Detoxification: A Very Different View

Detoxification is one of the most cherished tools used by many holistic or alternative healthcare practitioners. It’s an easy to understand concept: we live in a toxic environment, eat toxins in our food, slather toxic personal products on our skin and often take (very) toxic drugs, both for recreation and by prescription.

All this nasty stuff must build up and cause stress, malfunction and disease. Therefore, taking special supplements while eating and drinking specific foods over some period of time for the purpose of purging toxins from the body seems like a no-brainer.

Maybe It’s Not That Simple

There are two opposing schools of thought about detoxification:

Traditional, Scientific Medical View: “Detoxing – the idea that you can flush your system of impurities and leave your organs squeaky clean and raring to go – is a scam. It’s a pseudo-medical concept designed to sell you things.” (theguardian.com)

Holistic, Alternative View: “Health isn’t possible with a toxic body, specific detoxes such as liver and colon cleanses are necessary.”

It’s been my experience that, as usual, both viewpoints have truths and falsehoods.

If detoxing was as simple as “eat this way and take these supplements to flush out these toxins,” then labs could be done to measure toxic loads before and after the detoxes to show how efficient the process was. Sadly, I have seen no credible information that “before and after” toxicity has ever been conclusively measured by a lab. I say “sadly,” because healthcare would be so much simpler if I could just detox all my patients into high states of health.

On the other hand, the idea that our bodies can stay perfectly healthy just by eating a standard American diet— while ingesting the non-food products sold in the middle isles of the supermarkets, all manner of drugs and chemicals (and worse) in the environment is even more ludicrous (this is the “accepted medical viewpoint”).

Your Body Never Stops Detoxing

The health and function of your body can be compared to a scale: On one side is your body’s ability to function correctly and handle stress (such as toxins). On the other side is the total load of toxicity and lifestyle-induced stress. If your body can keep up and the scale stays tipped in the healthy direction, you will be fine. Other than some very specific situations (heavy metals, radiation, etc.) toxins really don’t load up in a body that is maintaining its health.

Where things go wrong is when the function of your body can’t keep up with the toxic and stress load you are giving it.

So truly, your body never stops detoxing, because in our current environment the toxins never stop getting into it! The trick is to get your body into a condition of health where it can “keep up” with the toxic load.

One disagreement I have with the “culture of detoxification” is that often people think they can detox once a year for a week or two as a substitute for a truly healthy lifestyle and effective therapy for their health problems. It’s not true!

Real Benefits of Detoxification Programs

A properly done detox program has the effect of kicking off a long-term improvement in lifestyle and diet while addressing acute stress in the liver and digestive systems. While I may not be sold on the “Detox to be less toxic” bandwagon, I am very sold on proven and effective ways to improve function and reduce stress.

My favorite detox? It’s the Standard Process “Detox Balance” program. This is a 28-day program of diet improvements and whole-food supplements in smoothies.

Does this “get out all the nasty toxins?” Probably not.

What it does with great efficiency for every patient I’ve ever put on the program is:

• Better energy
• Better sleep
• Better digestion
• Improved mental clarity

Often there are many other benefits, such as improved libido, improved skin, weight loss, etc.

The detox works because doing the program can radically shift your personal “scale” toward the good side.  Suddenly your body has a lot less stress and a lot more function. What does it do with this? It compensates better for stress and starts the healing process.

You get the benefits that are touted for a “detox,” just for different reasons!

You Can’t Stop with the Detox

Let’s say you do a detox and feel lots better. Yea! But how long will this last?

Sadly, not long.

With no follow-up, it’s just like you washed your car. In a week you can’t tell it ever happened.

With the proper follow-up, however, it’s just the beginning of an entirely new level of life and health!

BUT: How do you know what to do for a follow-up?

Should you “eat healthy?” Well, sure, but what does that mean? And are there specific dietary recommendations that YOUR body needs?

Should you take supplements? Which ones? How do you know they’re correct? How do you know you don’t need more or less supplements? How do you know when your body is done with a supplement?

Are there functional problems with your body that will override all efforts to maintain your health? This could be hormone problems, allergy problems, nervous system problems, etc. Do you need therapy for this type of issue? If so, what therapies and for how long?

A Simple Solution

Get tested. Why would you want to guess at all these difficult and complicated issues when you can spend an hour getting tested and find out the truth?

To find out more about testing, just go here.

Find Out More

Here is a free booklet with the story of how I developed my techniques and how those techniques work (very practical information that shows how your body works and how to start recovering your health for the rest of your life).

The Insanity of Disease Prevention

With heart disease and cancer killing 1.2 million annually (the two leading causes of death in the US), should you be fooled into believing that anything is really known about prevention?

If you worry sometimes (or a lot) about getting cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, or other life-altering (or life-ending) diseases, there’s a reason for that:

You aren’t in control of whether you get these diseases, and you are hoping that you get lucky.

Sure, that would worry anyone.

Using cars as an analogy: you climb into the passenger side of a car and look over to see your neighbor’s 16-year-old son getting into the driver’s seat. You are WORRIED! You’re sweating, you’re shaking. So, you get out, evict the kid from the car and drive it yourself. Suddenly, no worries! You’re back in control. It’s not like you are the world’s most talented driver, but you trust yourself to stay out of trouble.

What if you did this for your health worries as well? What if you evicted your doctor from the driver’s seat and made the guy into an advisor instead? What if you stopped buying into the idea that “you can’t know” what to do to stay healthy and prevent disease other than general, inane stuff like “stop smoking.”

Here is an example of the insanity that passes for “Prevention” in our current health care system:

(Actual) Top Tips for Cancer Prevention:

1. Don’t use tobacco.
2. Eat a healthy diet.
3. Exercise and avoid being overweight.
4. Get regular medical care and screenings.

Here is my satire of these tips:

Top Tips for Auto Accident Prevention (Medical Version):

1. Make sure your headlights work if you drive at night.
2. Make sure your brakes and tires are inspected regularly.
3. Test your horn.
4. Schedule regular bumpergram imaging for early detection that you’ve already had an accident.

What’s Preventing the Prevention?

Prevention implies that something is being DONE to prevent the bad thing from happening. Current medical prevention includes no hint that you have some control of your own life and health outcome. There isn’t any inkling that you could be responsible for your health.

If you add personal responsibility and the idea that you can have control of your own health into the Tips List, it would look something like this:

Tips for Auto Accident Prevention (Personal Responsibility Version):

1. Pay attention to the road, traffic and your environment.
2. Drive as if the other guy might do something stupid at any time.
3. Don’t do distracting things while driving (phones, radios, kids).
4. Keep your speed and spacing with other vehicles so you have reaction time.

Tips for Cancer Prevention (Personal Responsibility Version):

1. Test your body to find out if anything is inhibiting your immune system and correct it.
2. Test your body to find out what you could do to help your body improve its overall health and do this.
3. Find out what diet restrictions are needed with your body and develop a more ideal food plan to improve and maintain your health.
4. Get tested regularly for cancer risk factors (such as thermography) and handle any that are found.

If you aren’t familiar with these last four tips, you should know that understanding them could be the answer to much of your worry about scary diseases.

To understand how these tips would work, here’s a quick rundown of important health information that is either little known or little understood:

Summary: Your body is intelligent and constantly is working to maintain and heal itself. By accessing information from the nervous system with specific types of testing, it’s possible to let the body be its own doctor. You can find out from it what help it needs and then assist it to heal itself. We have treatment techniques and supplements all designed to be used by the body to repair itself and return to health.

Here’s a detailed version of the above summary:

1. Your body is alive and intelligent. You may think of it as a kind of biological machine run by reflexes, but it’s really a bona fide intelligence. It created itself starting with just two cells. It runs itself and repairs itself (even from threats such as viruses that it’s never seen before). Most important, it is aware of the areas in it that are damaged or not functioning correctly and knows what it needs to repair them.

2. There are testing techniques that access your body’s nervous system to expose the information about what is damaged and what is needed by your body to repair this.

3. There are noninvasive treatment techniques and specific supplements that are designed to work with your body, giving it what it is asking for so that it can repair itself.

4. Using tools called “functional lab testing” along with the nervous system testing described above, it’s possible to know what your body shouldn’t eat and to design a diet that would be healthy for you.

This Information Changes Everything

Working with the body to assist it to heal itself ends the standard trial-and-error methods of conventional medicine. It ends the tyranny of the pharmaceutical treatment model as the ONLY method of treatment accepted as legitimate. It gives you the ability to improve and control your own health, and to kick the teenage driver out of your car for good.

Find Out More

Here is a free booklet with the story of how I developed my techniques and how those techniques work (very practical information that shows how your body works and how to start recovering your health for the rest of your life).

Should You Get the Flu Shot?

 Learn the facts and then decide…

“Get Your Flu Shot Here” signs have been all over the city since late summer. It’s that time of year when we are bombarded with flu shot advertising encouraging you to get your shot. CVS and Target are offering “free” shots (no copay on your insurance).

There are many physicians who are pushing flu shots, however there are many others who believe that the flu vaccine is not a good idea for anyone. Here are some facts about the influenza virus and the vaccine so that you can make an informed decision on whether you should get the flu shot:

FACT: Did you know that influenza is not a very common illness? Just because you have flu-like symptoms does not mean you have the flu. There are over 200 viruses that cause influenza-like illness and symptoms and without a laboratory test, you cannot tell the difference.

ACTUAL percentage of the US population likely to get the flu? 3% to 11%. (This figure is the current one from the CDC (Center for Disease Control). Previously, the percentage has been given as 5% to 20%, because people with “no symptoms” were being counted. Huh?)

FACT: Flu vaccines only work against the virus strains picked as most likely to show up in any given year. The vaccines must be manufactured well in advance of the season, so no mid-flu-season adjustments can be made. Here’s the vaccine effectiveness for the past few years (according to the CDC):

• 2014-15 – 19%
• 2015-16 – 48%
• 2016-17 – 40%
• 2017-18 – 38%
• 2018-19 – 47%

FACT: You can get the flu despite being vaccinated. Here’s what the CDC says about this:

There are several reasons why someone might get flu symptoms, even after they have been vaccinated against flu.

1. One reason is that some people can become ill from other respiratory viruses besides flu such as rhinoviruses, which are associated with the common cold, cause symptoms similar to flu, and also spread and cause illness during the flu season. The flu vaccine only protects against influenza, not other illnesses.
2. Another explanation is that it is possible to be exposed to influenza viruses, which cause the flu, shortly before getting vaccinated or during the two-week period after vaccination that it takes the body to develop immune protection. This exposure may result in a person becoming ill with flu before protection from the vaccine takes effect.
3. A third reason why some people may experience flu like symptoms despite getting vaccinated is that they may have been exposed to a flu virus that is very different from the viruses the vaccine is designed to protect against. The ability of a flu vaccine to protect a person depends largely on the similarity or “match” between the viruses selected to make the vaccine and those spreading and causing illness. There are many different flu viruses that spread and cause illness among people. For more information, see Influenza (Flu) Viruses.
4. The final explanation for experiencing flu symptoms after vaccination is that the flu vaccine can vary in how well it worksand some people who get vaccinated may still get sick.

FACT: The vaccine contains toxic ingredients that are potentially or overtly dangerous to everyone, but especially to developing infants and children, the elderly and those with compromised immune systems. Some of the ingredients are:

• Formaldehyde
• Aluminum Salts
• Mercury (preservative)
• Antibiotics (anti-contaminant)
• Chicken Egg Proteins
• MSG (as a stabilizer)
• Polysorbate 80 (emulsifier)

FACT: Flu vaccines are made from viruses that are grown in chicken eggs with embryos. If you have a severe allergic reaction to eggs getting a flu shot is very risky. So, if your baby hasn’t eaten eggs at 6 months how do you know if she is allergic to it?

FACT: Vaccination studies are not independent and unbiased.  The Cochrane Collaboration caution people evaluating flu vaccine research to be aware that most research conducted on vaccines is funded by the very pharmaceutical companies who market the vaccines and make huge profits on their sales.

The Cochrane Collaboration’s long-running review of flu vaccines (2018 update) has this statement in its Main Results:

Healthy adults who receive inactivated parenteral influenza vaccine rather than no vaccine probably experience less influenza, from just over 2% to just under 1%. NOTE THE WORD “PROBABLY.”

What Should I Do?

Become educated about the flu and its risks and the vaccine and its benefits and risks and make an informed decision after consulting multiple sources of information and discussing your questions with one or more health professionals.

Getting a flu shot because “it’s just the normal thing to do” may not be your best decision.

Doing whatever your doctor recommends because he or she “knows best” should be considered with the knowledge that more than 50% of the US population has chronic illness that your doctor doesn’t understand and can’t treat. In general, medical science knows much, much less than the popular media represents.

More Information

To help your body’s immune system stave off that flu, learn how changes to your diet can give you an immune boost:

Boost Your Immune System (A diet-based way to dramatically reduce your chances of illness)

Start Now! Get Healthy!

Here is a free booklet with the story of how I developed my techniques and how those techniques work (very practical information that shows how your body works and how to start recovering your health for the rest of your life).

Don’t Get Sick, Boost Your Immune System

Mostly I don’t think very much about my immune system… it chugs along keeping me protected and repaired without bringing any attention to itself.

That is, until I start to get sick. Then I’m really paying attention to my immune system!

Will I get really sick, or will my immune system win and I’ll be better by tomorrow? I feel like I’m in the last minutes of the big game, the invaders are ahead by 3 points and I’m on my feet screaming for the home team to pull off that big win. Come, ON immune system! Kill those guys! Win WIN WIN!!

What I have for you is a secret weapon to boost and energize your immune system (so it can WIN more often). It won’t cost you anything, you don’t have to swallow pills and it works phenomenally well.

But: You must understand how to work it, or you’ll mess up and still get sick.

How to Work It

Your body has a very efficient system for protecting itself from invaders such as viruses, bacteria, funguses, etc. A very important part of this system is the body’s ability to identify and destroy any invaders that get inside.

In the 1970’s Dr. Linus Pauling (one of the greatest researchers in the field of microbiology and only scientist to ever win TWO Nobel Prizes) made a critical discovery about the immune system that you can use to stay well. The fact that you likely haven’t heard of this research demonstrates how our society ignores what it doesn’t want to agree with.

Here’s how it works:

Your immune system disposes of invaders (like bacteria and viruses) by literally swallowing them with a special type of cell called a phagocyte. This is a cell (example: a white blood cell) that engulfs and absorbs waste material, harmful microorganisms or other foreign bodies in the bloodstream and tissues.

Dr. Pauling discovered that white blood cells use vitamin C to dissolve and absorb the invaders once they’ve been engulfed.  A white blood cell needs a 50 X concentration of vitamin C (compared to the amount of C in the blood) to be as efficient as possible in dissolving toxins and invaders. To maintain this concentration of C, the cell pulls in vitamin C as needed from the bloodstream around it.

Glucose (sugar in its simplest form, as found in the blood stream) and vitamin C have a similar chemical structure. So similar, in fact, that when a white blood cell tries to pull in more vitamin C from the blood around it, glucose can get substituted by mistake. If the concentration of glucose in the blood goes beyond a certain concentration (in other words, if your blood sugar level gets too high), the white blood cell’s 50 X vitamin C concentration can start to drop because of the large amount of glucose it’s pulling in as a substitute for vitamin C.

In fact, the blood sugar level created by eating some candy, cookies, drinking a sweet drink or juice can reduce the white blood cell’s vitamin C concentration from 50X to about 13X. This cuts your immune system’s ability to absorb and destroy toxins and invaders by 75%. Worse, it can take four to six hours for the vitamin C concentration in the white blood cells to reach that optimum 50 X concentration again and return your immune system to normal efficiency.

The Secret Immune Weapon:

To boost your immune system, don’t raise your blood sugar level!

Here’s how to avoid this:

1. Don’t eat refined sugar (cake, candy, cookies, soda, wine, beer). Refined sugar is processed to make it absorb more rapidly into your bloodstream (which is why we love it SO MUCH… it’s the sugar high). Also, most foods containing refined sugar contain a LOT of it (cake, candy, cookies, etc.). This combination of a lot of sugar that absorbs rapidly is the nuclear option: you WILL raise your blood sugar, there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
2. Fruit contains a lot of sugar. Sugar is sugar. Your white blood cells can’t tell if the sugar they’re pulling in instead of the vitamin C comes from bananas or lollypops. Some guidelines about eating fruit: Don’t eat more than 3 servings a day, and not at the same time. Don’t drink fruit juice of any kind (it’s refined sugar). Eat protein (meat, eggs, nuts) WITH the fruit to buffer it. The protein slows down the sugar being absorbed in your stomach so that it doesn’t raise the blood sugar nearly as much.
3. When buying food with a label: Check that the sugar per serving is 5 grams or less.

Summary: Don’t eat any kind of sugar if you’re sick, including the much-recommended orange juice (which may contain vitamin C, but this won’t help if the white blood cells can’t get past the sugar to use it!).

The Long-term (Chronic) Illness Connection

If you’re trying to recover from a chronic illness (arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure, hormone problems, depression, anxiety, digestive problems, etc., etc.) you must know that your body is damaged because your immune system has been unable to keep up with the repair work.

Bodies rebuild and repair themselves every minute of every day. In the time you read this sentence, your body has replaced about 50 million cells. If you wish to recover your health, you’d want to help your body in any way you can to rebuild cells more rapidly. If your body could catch up, it might repair much of the damage from your illness and you could be dramatically better.

Here’s the Problem:

As your body replaces cells during the healing process, much of the material from the old, replaced cells becomes toxins that must be gotten out of your body. The faster your body heals, the more toxins from dead cells it must deal with. If you are already very toxic (this is true for almost anyone with a chronic health problem), your body can rapidly “hit the ceiling” of toxicity, because it’s trying to replace too many cells too quickly.

In this case, your body has no choice but to stop or slow the healing process to bring the toxic level into a manageable range.

If you could help your body get rid of the dead cells more efficiently, it could increase the healing capacity enough to help you recover.

Guess what? The only way your body can get rid of dead cells is… white blood cells! So, if you follow the above guidelines for not raising your blood sugar level on a long-term basis, it can increase your body’s capacity to heal from chronic illness.

Talk to us about some great sugar substitutes you can use! And the next time you go to the drug store and notice that the cough syrup contains mostly sugar, you can wonder as we do what happened to Dr. Pauling’s valuable research that no one seems to remember.

Start Now! Get Healthy!

Here is a free booklet with the story of how I developed my techniques and how those techniques work (very practical information that shows how your body works and how to start recovering your health for the rest of your life).

Photo Credit: By Volker Brinkmann – (November 2005). “Neutrophil engulfing Bacillus anthracis”. PLoS Pathogens 1 (3): Cover page. DOI:10.1371. Retrieved on 2009-01-04., CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2107792

What is Intermittent Fasting?

In a small nutshell, intermittent fasting is avoiding food of all kinds during certain periods of the day, typically for 12 to 16 hours, or for an entire day. For example, you might eat only between 8 AM and 6 PM, or you might fast for two full nonconsecutive days a week. There are a lot of variations.

The benefits: The idea is that by mimicking ancient eating schedules instead of having food available all the time you can improve health. Reportedly, you can increase your mental clarity, burn fat and lose weight, feel better overall and improve your health to avoid diseases.

Ahh! You picked up on that “reportedly” I dropped in the last paragraph. Which of course might mean that I disagree with intermittent fasting in general.

Really, I believe that some people may get wonderful benefits from intermittent fasting. I’ve read the research and rationales behind it, and some of this does makes sense.

What I don’t agree with is any diet, food, supplement or treatment that is purported to work with “everyone.” In my practice, I see mainly severe chronic cases. These people are physically very stressed. They are very toxic, and usually have some type of immune suppression. Intermittent fasting would be about the worst thing that many of these people could do to themselves.

“Testing,” a Weird New Idea?

I was explaining to a patient this morning that I can’t think of any single food, supplement or treatment that would be appropriate for every patient I’ve had in the past year. Well, except for maybe clean water.  Every person needs different solutions.

When I make this statement to people, they often ask, “But, how would you be able to tell who would benefit and who would not?” This shows how remote the concept of TESTING is from the general consciousness. If you could accurately test someone to determine what foods, supplements, diets and treatments would be effective and safe for them—why would anyone make any decisions without doing this?

In my practice, I don’t do ANYTHING without testing it first. And after 25 years of operating this way, I’ve learned a valuable lesson: If you test a lot, prepare to be surprised a lot! Often, what shows up in testing is NOT what you would have come up with on your own. There are so many variations on the causes of any symptom that I see.

Medicine’s Failure to Test

The lack of accurate testing is probably one of the main reasons that conventional medicine fails to effectively treat chronic health conditions. When treating diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, thyroid conditions, hormone imbalances, depression, etc., conventional medicine relies on protocols, not testing.

Medical doctors test to diagnose, but no testing is done to determine causes. Not knowing the cause, the doctor slavishly follows the treatment protocol for that diagnosis in order to treat the symptoms. The result is often a lessening of the symptom (which can be a very good thing in many cases) but there is no solution to the actual problem. The patient usually will suffer from the chronic health condition for the rest of their lives, and the undiscovered cause of their condition will continue to deteriorate their health.

“One Accurate Measurement is Worth a Thousand Expert Opinions”

—Admiral Grace Hopper

Medical practice relies on the doctor’s opinion as the primary method of deciding what is wrong with the patient and what treatment would be effective. This is so true that it’s normal to get a second opinion to see if you can get more than one doctor to agree on your treatment.

My long experience is that many—maybe most—people are so used to this that they’ll shrug and say, “OK, so what’s the problem with opinions?” The problem is that an opinion is really a guess.

Doctors have been practicing this way for so long that we think it’s normal. But what other profession could possibly get away with this approach? Would you get a “second opinion” on the engineering of a bridge or skyscraper or the design of your car? No, these and almost all other professions rely on accurate measurements and proven methods based on scientific and engineering principles that always get results.

Engineers do not guess. Neither do carpenters, chefs, pilots, accountants or carpet installers.

In our entire society, professionals are expected to “know their stuff” and get a predictable, effective result. Except for doctors! (And, maybe philosophers, sports bookies and politicians.)

The Takeaway:

Everyone is different.

Your genetics, damage from illnesses and injuries, diet you were raised on, preferences, environment, available food, drug history, stress history, personality and many, many more variables are all different from other individuals.

So, there is no “universal” diet, food, lifestyle, supplement, drug or treatment that would get good results on everyone. Far, far from it!

The ability to test any of the above items before recommending them to an individual is not only of critical importance, it is obvious.

Because, the only other option would be to GUESS.

How Could You Assist Your Body to Heal?

Here is a free booklet you can read online in 30 minutes that will explain how your body can be assisted to heal itself successfully from many “permanent” medical conditions.

Are You Fed Up with Medicine and Want Help?

I’d be happy to get you started on improving your health. If you’ll fill out a health assessment on this website, I’ll go over the clues with you on a free phone consult (limited to greater Atlanta area). This way you can get started doing something about your health problems quickly.