With alternative medicine treatments, you sometimes first need to separate the conceptual wheat from the chaff. Let's try to do this:
Why The "Stones" Found in the Feces After a Gallbladder Flush Cannot be Gallstones
First of all, for those who believe gallbladder flushes are pulling out gallstones: a little bit thought on this matter will convince you otherwise:
Think about this: repeated flushes keep producing more "stones" on each occasion. But the gallbladder is a smallish organ, so there simply would not be enough room inside it for all those "stones" that keep coming out every time you flush. So obviously what you see in the feces cannot be gallstones, but globules containing bile, cholesterol, and emulsified oil. Bile is a dark green to yellowish brown fluid, incidentally, which is the hue these "stones" have.
Also think about this: if what is seen in the feces were genuine gallstones, then once you had removed a set of them with a flush, and immediately felt the health benefits from doing so, then your health would be permanently better, because the stones would have been permanently removed. However, in fact people report the health benefits of gallbladder flushes wear off after 2 or 3 weeks, thereby showing that the idea of them passing gallstones cannot be correct.
How Do the Health Benefits of Gallbladder Flushes Arise?
But if gallbladder flushes are nothing to do with passing gallstones, how do gallbladder flushes lead to the observed health improvements? People report benefits such as: improved digestion, more energy, better sleep, increased mental clarity, healthier skin and hair, decreased headaches and decreased joint aches.
Presumably these health benefits must be something to do with the large amount of oil being consumed in one go, and the volume of bile secreted as a result of consuming this oil. Bile is secreted because one of the functions of bile is emulsifying dietary fats and oils so that they can be absorbed in the intestines.
However, another function of bile is detoxification: bile is one of the vehicles by which toxins are removed from the body. Bile binds to the toxins, and then carries them out of the body. So one might guess that with all this bile being secreted via a gallbladder flush, this will lead to intense detoxification session.
The type of toxins removed by bile include bacterial toxins, and mycotoxins from any fungal or mold infections with the body. Both of these type of toxins are constantly being generated by these microbes in the body, and thus need to be constantly detoxified.
Normally though bile is an imperfect vehicle for toxin removal, because around 95% of bile acids are reabsorbed by the small intestine and returned to the liver, which means that the toxins carried in the bile are also reabsorbed and routed back to the liver, rather than being eliminated from the body.
However, if there is a sudden flood in the quantity of bile in the intestines, then conceivably the sheer volume of bile may outstrip the intestines' ability to reabsorb it (and especially outstrip the active transport process in the ileum which absorbs conjugated bile acids).
† During this flood, the toxins carried by the bile may be flushed right out of the body.
So this flood of bile may be much more effective in fully removing toxins from the body.
Gallbladder Flushes for ME/CFS Patients
The postulated ability of gallbladder flushes to more efficiently remove toxins from the body might be useful for ME/CFS patients. Dr Richie Shoemaker finds that cholestyramine (Questran) is useful for patients whose illness involves neurotoxins, as this drug improves the detoxification process. Cholestyramine works by binding to bile acids and preventing their reabsorption, thus ensuring the toxins carried in the bile are expelled from the body and not returned back to the liver.
Conceivably, gallbladder flushes might offer similar detoxification benefits to cholestyramine.
Dr Shoemaker uses the visual contrast sensitivity test (VCS) to help determine whether patients have high levels of neurotoxins. This visual test utilizes your eye's ability to detect shades of contrast as a means to gauge your exposure to neurotoxins such as mycotoxins.
If your VCS result indicates high levels of neurotoxins, then conceivably gallbladder flushes might be particularly helpful, as would cholestyramine.
A free version of the VCS test, which takes just a few minutes to complete, can be found online
here. This test was developed by Dr Ritchie C. Shoemaker and Dr H. Kenneth Hudnell.
Dr Joseph Brewer found mycotoxins were extremely common in ME/CFS patients but entirely absent in healthy controls,
† and suggested that these mycotoxins may constantly be created by mold infections in certain body sites such as the sinuses.
†
So gallbladder flushes might help to better remove these mycotoxins from ME/CFS patients.
It's interesting that the mold toxins gliotoxin and patulin have been shown shift the immune response towards the Th2 mode, which may hamper the body's ability to fight viral infections.
†
Note that bitter herbs and foods like dandelion increase bile flow. A herb or medicine that increases bile secretion and flow is called a cholagogue.
They don't have the pain associated with passing large gallstones, nor the infections that would eventually result. If someone thinks that their liver is really producing that many gallstones, they should be talking to their doctor about it immediately. Oddly, no one has gotten the "stones" tested properly - and Some Guy From The Internet doing it on his kitchen counter does not count.
