new age weirdness that might work anyway
Today I researched liver cleanses because depending on recent chemical exposures, I get a pain under my ribs on the right side that sometimes gets referred up into my shoulder and neck. It's very much not fat-intake related, so I'm sure it's not gallstones. I'm pretty sure the problem is my liver, and since this is my blog, I can think whatever I want.
Anyway, I'd heard of liver cleanses, so I fished around on the web, where you can easily find multiple sites that spell out exactly what you're supposed to do to get crystallized crud out of your liver, but at least they all agree that after some variant of a short fast, you're supposed to drink some amount of dissolved epsom salts, olive oil, and citrus juice, and then you'll poop out a bunch of things that look like very small rocks, except for the bright green ones. They also seem to encourage people undergoing whichever version of this cleanse they have found most superior to collect the 'stones' that they excrete, and, as I understand it, store them in the freezer for what appears to me to be entirely for entertainment purposes.
Ok, maybe I'm overstating it, but there's this fantastic letter in The Lancet (free registration) about a woman with gallstones that needed surgery who showed up in the emergency room with a bunch of frozen green things. The doctors analyzed them and concluded that they melted at 40 C, which actual gallstones wouldn't do, and that they were actually a product of putting olive oil and citrus juice into a fairly empty GI tract.
Which doesn't mean that some people with weird allergies and other symptoms don't feel better after trying a series of these cleanses - you can find their stories all over these websites. It may be that some of them are hypochondriacs, as Gene Weingarten suggests, so any treatment that gives them something to do will make them feel better, but given my experience of the last few years, I am quite confident that there are some people whose health has improved after pooping out a bunch of saponified olive oil.
The thing is that if people are positive that the stones are made of cholesterol and really are gallstones and that you have to drink apple juice beforehand and lie on this side or the other after chugging oil at exactly 10 pm, then the medical establishment has every reason to believe that cleansing advocates are kooks.
My theory is that taking a whole bunch of magnesium (from the epsom salts) gives people fire-hose diarrhea, which I expect would potentially wash out gunk they'd happened to collect in their innards, and then adding the olive oil gives the bile production system something to work with, so maybe that gets rinsed out, too. Rinsing seems to help devotees of colonics, where you pay someone to hose down your colon. For all I know, it's the same thing, but cheaper because you wouldn't have to pay anybody to stick a hose in a fairly personal body part.
Anyway, I'd heard of liver cleanses, so I fished around on the web, where you can easily find multiple sites that spell out exactly what you're supposed to do to get crystallized crud out of your liver, but at least they all agree that after some variant of a short fast, you're supposed to drink some amount of dissolved epsom salts, olive oil, and citrus juice, and then you'll poop out a bunch of things that look like very small rocks, except for the bright green ones. They also seem to encourage people undergoing whichever version of this cleanse they have found most superior to collect the 'stones' that they excrete, and, as I understand it, store them in the freezer for what appears to me to be entirely for entertainment purposes.
Ok, maybe I'm overstating it, but there's this fantastic letter in The Lancet (free registration) about a woman with gallstones that needed surgery who showed up in the emergency room with a bunch of frozen green things. The doctors analyzed them and concluded that they melted at 40 C, which actual gallstones wouldn't do, and that they were actually a product of putting olive oil and citrus juice into a fairly empty GI tract.
Which doesn't mean that some people with weird allergies and other symptoms don't feel better after trying a series of these cleanses - you can find their stories all over these websites. It may be that some of them are hypochondriacs, as Gene Weingarten suggests, so any treatment that gives them something to do will make them feel better, but given my experience of the last few years, I am quite confident that there are some people whose health has improved after pooping out a bunch of saponified olive oil.
The thing is that if people are positive that the stones are made of cholesterol and really are gallstones and that you have to drink apple juice beforehand and lie on this side or the other after chugging oil at exactly 10 pm, then the medical establishment has every reason to believe that cleansing advocates are kooks.
My theory is that taking a whole bunch of magnesium (from the epsom salts) gives people fire-hose diarrhea, which I expect would potentially wash out gunk they'd happened to collect in their innards, and then adding the olive oil gives the bile production system something to work with, so maybe that gets rinsed out, too. Rinsing seems to help devotees of colonics, where you pay someone to hose down your colon. For all I know, it's the same thing, but cheaper because you wouldn't have to pay anybody to stick a hose in a fairly personal body part.
posted by missmolly at 8:01 PM
1 Comments:
Much thanks to you for giving such significant data, and a debt of gratitude is for sharing this Business Promotion system.
Post a Comment
<< Home