A little word about remedies

I think there is far too much emphasis in the health world, alternative and mainstream, on remedies.

You know when a remedy is necessary?

When someone doesn't know how to restore proper functioning.

A remedy is something that alleviates symptoms, but doesn't restore what the body needs to function.

For instance, it's fine to drink cranberry juice for your kidney stones, but you need to eat enough magnesium-rich foods so your body can utilize the calcium properly before it crystalizes.

It's fine to take ginkgo biloba for poor memory, but if you're deficienct in choline and/or cobalt-amine (b12) required to build well-functioning brain tissue, you're still just putting another band-aid over the issue.

I'm going to end it here for now, but I think a series on the innumerable, damaging health fads needs to be done. I'll probably do it tonight after I get a little drunk and party-hard downtown; maybe I'll sound less vindictive than I feel at the moment.

The Next Morning:

Okay I'm feeling slightly less vindictive.

Nah not really. So here goes.

Colon cleansing:

Whether it's with herbs like senna or cascara sagrada, or magnesium oxide (milk of magnesia) repackaged as fancy "oxygen cleansing," they all do 1 thing: give you diarrhea.

That's all colon cleansing is. Diarrhea. If that upsets your little belief system, tough. Deal with it and grow up.

Now that's not to say that diarrhea doesn't cleanse out your colon; it absolutely does. That's why your body has that function there.

The problem is that colon cleansing is dangerous. Any paramedic will tell you that dehydration is the most common thing they get called out for. This isn't as simple as not having enough water, this is about electrolyte imbalances and deficiencies. This is why diarrhea and dehydration kill thousands of children in the third world every day.

However, this goes far beyond electrolyte imbalances (which I will address in another post). The organ with the highest concentration of trace and rare minerals is your pancreas. This is because your pancreas is responsible for producing the largest amount of enzymes in your body, and minerals are the catalysts for their creation.

Every time a meal is digested by enzymes and bile from the pancreas and liver, around 95% of the enzymatic material is reabsorbed by the small intestine. However when one triggers diarrhea with a colon cleanser, this causes the food to move out of the small intestine before proper absorption can occur. This is why diarrhea burns; it is literally the enzymes eating away at your large intestine and colon. This is also why it is useful for literally digesting compacted fecal matter and unfriendly bacteria farther down the bowels than these enzymes normally reach.

However, every time this happens, those trace minerals and enzymes leave your body with your stool instead of being reabsorbed. Over time if done enough, this may result in total shutdown of the digestive system; a condition known as pancreatic insufficiency. This is not the only cause of that, but that is one result.

In fact, If you are considering colon cleansing because some douchebag on the internet told you it would cure your disease (unless your disease is caused by too strong a digestive system, it won't), I challenge you to look up and down google at all of the people talking about "spots" appearing in their stool shortly after beginning cleansing. Then look at all the people who went farther talking about their stool eventually being totally made up of these lightly colored "spots." Then read about those people whose digestion stopped altogether.

Those spots are where the bile could not reach because the person had already hemmorhaged out enough of their vital life juices to cause an inability to even digest food properly.

This is the essence of the issue:

YOU ARE NOT DIRTY. YOUR BODY IS NOT DIRTY. YOUR BODILY FLUIDS ARE NOT DIRTY. YOUR BODY IS NOT YOUR ENEMY. LEAVE IT THE F*&$K ALONE AND GIVE IT WHAT IT NEEDS. STOP TRYING TO "CLEAN" IT. IT'S NOT THE KITCHEN SINK.

For all those countless people who have been hurt by colon cleansing, I will do a series on how to replace your enzymatic function, but only if enough people explicitly ask for it because it's a lot of work.

Anyway, lather rinse repeat, apply to every fad out there.

I'll probably get the shitstorm of religious fad addicts for this one. Hey, do me a favor and project your daddy complex onto your boyfriend, not your doctor.