Why do we lose our health? What causes certain organs and systems to change, to move away from normal, healthy function? These are questions that concern all of us. Susceptibility to disease and illness is the result of inherited weaknesses, environmental exposures, and lifestyle stresses. These obstacles create changes in the cells of the body and affect our struggle to attain and maintain good health.
A certain wisdom is built into every life form, each of which is highly sensible and organized. Each life form is a resilient ecosystem reflecting a larger cosmic intelligence. Humans, as they have evolved, have adapted to their environment over the past five million years. Until modern times, the stresses of everyday life were fairly constant and predictable. These consisted of hunger, thirst, cold, heat, and bacteria-based diseases.
Enter the new millennium. Everything about our environment has changed radically. Now we must cope with new sources of toxins. Since the industrial revolution, thousands of chemical compounds never seen before have been introduced into the environment. We’re constantly exposed to multiple toxins found in our medications, food, water, and air. Each one poses serious health risks, and little is known about how they interact and the ways in which two or more toxins, acting together, impact our health. We have mercury fillings in our teeth and ecosystem, anaerobic bacteria in our root canals, abnormal (bacterial) flora in our guts from antibiotics, lead in our bones from the years when leaded gasoline fueled our cars and machines, and drugs in our bloodstream that throw liver metabolism out of balance. This proliferation of toxic sources demands, more than ever, that we consider detoxifying our bodies. Toxins that damage the cells of the body are invisible and insidious. They break down the “invironment” of all body systems at the cellular level. This happens slowly, day by day, year after year, and so is difficult to detect until the actual onset of disease.
Disease from toxicity is caused by the presence of bio-chemicals that poison the blood and spread via the circulatory system. As a result, cells and tissues are literally “swimming” in a contaminated environment. Detoxification is a treatment regimen that cleans the blood and removes toxins from the body.
Detoxification enzyme systems in our cells have evolved that allow us to survive as we come into contact with thousands of toxic substances every day. They provide us with the natural ability to transform poisons into nontoxic elements that the body can reuse or eliminate. This is a type of biological alchemy, a mysterious and wonderful process that takes place on a daily basis—in our sleep and while we work. We aren’t even aware of the miracle that’s going on in every cell of our body.
Since this book is a primer in detoxification, it is important to distinguish three main areas of detoxification medicine:
Each of these areas of detoxification (metals, pesticides, and gut ecology) has its own medical literature base, and generally these areas are not thought of as related. The cells in our bodies don’t know that medical science considers these different areas of toxicology as separate. Our cells are bathed in an environment that mixes all three classes of toxins, which have the potential to cause disease in our bodies.
It has been through our clinical experience, not medical research, that we have understood the importance of a multiple-intervention detoxification therapy. A complete detoxification therapy should include (1) dietary therapy to reduce intestinal membrane inflammation and altered bowel flora, (2) nutritional supplements to increase Phase 1 and Phase 2 liver detoxification and stimulate bile flow, and (3) sauna therapy to enhance the reduction of fat-stored pesticide metabolites.
This multiple-intervention therapy stimulates the function of the liver, spleen, lymphatics, and digestive tract (reticuloendothelial system). Medical science has described this system as a filtering organ that provides very important immune and regulatory functions. To date, there are no medical textbooks, surgical procedures, or drugs that create a process to enhance the function of this extremely important “blood cleaning” organ system. The work by naturopathic physicians and other holistic medical practitioners who use detoxification therapy represents an attempt to open up the concept of a medical specialty in “reticuloendotheliology” and a need for more research and clinical application of therapies that work with the reticuloendothelial system. The complete mechanisms by which detoxification therapy works need to be fully uncovered by medical science.
Detoxification is not a new way of healing. It isn’t a New Age concept floated out on a weekend workshop, it isn’t the latest healing fad flown in from the East, and it isn’t a process that’s foreign to your cells. Rather, detoxification is the way in which the body heals itself—an internal cleansing process that takes place continuously. It is truly miraculous. Detoxification medicine is a medical strategy for eliminating the obstacles to health. Just as antibiotics are a strategy for ridding the body of harmful bacteria, detoxification medicine is used to remove the toxins that disturb the cells’ ability to function normally. At the same time, cells receive nutritional support to maximize their activity. This enhances the body’s own self-healing mechanisms.
We’re constantly exposed to multiple toxins found in our medications, food, water, and air. Each one poses serious health risks.
The toxin and the organism can be thought of as two samurai ready for battle. Both are biochemically alive and well trained. The contest is to see which is stronger. The strength of a toxin, or its toxicity, depends both on how effectively it blocks critical cell functions and on the cell’s ability to deal with the toxin’s life-blocking strength. Each cell’s capacity to deal with toxins varies greatly, and many factors conspire to alter these variables. Inherited physical weaknesses, lifestyle stresses, and environmental exposure change a cell’s capacity to break down toxins. This is what accounts for the fact that one person gets sick and another, subject to the same conditions, does not.
Research has shown that our ability to detoxify our internal environments bears a direct relationship to our susceptibility to disease. If your detoxification mechanisms are weak, you’ll be more prone to early aging, heart disease, cancer, and chronic degenerative diseases. Both prevention and treatment depend on your capacity to detoxify. Detoxification protects the nervous, cardiovascular, and immune systems. By learning how to enhance your body’s ability to detoxify, you’ll be better able to stay healthy and feel young.
Using current medical research and traditional naturopathic detoxification therapies, we have put together a seven-day plan, which we’ll refer to as the EcoTox detoxification program—a system of diet (with foods and supplements you can readily find at grocery or health food stores) and exercises and activities to stimulate circulation (which you can do at home alone or with a friend to give you a hand). This program as outlined here in this book helps you minimize your risk for disease as a result of toxicity syndromes and uses natural detoxification mechanisms to promote healing. Here are some relevant definitions to help you understand some important detoxification concepts.
Toxicology is the study of the effects of noxious or harmful substances on living organisms.
Biochemical toxicology is the science of biochemical mechanisms that transform molecules from toxic to nontoxic states.
Xenobiotics are chemicals or molecules that are foreign to biological systems.
The process of detoxification is the therapeutic biochemical, physiological, and nutritional approach to decreasing the impact of xenobiotics on the cellular physiology.
Toxicity describes the disturbing influences of a xenobiotic on cell physiology and the mechanisms or abilities of the body to deal with a poison.
The term EcoTox describes the overall concept of our approach to detoxification. EcoTox is a combination of the words ecology and toxin. Ecology is the science concerned with the relationships between organisms and their environments. In environmental studies, ecology is the study of the detrimental effects of modern civilization on the environment with a view toward preventing or reversing those effects through conservation.
Used together, ecology and toxin suggest a link among health, the environment, and the actions of toxins. As a word and a concept, EcoTox goes beyond the simple notion of detoxification, embodying a new definition of health equilibrium based on the weblike connections between the outer environment we live in and the inner environment of our bodies. It incorporates the core concepts of holistic medicine, preventive medicine, and wellness medicine and focuses on the need to bring harmony to our cellular biochemistry through detoxification methods. This approach to health care contributes to youthful vitality, longevity, and wellness, and it can alleviate chronic disease. Although our approach goes beyond just detoxification, keep in mind that whatever you can do to help your body detoxify and eliminate exposure to toxins may be of benefit. The guidelines that make up our detoxification strategy work by “turning on” and supporting the body’s own mechanisms for managing and eliminating toxins and metabolic waste. We’ll present these in detail in chapter 8.
Case History
Alice was seventy-two years old and had been bothered by abdominal pain, obesity, and fatigue for several years. Her doctors diagnosed gall bladder disease and told her she needed surgery. She followed their instructions and although her gall bladder was removed, her pain and problems persisted. Her energy continued to decline despite the use of vitamins, prayers, and positive thinking.
After an initial evaluation, we placed Alice on our detoxification program with daily observation at our clinic. Initially her energy was low, and she experienced headaches and dizziness as her body adjusted to the change. After a few days, however, her complexion changed from its chronic pasty color to a healthy glow, her mind and memory cleared (helping to relieve her fatigue), and her abdominal pain completely disappeared.
We discovered her problem was rooted in what she ate. In all of her seventy-two years, she had never missed a meal, and she had overwhelmed her digestive system with too much food. In addition, she had irritated her intestinal tract by eating foods that we found she was allergic to. Like many people, Alice was unaware that if you have a sensitivity or allergy to certain foods, the reactions caused by exposure to them can have toxic consequences. Alice now avoids these foods, which were toxic to her system. She continues to lose weight while eating the foods that satisfy her and make her feel well.
No matter what disease or health problem you suffer from, detoxification medicine can help because it encourages vital organs and organ groups such as the brain, the kidneys, the liver, the cardiovascular system, and the immune system to function at full capacity and can even amplify their performance. Not everyone will experience relief from all their aches, pains, and problems in one week, but after seven days of stimulating cellular detoxification, many of those who use this program feel better. They report having more energy, improved digestion, and enhanced mental faculties.
This book gives you a blueprint for health. It is a program that can be individualized to your particular weaknesses to help prevent disease and cure chronic illness. We can’t promise that everyone who’s sick will be cured after following the program for seven days. But we can assure you that, at the very least, you’ll be closer to wellness, with fewer, less troublesome symptoms and more internal strength to combat illness. You can apply the ideas outlined in this book and become your own health advocate by taking charge of your own wellness program. You could save hundreds or even thousands of dollars in medical expenses during your lifetime by using detoxification therapy.
Just as toxins are ravaging the environment around us, they are destroying the human body’s internal biochemical and biomechanical atmosphere. To heal the damage they inflict, you need to intentionally re-create a normal, healthy, balanced internal ecology in your body. This is as profound and as thrilling as the restoration of a damaged ecosystem by conservation agencies. You’re the conservation warden who watches over the ecology of your mind and body. Detoxification is the first phase of your personal restoration program.
Everyone has different definitions of health and disease, and no single definition for either term fits all cultures, ages, and individuals. If you’re twenty-five years old, your definition of health will likely have changed by the time you’re seventy-five. Disease is a state in which certain cells in the body cannot perform the job they are meant to do. Symptoms are a sign that cells are damaged and function has been lost. So a good working definition of health is that it is proper cellular function expressed as optimum physical, mental, and emotional performance.
Conventional medical training programs focus mainly on pathology, drug and surgical therapies, and symptom management. The job of the physician and the medical-care delivery team is to take over where the body has failed. The body’s ability to self-heal is generally not accounted for, an attitude that’s reflected in the public’s understanding of diagnosis, sickness, and health.
By learning how to enhance your body’s ability to detoxify, you’ll be better able to stay healthy and feel young.
Once you understand that your body is designed to regulate and repair itself, you’ll be ready to look at health care in a new way. You’ll never again be willing to settle for a therapeutic approach that focuses simply on naming your illness and suppressing your symptoms. Detoxification is the tool you can use to fight disease and promote health, strengthening your body cell by cell and revitalizing its ability to heal itself.
A relationship exists between health, the activity of the mind, and toxins in the environment. Toxins affect the ways in which we think and feel, and thoughts and feelings affect the ways in which we process environmental toxins. It’s a two-way street. Negative mental states—expressed as anxiety, panic, anger, depression, neurotic behavior, self-deprecation, self-destructive feelings and tendencies, and a weak will to live—can be triggered by conditions of toxicity, and they also hinder the ideal functioning of your built-in detoxification system. The brain produces hormones and substances in response to stressors, and these substances disrupt the body’s delicate biochemical balance, changing the ways in which organs and systems operate. It’s known, for example, that stress hormones slow down the activity of detoxification enzymes in the liver.
Mental and emotional strain contributes to almost every known disease: autoimmune disease, infectious disease from viruses or bacteria, cancer, and even skin diseases. All acute, chronic, and degenerative diseases are affected by one’s mental and emotional state. Medical research has verified the effects of positive and negative thinking in heart disease and cancer, the leading causes of death in North America. For example, it has been established that even low levels of stress trigger the onset of angina. We also know that attitudes and emotional states are critical in fighting disease. The opposite is also true. Laughter, hope, acceptance, and the reduction of emotional and mental suffering speed the course of healing and decrease pain. If you can consistently visualize a state of wellness, you are more likely to achieve that state of wellness.
Therefore, to remain healthy every person should develop strategies for stress management and for maintaining a positive attitude, taking advantage of techniques such as therapy, support groups, and meditation. Every doctor’s health care approach should reflect this scientific reality.
To get the most advantage from detoxification medicine, you must have a lifestyle and an outlook that support positive emotional states and that reduce negative emotions. We’ve included some techniques later in this book to help you.
The body has a natural defense mechanism that always attempts to protect the most important organs. This defense mechanism is not any single organ or structure in the body. Rather, it’s the cumulative result of many internal systems, including the immune system and the brain, working in cooperation to set health priorities and shield critical organs from disease. The defense mechanism directs and controls the ways in which we fall ill and become well.
There is a useful model for understanding the effects of disease and the process of healing. As you can see in figure 1.1, as organisms, each of us is organized in a hierarchy. Tissues, organs, systems, and even states of mind are ranked according to each one’s level of importance to the function of the whole. There are three “bodies”: the physical, the emotional, and the mental. If you visualize a pyramid, the physical body is at the base, the emotional body is in the middle, and the mental body is at the top.
Within each of these “bodies” are five levels of priority. For the physical body, the skin and skeletal systems are the first, primary level, followed by the kidneys and genitals, the liver and the digestive system, the heart and lungs, and finally the brain and nervous system at the top. In the emotional body, worry comes first, followed by fear, anger, hysteria, and finally suicidal depression. The levels within the mental body are expressed as dullness and sloth, anxiety, cognitive dysfunction and memory loss, delusional states and dementia, and finally coma.
Figure 1.1
Each “body” (body, emotions, mind) contains five levels of priority.
The farther into a person’s body-emotions-mind pyramid a disease enters, the higher the degree of toxicity.
Disease tends to start at the base of the pyramid with the physical body, moving through each of its successive levels. If not stopped, the disease condition advances through the five levels of the emotional body and if unchecked continues through the levels of the mental body. Often, when only the symptoms of disease are treated rather than the disease itself, the condition is simply “pushed” to the next level of priority and farther up the hierarchy.
A disease that penetrates into a higher-ranked level indicates stronger shock and stress to the system and suggests that a weakness exists in the defense mechanism. The more toxic the patient, the deeper the penetration of symptoms into the hierarchy of the body. The greater the level of toxicity in the body, the more severe the disturbance in the defense mechanism and the longer detoxification therapy will need to be used. We heal from the top down, from the inside out, and from the most recent disease to the oldest. This concept was formulated by Constantine Herring, a renowned homeopath of the nineteenth century and is known as Herring’s Law.
Figure 1.1 is applicable to you in that as you get better, your healing will move from deep levels of disease to more superficial levels. Mental symptoms of sloth or anxiety can be replaced with emotional symptoms of fear or worry. Emotional symptoms of anger can be replaced with physical symptoms of gallbladder pain or skin eruptions.
Improvement of one’s health with detoxification is noticeable on a daily basis. Recovery is based on an individualized standard of evaluation that we call the three points of recovery: genetics, strength of disturbance, and interference.
Human beings are not created biochemically alike. We inherit genetic traits that, to a large extent, determine our vulnerability to disease, our resistance to aging, and our capacity to handle environmental toxins. Inherited predispositions to disease might or might not manifest, depending on a variety of environmental factors. The deeper the inherited trait, the longer it takes to treat. A physician who takes a detailed family history will be better able to understand the nature of your health and the patterns that are likely to emerge as you get better.
The ability of a disease or a toxin to disrupt health depends both on its strength and on the strength of your body’s defense mechanisms. If emotional pain or any physical or mental disturbance weakens your defenses, you become more vulnerable. The stronger the shock and the weaker your defenses, the more damage is done, and the longer is the required treatment time.
Interference with the body’s natural ability to handle disease through the inappropriate application of therapies, such as drugs that put an additional burden on the body’s detoxification mechanisms, can alter the timetable for recovery. When the body’s natural healing mechanisms have been disturbed, the prognosis becomes more uncertain. Patients who have taken steroids, are on immunosuppressive drugs, or take certain prescribed medications on a daily basis generally require longer courses of detoxification treatment. In these cases, it’s critical to take a “wait and see” approach. We are continually amazed when patients whom we didn’t think we could help—because of medical histories that involved extensive medications and surgeries—fully recover.
Those who practice mainstream medicine might be unaware or critical of the enormous body of medical literature that supports the safety, efficacy, and cost-effectiveness of detoxification medicine. Detoxification programs are the culmination of more than a hundred years of research and clinical delivery, and many gifted practitioners have contributed to the development of various approaches to such programs. These ideas have been embraced mainly by naturopathic physicians, but medical doctors, osteopaths, acupuncturists, and chiropractors have also used detoxification medicine with excellent results.
The ancient Indian and Chinese medical systems were built on the principles of detoxification. For centuries, physicians from different eras, countries, and cultures have seen the same thing: Allowing the body to detoxify can alleviate chronic disease and helps patients attain maximum wellness.
Unfortunately, timeless approaches to health care sometimes produce a knee-jerk response in highly trained physicians and specialists who equate it with snake oil and ignorance. The trend is to trust what is new and to ignore what was known in the preindustrial past. It’s a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bath water.
If you are determined to get well and stay well, it’s time to think for yourself and take the following steps.
But remember, no doctor can help you if you won’t help yourself. Many of our patients know that their habits and lifestyle are harmful to their health, but they’re unwilling to change.
We try to help people understand what they need to do and why, but frequently they question our advice or hesitate to follow it. This is understandable, especially in light of the fact that their attitudes have been formed by medical literature and other sources that don’t take into account the work of respected scientists and clinicians who function outside the boundaries of the medical mainstream. We explain that they’ve been getting their information from people who don’t use the types of therapy that we do and who know little about the approach of naturopathic doctors and others who use so-called alternative therapies.
This book provides you with the information you need to start regaining and maintaining your health. If you feel good and have no symptoms, congratulations. However, before you decide that you don’t need to clean house internally, remember that detoxification is the definitive concept in wellness medicine. It’s an excellent way to prevent disease and protect your health. Common sense and medical physiology indicate that hardworking bodies need a rest and a tune-up every now and then. Regular downtime for every bodily system is the secret to maintaining vitality both now and in the future.
Once you understand that your body is designed to regulate and repair itself, you’ll be ready to look at health care in a new way.
It can take years for symptoms to surface. Although you might not feel sick, your body may be holding off disease with all of its defense mechanisms. Eventually, the dam can break, and that’s when illness appears. Even if you feel fine, consider a thorough evaluation to check your detoxification chemistry. The results might surprise you. Or, simply try the program, and see how much better you can feel.
This chapter is probably the most important in the book. When teaching patients to take charge of their health to recover it, they are always instructed to read this chapter first because it gives them a framework for thinking about their health. Because teaching a person how to think is more important than actually helping them, it is probably helpful to re-read this material several times.
The Antibiotic Dilemma
Just as people are being forced to adapt to a changing environment, doctors must adapt to a new way of thinking. Use of antibiotics is a case in point. Antibiotics don’t fight many infections, but doctors continue to use them. These drugs cause antibiotic resistance in bacteria and alter the delicate immune balance in the intestinal tract. It is important to save these drugs for those situations where they are indicated.
We saw a four-year-old boy who had been given thirty courses of antibiotics over three years for chronic ear infections. When a child is medicated like this, it creates a serious disturbance in the bowel flora and immune system. We were struck with chilling awareness that the drug solution that was supposed to have helped instead caused great harm. Studies have shown that children with recurrent ear infections are commonly allergic to certain foods, and antibiotics do nothing to treat the source of the problem: the allergic reactions to foods. In one study, children who did not receive antibiotics actually had fewer recurrences of ear infections than those who did. Keeping these points in mind, we identified the boy’s food intolerances and eliminated those foods from his diet. After several months of detoxification to repair his intestinal tract and revive his immune system, the child had no further ear infections and thus no need for antibiotics.
Detoxification programs are the culmination of more than a hundred years of research and clinical delivery, and many gifted practitioners have contributed to various approaches.
Most people usually associate the word detox with programs to help those addicted to alcohol and drugs. But that is not what is meant by the term detoxification medicine, which is a very specialized kind of health care. It recognizes that the body has its own built-in healing system. Supporting that system by removing and eliminating toxins and supercharging every cell with healthy nutritional fuel is the natural way to treat and prevent disease. The first step is to realize that all of us are exposed to toxins every day, and some of us are more vulnerable to their harmful effects. It’s a fact of life in our modern world. To protect your health, it’s important to understand how toxins alter cellular activity.
