Goodness, FriarTed! Why are you serving as a proxy for someone battling to advance ignorance? Let her get a guest membership and do it herself!
Kudos to all the posters who arose to so ably fight ignorance in this thread!
Well, I didn’t read the links so maybe I shouldn’t intervene here but my wife (before she was killed in a car wreck) had problems with her gall bladder and stones. She also had a pre-existing medical condition which her MD was fearful of performing surgery on her. We started her on a special diet and she drank a LOT of apple juice. The pectin/acid in the apple supposedly has the ability to dissolve the gallstones. She was re-examined after 30 days of this and she was much better. No more pains and x-ray gave her a clean bill of heath. She remained on this diet and never had gallstone problems again.
My uncle passed some stones awhile back and his doctor put him on basically the same diet, apples included.
call BS if you want… but it did work for her (she couldn’t have the surgery)
BTWI’m NOT recommending this in lieu of medical attention, only in addition to. A sound responsible diet and regular checkups are the best medicine.
jimbeam, I am sorry about your loss.
I’m guessing the doctor’s special diet was what my wife and I call “the white diet”: if it isn’t white you probably can’t eat it or you’ll get sick. Macaroni, rice, bananas, maybe some chicken breast, if you’re feeling adventurous, and nothing in large amounts. No Crisco or lard, even though they are white. This is the basis for a diet to put off surgery until the symptoms subside but it is rarely a permanent solution, and the symptoms subside because a stone has moved away from the exit into the bile duct; if it’s not blocking the door when the gall bladder squeezes bile gets released with no pain. Many people get by for years going on the White Diet for a few weeks or months when their gall bladders start acting up.
Apple juice is stretching it on that diet because the pectin, a water-soluble fiber, triggers the gall bladder to release bile. There is nothing to the doctor’s idea that pectin dissolves gallstones since it is not actually absorbed by the system, but what it does is bind with bile salts that have not yet been incorporated into gallstones (see what the [url=“http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_057.html”]Perfect Master** has to say about soluble fiber), which could explain the confusion.
This is FriarTed’s friend- He got me a guest membership to allow me a chance to respond personally to the inaccurate and unrequested comments made by people who were disregarding the purpose of the original posts.
I would like to say that I find it sad that there are so many people who are unwilling to see the validity of time-tested, age-old treatments, even if they are prescribed and used regularly by medical doctors. I find it even more unbelievable that said people should make statements to the contrary as if they are experts and have personally researched or experienced the subject matter. People have said that magnesium sulfate is never used by the “medical community” and in fact is strongly cautioned against- this shows an extreme ignorance of the subject matter. Open up a phone book and call the gastroenterologists in your community. Ask them what substance they use as a preparatory laxative for a colonoscopy, and then be prepared to post your apology on this site. There is laboratory evidence of the gallstones passed with this procedure as most of the internists and digestive health specialists who prescribe this treatment will have their patients bring is the specimens to be examined, and they are proven to be gallstones, and many are calcified.
It was stated that because I make this claim, I must prove it with evidence. As stated before, the laws of a classic debate require the person making an assertion must prove his assertion true. However, I never made an assertion. I made a simple request for experieced people to share their results. Instead, I got a bunch of negative responses slamming the entire practice of something as best as I can tell that nobody here has ever experienced or researched to give a first-hand opinion of. Therefore, it is you who make the assertion and you who must prove his own theory. So I challenge you to put your research where your mouth is and back up what you are contending. It will be hard to find scientific research
investigating this claim because the medical and pharmaseutical industry would lose millions of dollars from surgery and drugs by so simple and effective a treatment. However, since there are many specialists putting this into practice, the evidence does exist. If you should find actual evidence that this cleanse produces specimens which are not genuine stones but are somehow produced in the body during this cleanse, then I will prostrate myself before you, humbly apologize and declare your intellectual superiority. My guess is, however, that no one here will do so. To refuse to do the reseach and still ardently dispute this practice would show an intellectual laziness which I hope we are all above.
brossa, as I don’t have internet access, FriarTed has been reading these responses to me on the phone, and he overlooked yours-
Why do you think I would discount your words simply because you are a medical doctor? I appreciate your post more than any because you speak from an experienced and educated standpoint, and you have the honesty to admit that you have had no experience with this practice in particular, so you at least leave some room for the possibility.
I never meant to imply a conspiracy among doctors to keep effective drugs away from patients. On the contrary, I believe that doctors are too willing to give out drugs to patients when simple alternatives could be found. I don’t want to go into detail here as I don’t wish to open up more avenues of debate. However, I would relish the opportunity to correspond with you directly.
I can’t speak to the expansion of the biliary ducts as your knowledge far surpasses my own. However, I can speak from personal experience when I tell you that I believe in this technique 100%. I have experienced it over nine times.
When doing the cleanse after drinking the oil, I have literally felt stones moving along the passageways. This is not an effortless clease. It can be extremely uncomfortable and even painful depending on the size of the stone passed.
After performing several cleanses, I have seen a general improvement in my health and digestion, and a great lessenning in chronic back pain, and so have thousands of people giving testimonials after doing these cleanses. Being in a position of authority as you are, I would love to see you collaborating with a colleague and finding a patient who is willing to do this cleanse. You would have the resources to analyze the specimens passed. With your experience, you would be able to tell whether these are substances passed by the clease or actual gallstones. What an extraordinary opportunity it would be to have first-hand evaluation by an expert. It would certainly save me from having to drink that horrible stuff again if it was proved untrue!
I don’t know where you’re getting that each clease produces hundreds or thousands of “stones”. In my first hand experiences with these cleanses,
my first cleanse produced hundreds of stones. My second produced about a
hundred. My third and fourth cleanses produced between 20-50 stones.
My fifth cleanse produced 15 stones. The sixth cleanse produced so few stones that I waited three months before performing the seventh. It produced only
30-50 stones so I waited six months before doing the eighth cleanse. That only produced about 50 stones. I didn’t do the ninth cleanse until about two years later. This cleanse produced over a hundred stones. These results would not seem to support your theory.
I don’t know where you found the instructions given in those quotes. They sound ludicrous to me as well. In my research, I have never come across those statements and I have certainly never needed to lay down to get results.
I don’t think statements like these should provide a strong basis for your rejection.
I don’t know what website you’re referring to, but I think it’s odd you would criticize them removing spam and hazing comments- that seems the standard practice at most sites. If you’re referring to the curezone forums and the actual testimonials, you should find people who say they don’t believe in it, or that it
hasn’t been effective for them, or they couldn’t swallow down the substances.
I have seen comments from people who thought it was bunk and who didn’t see the results expected. There are also hundreds of people who have had amazing results who believe their lives have improved because of it. Curezone is just one of many sites that deal with this subject matter. I’ve never known anybody to do this cleanse is lieu of a much-needed gall bladder surgery, so I can’t speak to your last comment, but I can say I have seen it effective as a preventative measure and for people whose cases were not quite as acute.
In doing this cleanse myself, I have passed calcified stones which seems to dispute your claim that these are created in the digestive processes. How could the digestion produce calcified stones? I hope you will keep an open mind when approaching this subject matter. If anything can be said about medical science, it is that it is a very dynamic study, one in which what was tried and true in the past becomes defunct in the present. We are constantly learning new things that
refute earlier statements that were backed by “irrefutable evidence”, so perhaps in the end, you might be surprised?
Let me know if you would be open to correspond.