http://www.drclark.net/info/liver.htm
I know a guy who is doing something like that. Can anyone give me info on it? I know alot of SD posters are very skeptical of herbal remedies, so can anyone point me to studies that show if this kind of thing works or not, or if its even necessary?
Without knowing anything more about it, don’t gallstones come from the gallbladder, not the liver?
It sounds like quackery to me.
Exactly true. Gallstones form in the gallbladder and don’t get anywhere near the liver. Ditto on kidney stones.
So the guy either doesn’t know WTF he’s talking about, or he’s counting on his suckers to be uninformed.
However, it should be recognized that most gallstones are formed by cholesterol and a low-cholesterol diet will help prevent gallstones.
However, it should be recognized that most gallstones are formed by cholesterol and a low-cholesterol diet will help prevent gallstones.
Pregnancy/delivery can do it, too.
It’s an utter and complete scam. At the heart of it is this recipe:
Epsom salts: 4 tablespoons
Olive oil: half cup (light olive oil is easier to get down), and for best results, ozonate it for 20 minutes. Add 2 drops HCl.
Fresh pink grapefruit: 1 large or 2 small, enough to squeeze 2/3 cup juice.
Behold: magnesium sulfate, citric acid, complex carbohydrates, and olive oil. A perfect recipe for a tough film that will encapulate the olive oil, forming round blobs that will pass during defecation, convincing the “patient” that he has been cleansed of gallstones. Hulda Clark is a charlatan, and a dangerous, ignorant charlatan at that.
Hulda Clark is a nutcase (and menace), in my not so humble opinion. Her liver cleanse seems to be part of a series of “treatments” she advocates. The treatments are the same no matter what your ailment. Some of her theories:
All diabetics have a pancreatic fluke, eurytrema pancreaticum.
All asthma is associated with ascaris infestation.
Kill these parasites and you cure the disease.
Is he hoping to cure allergies, or perhaps his bursitis, as this liver cleanse is purported to do? Did he do his parasite flush first? If he pulls all his filled or root canal treated teeth, in addition to the above, he can also cure any arthritis and cancer he has.
Please, please, understand I in no way believe what I wrote in that last paragraph. We need a sarcasm smiley. Or an edit function.
A good friend of mine did this a few months ago when her doctor told her she had gallstones. It had worked for her uncle, so she thought, why not? I think she drank a cup of virgin olive oil every hour, and by the end of the day she’d pooped them out.
She even sent us pictures… so I can say that in her case this “treatment” worked, although I have no idea why.
I’m kind of a crackpot who is open to “alternative” medicine, but usually something much more mild and less scary than this. I have gallstones and have been told about this olive oil treatment. I always adamantly refused to try it.
I’ve heard that gallstones can be triggered by different things for different people. For me, it was eating too much greasy food. The doctor told me to lay off the greasy food. It worked pretty well. So to consume a huge portion of “grease” (olive oil) just sounds really wrong to me. I don’t see myself ever trying that.
Dr Hulda Clark got her Naturopathic Degree (“ND”- “not a doctor”- he he) from The Clayton College of Natural Health, a non-accredited correspondence school in Birmingham, Al. It was a 100 hour course that cost her $695.00.
She thinks most disease, cancer included, is caused by an intestinal parasite called a liver fluke, and that she can cure all the many diseases (from cancer to HIV to acne) caused by this parasite in 5 days. Which disease you have apparantly depends on which organ system the fluke lands in. She has some unorthodox (read bogus) methods of determining your particular disease and will give you instructions on how to build your own diagnosing machine using parts from Radio Shack.
Treatment in her Mexican clinic will only cost you $4500.00, plus food, lodging, lab work, and her special supplements (available for purchase, of course) that run for $500.00 to $1500.00 a month.
That is, if it’s open.
It seems to get shut down alot.
She moved to Mexico to avoid that pesky US oversight, but has had problems with Mexican authorities also. There are lots of interesting first hand accounts about people visiting the clinic on-line.
Oh, I forgot, you have to come back to the clinic twice a year for ‘maintenance’ and have all family members and household pets treated, too.
Clarification:
“Dr” Clark’s Mexican clinic treatments are for serious diseases such as cancer and HIV. She gives free advice like the gall stone cures to convince people that her methods work. Like the previous poster pointed out, the “stones” are just the product consumed all lumped up together and passed through the digestive tract. Another example is that many people think they see tiny “worms” or “flukes” in the stool they pass following treatment. These “flukes” are really the bits of grapefruit that have passed through the digestive tract largely undigested.
My boss swears by Dr. Clark and her liver cleanse. When I was having problems with my pancreatic enzyme levels the other year, she tried to get me to try the liver cleanse even though I told her the doctors had completely ruled out any possibility of gall stones. She’s also done the parasite cleanse (I think - or maybe she was just raving about wanting to do it) and tried the yeast cleanse (but had to stop due to adverse physical reactions).
I would pass this information along to her, but she’s the type of person that if she believes something is true, then there’s just no getting her to believe anything else, no matter what facts you may have.
Of course this is the same woman who believes (and actually seriously suggested*) that one should put butter on burns. She also doesn’t believe that isopropyl alcohol kills germs - I know this because she told me so when I was using one of those pre-moistened isopropyl towelettes to wipe down the phone after someone used it that had a cold.
*When one of my co-workers burned himself while manning the BBQ.
Gallstone pain is often caused by the gallstone blocking up the duct which leads from the gallbladder to the small intestine. The backup of pressure and the spasms of the gall bladder trying to empty induces pain.
Ingestion of fat will cause a gall bladder to try to empty also, as the contents of the gall bladder do aid in the digestion of fat to some extent (not a critical one; people without gall bladders digest fat ok, usually).
Therefore, ingestion of fat will often trigger a gall bladder attack when stones are already present in the gallbladder. Hence the advice to avoid fats. But sometimes, if the stone is small, ingestion of fat triggers enough extra spasming in the gall bladder to actually help pass the stone into the intestine. Sometimes.
Here’s a nice illustration of biliary tree anatomy.
http://abdellab.sunderland.ac.uk/lectures/Parmacology/Pics/anatomy/BileAnat.jpg
And it sounds like Dr. Hulda Clarke may suffer from microdeckia. I would not recommend following her advice.
QtM, MD
What is microdeckia? I cannot find it in any of my dictionaries. “Small <something>”?
She’s not playing with a full deck.
Giving your boss information contrary to what she believes would not be helpfull, especially to you.
People who hold ‘alternative’ beliefs often have those beliefs so firmly entrenched that opinions contary are met with hostility. She’s used the ‘cleanse’ and seen the results. If you tried to tell her it’s bogus, she won’t be very happy with you.
If you wanted to plant a seed of doubt in her mind, you could try asking some gentle questions or some experimentation. I wonder what would happen if you mixed the ‘recipe’ above (epsom salt, oil, etc.) in a jar and shook it or left it out overnight. Would it form “stones”? It may be that the ‘recipe’ does need to pass through the digestive tract to form. Maybe adding something similar to stomach acid would be needed. I don’t know.
Anyway, I would not give her any negative info myself. These fraudulent things need to be to be disproved by the user him or herself to have any effect on the belief system, and sometimes even that won’t shake the belief.
Ah. I shall now smack my head upon my desk. :rolleyes: (Shoulda seen that from a mile away.) Good one though; I’ll remember that one.