, perhaps some enterprising individual wants to own the Angel of Water for home use. Based on the first result I found, ten Water sessions would run you $990. To get your money’s worth, you would need to use the Angel of Water 26 times at home, and that’s assuming you have a trusted friend or partner willing to learn how to safely operate the device.
As a person who does not want 26 colonics in his life, that number seems high to me. To the person who wants way more than 26 colonics in theirs, well, maybe the Angel of Water is too good of a deal to pass up.
There’s one factor in favor of a private buyer. A licensed facility may want the training and customer service that comes with going direct to an authorized distributor, but an individual might well be turned around by that same distributor. They’re not selling bidets; this is an extremely large, sensitive piece of equipment that does not belong in a home setting!
A Facebook seller probably won’t have that same hesitation. They just want to get this giant fountain moved, and it’s a useful reminder of another key difference between Facebook Marketplace and a flea market. You’re not buying a machine that can factory reset your colon. You’re buying that machine and no questions asked.