"Patients
have to know that the coffee enemas are not given for the function of the
intestines but for the stimulation of the liver." Dr. Max Gerson
COFFEE ENEMA AND DETOX TECHNIQUES
WARNING: These techniques should be
monitored by a physician especially in patients with severely compromised
immune systems due to the possibility of provoking an infection.
Pregnant
women should not use coffee enemas
In
her book, Wellness Against All Odds, Dr. Rogers explains the importance of
this regular detoxification process in conjunction with the other elements
of a wellness plan:
“One
of the things that impressed me in watching people improve cancers,
chemical sensitivity and other conditions with the coffee enemas is the
steadiness with which it must be done.
It must be a daily routine and for weeks on end there may be no
improvement and then suddenly everything clicks in and improvement can be
appreciated.
For
some, it takes months before the body rallies.
It is the steadiness however, that is so important and it is a
steadiness of a total load program which includes the correct diet,
enzymes, hormones, juicing, prescribed nutrients, periodic bowel cleanse
and flushing, attention to ones’ spirituality, and environmental
controls. These
all constitute an important part of the total load whenever coffee enemas
are used. They should not be used in isolation or alone without a total
program. And above all, they
should be done with good nutrient supplementation and periodic checking of
nutrient levels.”
The
Coffee Enema for Detoxifying the Liver*
What
you will need:
- Enema bag – Most pharmacies have or can get them
- A bunch of old towels
- Folgers regular grind coffee
- Pure spring water or steam distilled water
- Small bottle of organic oil or vitamin E capsules
The
Procedure
- Boil 4 tablespoons of coffee in 1 quart (4 cups) of
water for at least 10 minutes and allow to cool to room temperature
- Hang the enema bag around waist height and fill it ˝
the solution (1 pint or 2 cups) Make sure the clamp is secure if not
you will be glad I suggested the towels
- Place an old towel in the bathtub (saves mess later)
and assume the position best described by Phyllis Balch in
Prescription for Natural Healing (on your knees with head down, rear
up)
- Lubricate the tip with organic oil or the liquid from
a vitamin E capsule and gently insert the enema tube (you may want to
find a softer tip if you can)
- Slowly release the clamp and allow the liquid to flow.
I usually release for a count of 6 and then stop for a count of
20 or 30
- Lie on your first right side and retain the liquid for
at least 5-10 minutes (this may be difficult at first but will become
easier later) and then evacuate
- Repeat
I
do this at least five days per week and credit it as one of the keys to my
success.
*This
has been compiled from multiple sources and I believe it to be safe, but I
am not a doctor and I caution you to consult with a nutritionist or
medical professional before implementing this or any other elements of my
program. I may error on the
side of too much detail, but hopefully this will same you some time as you
develop your own plan.
Almost
two years after my diagnosis and while reading the Prescription for
Nutritional Healing, I discovered the concept of a regular fast and
decided to also give this a try. The
results were amazing and I am surprised this concept has not received more
attention from other sources. Even
in the Balch book it is buried at the end.
According
to the Balch’s, the fasting process, when used in conjunction with lemon
juice and coffee enemas, reduces the workload on the immune system and
gives all your organs a much needed rest from the toxin removal chores.
The
procedure they recommend and what I followed was as follows:
- Two days before beginning the true fast, eat only raw
organic vegetables
- On day three, drink only organic juices, herbal teas
and at least 8 glasses of pure water
- Drink two or three cups or juiced or broth boiled of
cabbage, carrots, alfalfa sprouts, celery, beets, garlic and onion.
Save the actual vegetables for eating later.
- Do a daily coffee enema and a daily lemon juice enema
– they say to use 3 lemons in 2 quarts of water and use the same
process as described above except there is more frequent expelling and
when you can lay on your left side and massage your colon and abdomen.
As
mentioned, this simple process worked wonders for me. I was surprisingly not hungry once I got into it and felt
like my whole body had been cleansed.
This
and many other hints are available in my book. To preview a copy,
see this link:
http://aplasticcentral.com/AA_Book_Preview.htm
Full
article highlighted below is available at http://www.duffyslaw.com/current32.htm
OK, I know you probably are getting more than you really wanted, but
since I am doing this almost every day and it has been proven to work for
so many people including me, I decided to provide some specific
documentation on the process.
I first started this somewhat bizarre practice after reading
"Tired or Toxic" by Dr. Sherry Rogers and have gone on to
research it further from other online areas and books. Turns out
that this practice of using coffee enemas to cleanse the colon and assist
in healing the gut has been around since 1500
B.C. see below.
In addition to my daily sauna and the diet change, I attribute this
procedure to being a key to my progress.
From
The Cancer Chronicles #6 and #7
© Autumn 1990 by Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D.
This
is a two-part story on the history of the coffee enema. It has been
reprinted often around the world. --Ed.
The
most controversial alternative procedures has to be the coffee enema.
Along with other detoxification routines, the coffee enema is a central
part of both the Gerson and the Kelley programs. It is always good for a
laugh: "with milk or sugar?" This bizarre-sounding treatment can
also be used to scare people away from alternatives in general. No
quackbusting article these days is complete without a reference to
"enemas made from roasted coffee beans." So what's the story? Is
the coffee enema crackpot faddism or is there some rationale behind this
procedure?
An
enema is "a fluid injected into the rectum for the purpose of
clearing out the bowel, or of administering drugs or food." The word
itself comes from the Greek en-hienai, meaning to "send or
inject into." The enema has been called "one of the oldest
medical procedures still in use today." Tribal women in Africa,
and elsewhere, routinely use it on their children. The earliest medical
text in existence, the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus, (1,500 B.C.) mentions it.
Millennia before, the Pharaoh had a "guardian of the anus," a
special doctor one of whose purposes was to administer the royal enema.
The
Greeks wrote of the fabled cleanliness of the Egyptians, which included
the internal cleansing of their systems through emetics and enemas. They
employed these on three consecutive days every month said Herodotus
(II.77) or at intervals of three or four days, according to the later
historian Diodorus.
The
Egyptians "believed that diseases were engendered by superfluities of
the food", a modern-sounding theory!
Enemas
were known in ancient Sumeria, Babylonia, India, Greece and China.
American Indians independently invented it, using a syringe made of an
animal bladder and a hollow leg bone. Pre-Columbian South Americans
fashioned latex into the first rubber enema bags and tubes. In fact, there
is hardly a region of the world where people did not discover or adapt the
enema. It is more ubiquitous than the wheel. Enemas are found in world
literature from Aristophanes to Shakespeare, Gulliver Travels to Peyton
Place.
In
pre-revolutionary France a daily enema after dinner was de
rigueur. It was not only considered indispensable for health but practiced
for good complexion as well. Louis XIV is said to have taken over
2,000 in his lifetime.Could this have been the source of the Sun
King's sunny disposition? For centuries, enemas were a routine home
remedy. Then, within living memory, the routine use of enemas died out.
The main times that doctors employ them nowadays is before or after
surgery and childbirth. Difficult and potentially dangerous barium enemas
before colonic X rays are of course still a favorite of allopathic
doctors.
But
why coffee? This bean has an interesting history. It was imported in
Arabia in the early 1500's by the Sufi religious mystics, who used it to
fight drowsiness while praying. It was especially prized for its
medicinal qualities, in both the Near East and Europe. No one knows when
the first daring soul filled the enema bag with a quart of java. What is
known is that the coffee enema appeared at least as early as 1917
and was found in the prestigious Merck Manual until 1972. In the 1920s
German scientists found that a caffeine solution could open the bile ducts
and stimulate the production of bile in the liver of experimental animals.
Dr.
Max Gerson used this clinically as part of a general detoxification
regimen, first for tuberculosis, then cancer. Caffeine, he postulated,
will travel up the hemorrhoidal to the portal vein and thence to the liver
itself. Gerson noted some remarkable effects of this procedure. For
instance,
Patients
could dispense with all pain-killers once on the enemas.
Many
people have noted the
paradoxical
calming effect
of
coffee enemas. And while coffee enemas can relieve constipation, Gerson
cautioned:
"Patients
have to know that the coffee enemas are not given for the function of the
intestines but for the stimulation of the liver."
Coffee
enemas were an established part of medical practice when Dr. Max Gerson
introduced them into cancer therapy in the 1930s. Basing himself on German
laboratory work, Gerson believed that caffeine could stimulate the liver
and gall bladder to discharge bile. He felt this process could contribute
to the health of the cancer patient.
Although
the coffee enema has been heaped with scorn, there has been some
independent scientific work that gives credence to this concept. In
1981, for instance, Dr. Lee Wattenberg and his colleagues were able to
show that substances found in coffee— kahweol and cafestol palmitate—promote
the activity of a key enzyme system, glutathione S-transferase, above the
norm. This system detoxifies a vast array of electrophiles from the
bloodstream and, according to Gar Hildenbrand of the Gerson Institute,
"must be regarded as an important mechanism for carcinogen
detoxification." This enzyme group is responsible for neutralizing
free radicals, harmful chemicals now commonly implicated in the initiation
of cancer. In mice, for example, these systems are enhanced 600 percent in
the liver and 700 percent in the bowel when coffee beans are added to the
mice's diet.
Dr.
Peter Lechner, who is investigating the Gerson method at the
Landeskrankenhaus of Graz, Austria, has reported that "coffee enemas
have a definite effect on the colon which can be observed with an
endoscope." F.W. Cope (1977) has postulated the existence of a
"tissue damage syndrome." When cells are challenged by poison,
oxygen deprivation, malnutrition or a physical trauma they lose potassium,
take on sodium and chloride, and swell up with excess water.
Another
scientist (Ling) has suggested that water in a normal cell is contained in
an "ice-like" structure. Being alive requires not just the right
chemicals but the right chemical structure. Cells normally have a
preference for potassium over sodium but when a cell is damaged it begins
to prefer sodium. This craving results in a damaged ability of cells to
repair themselves and to utilize energy. Further, damaged cells produce
toxins; around tumors are zones of "wounded" but still
non-malignant tissue, swollen with salt and water.
Gerson
believed it axiomatic that cancer could not exist in normal metabolism. He
pointed to the fact that scientists often had to damage an animal's
thyroid and adrenals just to get a transplanted tumor to "take."He
directed his efforts toward creating normal metabolism in the tissue
surrounding a tumor.
It
is the liver and small bowel which neutralize the most common tissue
toxins: polyamines, ammonia, toxic-bound nitrogen, and electrophiles.These
detoxification systems are probably enhanced by the coffee enema.
Physiological Chemistry and Physics has stated that "caffeine enemas
cause dilation of bile ducts, which facilitates excretion of toxic cancer
breakdown products by the liver and dialysis of toxic products across the
colonic wall."
In
addition, theophylline and theobromine (two other chemicals in
coffee) dilate blood vessels and counter inflammation of the gut; the
palmitates enhance the enzyme system responsible for the removal of toxic
free radicals from the serum;and the fluid of the enema then
stimulates the visceral nervous system to promote peristalsis and the
transit of diluted toxic bile from the duodenum and out the rectum.
Since
the enema is generally held for 15 minutes, and all the blood in the
body passes through the liver every three minutes, "these enemas
represent a form of dialysis of blood across the gut wall" (Healing
Newsletter, #13, May-June, 1986).
Prejudice
against coffee enemas continues, however. Although this data was made
available to Office of Technology Assessment it was largely ignored in
their box on the procedure. They dismissively state "there is no
scientific evidence to support the claim that coffee enemas detoxify the
blood or liver."
No
medical procedure is without risk and OTA is quick to point out alleged
dangers of the coffee enemas. For instance, they cite one doctor's opinion
that coffee "taken by this route is a strong stimulant and can be at
least as addictive as coffee taken regularly by mouth." This may
indeed be true. Yet one wonders where the data is on this, and whether OTA
would issue a similar warning about the perils of coffee drinking.
Another
potential danger, they say, is physical damage to the rectum—"fatal
bowel perforation and necrosis" which have been associated with
"various other types of enema." The risk of perforation comes
from the insertion device used. At the Gerson clinic, for instance, they
use a short nozzle which couldn't inflict much harm; Gonzalez uses a
soft rubber colon tube. In neither case would this caveat seem to
apply. On thin evidence, OTA also suggests enemas can cause colitis.
The
agency also cites the case of the two Seattle women who died following
excessive enema use. Their deaths were attributed to fluid and electrolyte
abnormalities. One took 10 to 12 coffee enemas in a single night and then
continued at a rate of one per hour. The other took four daily. As OTA
points out, "in both cases, the enemas were taken much more
frequently than is recommended in the Gerson treatment."
In
general, coffee enemas are an important tool for physicians who try to
detoxify the body. This is not to say they are a panacea. They certainly
require much more research. But coffee enemas are serious business: their
potential should be explored by good research—not mined for cheap shots
at alternative medicine or derisively dismissed as yet another crackpot
fad.
|
