My first colonic

[H]ave you ever noticed everyone driving faster than you is a maniac and everyone driving slower than you is an idiot? Well, it’s kind of like that with chronic illness too – I find it hard not to categorize health therapies into scams (the faster cars) or Band-Aids (the slow cars).

Not knowing any better, I put colon cleansing in the scam bucket with holy water. But, five days ago I walked into a Colon Hydrotherapy clinic in a strip mall in Boulder and met James Allred who’s been administering colonics for 37 years. We talked on the phone a few days earlier and I had read a blog post written by one of his patients who recovered from Crohn’s disease with his help. So I was already feeling pretty comfortable but talking to James face-to-face I sensed that I was with someone who understood that my illness is invisible and was really listening and ready to fight in my corner.

So what on earth was I doing prepping for a colonic after considering it hocus-pocus for so many years? Well, nothing on earth will change your mind like physical evidence. A couple weeks prior I was doing a liver flush and did two vitamin C bowel flushes in one day. I had also preceded my liver flush with a coffee enema two days earlier (my first baby step into the hocus-pocus realm). The night of my two bowel flushes, I hardly slept because of a sudden flu-like body ache and in the morning I was shivering with cold even while wearing a down coat in bed underneath a down comforter, and lying on a heating pad when the room temperature was probably 74°F.

A couple hours later I was stunned when I passed a large mass of rubbery stuff that clearly was not stool. It didn’t look like stool, smell like stool or dissolve in water and it was all sort of attached to itself with little smooth round faces shaped like the surface of the colon. With a little research in Google I could see it’s what people call mucoid plaque or impaction.

Right after passing this plaque I became aware that I had a massive headache. The flu symptoms disappeared almost as fast as they came on but I was left with a migraine that lasted for 50 hours.

I estimated that I had perhaps cleared out 12 to 18 inches of plaque from my colon. Knowing that the colon is roughly 4 feet long, I calculated that I might have another 2 or 3 feet of plaque to clear and immediately thought that I might be able to avoid the flu and migraine by having a professional clean my colon. At the time, I was worried that the plaque would not fit through the tube (speculum) used in a colonic.

So I made an appointment with James but continued cleansing at home trying an apple cider vinegar enema and more sodium ascorbate enemas. I also started a Mag 07 cleanse after spending about eight hours reading reviews on YouTube and Amazon for Blessed Herbs, Oxy Powder and Mag 07.

I wanted to do a little more work at home before getting ‘professionally cleaned’ because of my concern about the size of the tube. But, no more black rubber came out. Instead, I got a lot of yellow tapioca-like goo which came out over two days. The tapioca was not accompanied by the flu as before, just an average frontal detox headache and fatigue.

Finally, on the morning of my colonic appointment, I passed a black gelatinous mass (before going to see James) which I’m told might be cyanobacteria (basically an algae). I didn’t take pictures of the tapioca or the black Jell-O, but you can see all kinds of nasty stuff if you want by googling ‘mucoid plaque’. Most of it comes out of people who are using bentonite clay-based cleanse products which stick to the plaque gooping it up. Because I used a magnesium based product and enemas instead, I had the privilege of seeing what was in my colon in its natural state.

Having done a half-dozen enemas before visiting James, I had the expectation that he would be able to get more cleaning done in 45 minutes then I could do in three hours. But I realized during my colonic as I watched the water flow in and out that the difference is much more dramatic. It might take me six or eight hours with my enema bucket to accomplish what James did. But in reality, my body would not tolerate even 3 hours of enema work because my sensitive tissues would not withstand the rush of the water leaving my body. Maybe others could do it, but I couldn’t.

So what else would you like to know about getting a colonic? You insert the speculum (tube) yourself which is comforting. The speculum was larger than I expected so my fear about the plaque fitting through it might have been misplaced. But then, when I first saw the speculum, the size made me a little nervous too. In the end, it is a little uncomfortable, but it gets the job done.

I really liked the closed system that James uses. It feels very ‘medical’ and mechanically it seems like efficient plumbing. I’m a very technical, mechanically oriented person and kind of went in seeking plumbing help, which I got in spades. If you research it, you’ll read about the other type of system which is called ‘gravity fed’, and has the advantage of allowing you to put something in the water as you might with an enema (like vitamin C or coffee).

During the procedure, James pressed on my abdomen, doing some massage and pressure point work, rotated me several times from one side to my back, and to the other side. He talked to me about the importance of breathing deeply and coached me into relaxation which is necessary for this process to work well.

After the colonic, I felt good, relaxed and really cleaned out, slimmer and with a clear mind. I was somewhat fatigued but that is par for the course for me when doing anything that involves leaving the house and talking to people. And of course, this was something new that I was a little anxious about. The rest of the day my energy was quite good, unusually so, because normally after an enema which causes me to pass alien stuff, I’m typically very fatigued all day.

Have a look at the blood flow around your colon. Look closely at the portal vein on the left and it’s connections. You’ll see that it connects your liver with every inch of the small intestines, colon and rectum, feeding nutrients into your liver for processing. That has a lot of implications.

The big lesson is that the contents of your colon are flowing straight to your liver. So if you’ve got infestations of bad bacteria like candida or larger parasites (helminths), the toxins they produce are going to your bloodstream through the portal vein. Or, if you’ve got toxins coming out of your liver after a flush, and they get trapped in your colon because it’s lined with plaque, those toxins are going right back to your liver and into your blood again.

It means too that anything you put in your colon — coffee, apple cider vinegar, vitamin C, milk & salt, chlorine dioxide or ozone gas, it’s all going to your liver before hitting your blood stream.

So I’m confident this was just the sort of plumbing I needed. We didn’t see anything large or unusual coming out during my clonic but I did see lots of material flowing out through the clear, lighted tube. I’m confident that we cleared out all of the remaining black Jell-O that morning.

Today I’m on day 7 of my planned 10 day Mag 07 cleanse and I’m pretty confident that my colon is just about cleaned up. In the beginning, the magnesium would cause turbulence in my abdomen and I’d get a detox headache followed by some darker than usual stool in the morning. Now, none of that is happening anymore. So my plan is to go back for one more colonic in a few days at the end of my cleanse and after that I’ll try to flood my system with probiotics perhaps including a kefir enema… Looking a little further down the road, I should try to figure out how to time the colonic with liver flushes as suggested by Moritz.

It’s a little too early for me to say what long-term benefits I’ll experience, but I can tell you that my sinuses feel clearer and I’m breathing a little more freely having removed several cups of plaque from my colon and possibly a cup of stones from my liver. My stomach is a little flatter too. But I really won’t know how I’m doing until I stop taking the Mag 07.

If you’re thinking about doing a colonic or colon cleanse – here’s some more background on my decision and the relevance of colon cleansing to chronic fatigue and other chronic illnesses. Here are several things that caught my attention and made me think I would benefit from a clean colon:

• I have osteoporosis which is unusual for someone my age indicating mineral absorption and transport problems. There’s not much online about the large intestines involvement but there is something here and it involves mercury.
• My reaction to colon cleansing mimicked other detox protocol reactions I’ve had – frontal headache, fatigue and depression.
• At a very young age I traveled in Mexico, Africa and Eastern Europe and swam in ponds and lakes and drank water from them creating many exposures to bacteria, parasites and algaes. Can they living in the plaque on your colon? My guess is that’s still unknown.
• I’m trying to go upstream to the original cause of my illness and intuitively I see colon cleansing as being in the headwaters.
• It’s about the easiest of all the treatments I’ve done – it’s low hanging fruit.
• It’s recommended by Hulda Clark and Andreas Moritz — when liver flushing, you don’t want any of the toxic outflow to get stuck or slowed down in mucoid plaque. You want it to flow out quickly and easily.
• I do some of my own plumbing work and have seen inside old clogged up kitchen drains.
• The video below was very motivational:

Lastly, not all medical doctors have their head in the sand – far from it in the case of Dr. Rowan M.D. who finishes off colonics in his clinic with ozone insufflation. If you like the video below, I highly recommend you watch Dr. Rowan’s ozone therapy video too.