I got another job in NYC and instead of just sittin’ in my room ordering Ray’s pizza and hookers, I was thinking of getting an “internal cleaning”.
I was a Pre-Med major in college so I know of the 5 parts of the ? we call the large intestine: ascending, transverse, descending, sigmoid, colon.
The question I have is how far does an enema reach? I can see it reaching the terminal colon, maybe even the sigmoid. But from a realistic stand point, how “clean” will I be? I went to a webstite called ColonBlow. Does “bran” work?
I’ve heard that you can have like 8 lbs of putrefying food in your gut. ICK! How can one get rid of all that SHIT?
Here’s a previous SDMB thread that sort of touches on this subject and links to others:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=55007
A high colonic uses a lot more water and goes a lot higher than a regular enema and, if there were any “toxins” or rotting food or whatever in your colon, it would theoretically wash them out. But I think it would be a waste of money.
Some colon cleansing cultists (who call themselves “Colon Therapists”) tell hilarious scare stories about incredible things they’ve washed out of people’s butts (I’m afraid to post the link because it’s so disgusting.), but there’s no need for an otherwise healthy person to “detoxify their colon” or any of that crap.
Hey Bob,
How about emailing that link then? That’s why I have the internet. Forget porn sites. For my money, you can’t get enough funny and disgusting stories about people’s asses!
James, if you were a pre-med major, then you must know that your colon contents are not something that need to be “washed out”, anymore than a vagina needs to be “washed out”. The vagina is a self-cleaning organ, and so is your colon. You ask, “How do you get rid of all that shit?” The answer is, “You don’t–your colon takes care of it for you.” Relax.
The food in your digestive tract is not “rotting”. It’s “digesting”. There’s a difference. Enzymes and friendly bacteria are converting proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and vitamins into important components of your body’s proper functioning. If you do a high colonic, you wash out a lot of those nutrients, plus the enzymes and friendly bacteria that you need to process your food, and your body has to start from scratch making more.
Also, regular enemas can really mess up your colon’s natural rhythm, called “peristalsis”, which (if you were pre-med) you know means the regular muscular contractions that move the shit down and out. Your colon has a certain way it wants to absorb the excess water from the digested (not rotted) food you’ve sent down, and sending two quarts of warm water up there to slosh around just confuses it, so it eventually quits trying.
High colonic irrigation is a holdover from the “squeaky clean” anti-germ fanaticism of the 1920s, when lots of health professionals who didn’t really know any better were appalled at the thought of “all that shit, with all its germs”, and thought, “We have to wash this stuff out of there so people can be healthy inside and out.”
And the “8 lbs. of undigested meat” factoid is just that–an Urban Legend factoid. Here is a short discussion of it.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=59324