The Detoxification Myth
Everyone wants to "detoxify" their bodies. Is this for real?
| Skeptoid #83 January 15, 2008 Podcast transcript | Listen | Subscribe |
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Today we're going to head into the bathroom and suck the toxins out of our bodies through our feet and through our bowels, and achieve a wonderful sense of wellness that medical science just hasn't caught onto yet. Today's topic is the myth of detoxification, as offered for sale by alternative practitioners and herbalists everywhere.
To better understand this phenomenon, it's necessary to define what they mean by toxins. Are they bacteria? Chemical pollutants? Trans fats? Heavy metals? To avoid being tested, they leave this pretty vague. Actual medical treatments will tell you exactly what they do and how they do it. Alternative detoxification therapies don't do either one. They pretty much leave it up to the imagination of the patient to invent their own toxins. Most people who seek alternative therapy believe themselves to be afflicted by some kind of self-diagnosed poison; be it industrial chemicals, McDonald's cheeseburgers, or fluoridated water. If the marketers leave their claims vague, a broader spectrum of patients will believe that the product will help them. And, of course, the word "toxin" is sufficiently scientific-sounding that it's convincing enough by itself to many people.
Let's assume that you work in a mine or a chemical plant and had some vocational accident, and fear that you might have heavy metal poisoning. What should you do? Any responsible person will go to a medical doctor for a blood test to find out for certain whether they have such poisoning. A person who avoids this step, because they prefer not to hear that the doctor can't find anything, is not a sick person. He is a person who wants to be sick. Moreover, he wants to be sick in such a way that he can take control and self-medicate. He wants an imaginary illness, caused by imaginary toxins.
Now it's fair for you to stop me at this point and call me out on my claim that these toxic conditions are imaginary. I will now tell you why I say that, and then as always, you should judge for yourself.
Let's start with one of the more graphic detoxification methods, gruesomely pictured on web sites and in chain emails. It's a bowel cleansing pill, said to be herbal, which causes your intestines to produce long, rubbery, hideous looking snakes of bowel movements, which they call mucoid plaque. There are lots of pictures of these on the Internet, and sites that sell these pills are a great place to find them. Look at DrNatura.com, BlessedHerbs.com, and AriseAndShine.com, just for a start. Imagine how terrifying it would be to actually see one of those come out of your body. If you did, it would sure seem to confirm everything these web sites have warned about toxins building up in your intestines. But there's more to it. As it turns out, any professional con artist would be thoroughly impressed to learn the secrets of mucoid plaque (and, incidentally, the term mucoid plaque was invented by these sellers; there is no such actual medical condition). These pills consist mainly of bentonite, an absorbent, expanding clay similar to kitty litter. Combined with psyllium, used in the production of mucilage polymer, bentonite forms a rubbery cast of your intestines when taken internally, mixed of course with whatever else your body is excreting. Surprise, a giant rubbery snake of toxins in your toilet.
It's important to note that the only recorded instances of these "mucoid plaque" snakes in all of medical history come from the toilets of the victims of these cleansing pills. No gastroenterologist has ever encountered one in tens of millions of endoscopies, and no pathologist has ever found one during an autopsy. They do not exist until you take such a pill to form them. The pill creates the very condition that it claims to cure. And the results are so graphic and impressive that no victim would ever think to argue with the claim.
Victims, did I call them? Creating rubber casts of your bowels might be gross but I haven't seen that it's particularly dangerous, so why are they victims? A one month supply of these pills costs $88 from the web sites I mentioned. $88 for a few pennies worth of kitty litter in a pretty bottle promising herbal and organic cleansing. Yeah, they're victims.
It's already been widely reported that alternative practitioners who provide colon cleansing with tubes and liquids have killed a number of their customers by causing infections and perforated bowels, and for this reason the FDA has made it illegal to sell such equipment, except for use in medical colon cleansing to prepare for radiologic endoscopic examinations. There is no legally sold colon cleansing equipment approved for general well being or detoxification.
As usual, the alternative practitioners stay one step ahead of the law. There are a number of electrical foot bath products on the market. The idea is that you stick your feet in the bath of salt water, usually with some herbal or homeopathic additive, plug it in and switch it on, and soak your feet. After a while the water turns a sickly brown, and this is claimed to be the toxins that have been drawn out of your body through your feet. One tester found that his water turned brown even when he did not put his feet in. The reason is that electrodes in the water corrode via eletrolysis, putting enough oxidized iron into the water to turn it brown. When reporter Ben Goldacre published these results in the Guardian Unlimited online news, some of the marketers of these products actually changed their messaging to admit this was happening — but again, staying one step ahead — now claim that their product is not about detoxification, it's about balancing the body's energy fields: Another meaningless, untestable claim.
But detoxifying through the feet didn't end there. A newcomer to the detoxification market is Kinoki foot pads, available at BuyKinoki.com. These are adhesive gauze patches that you stick to the sole of your foot at night, and they claim to "draw" "toxins" from your body. They also claim that all Japanese people have perfect health, and the reason is that they use Kinoki foot pads to detoxify their bodies, a secret they've been jealously guarding from medical science for hundreds of years. A foolish claim like this is demonstrably false on every level, and should raise a huge red flag to any critical reader. Nowhere in any of their marketing materials do they say what these alleged toxins are, or what mechanism might cause them to move from your body into the adhesive pad.
Kinoki foot pads contain unpublished amounts of vinegar, tourmaline, chitin, and other unspecified ingredients. Tourmaline is a semi-precious gemstone that's inert and not biologically reactive, so it has no plausible function. Chitin is a type of polymer used in gauze bandages and medical sutures, so naturally it's part of any gauze product. They probably mention it because some alternative practitioners believe that chitin is a "fat attractor", a pseudoscientific claim which has never been supported by any evidence or plausible hypothesis. I guess they hope that we will infer by extension that chitin also attracts "toxins" out of the body. Basically the Kinoki foot pads are gauze bandages with vinegar. Vinegar has many folk-wisdom uses when applied topically, such as treating acne, sunburn, warts, dandruff, and as a folk antibiotic. But one should use caution: Vinegar can cause chemical burns on infants, and the American Dietetic Association has tracked cases of home vinegar applications to the foot causing deep skin ulcers after only two hours.
Since the Kinoki foot pads are self-adhesive, peeling them away removes the outermost layer of dead skin cells. And since they are moist, they loosen additional dead cells when left on for a while. So it's a given that the pads will look brown when peeled from your foot, exactly like any adhesive tape would; though this effect is much less dramatic than depicted on the TV commercials, depending on how dirty your feet are. And, as they predict, this color will diminish over subsequent applications, as fewer and fewer of your dead, dirty skin cells remain. There is no magic detoxification needed to explain this effect. (Later news: In fact, Kinoki footpads contain powdered wood vinegar, which always turns brownish black when exposed to moisture, such as sweat. - BD)
Anyone interested in detoxifying their body might think about paying a little more attention to their body and less attention to the people trying to get their money. The body already has nature's most effective detoxification system. It's called the liver. The liver changes the chemical structure of foreign compounds so they can be filtered out of the blood by the kidneys, which then excrete them in the urine. I am left wondering why the alternative practitioners never mention this option to their customers. It's all-natural and proven effective. Is it ironic that the only people who will help you manage this all-natural option are the medical doctors? Certainly your naturopath won't. He wants to sell you some klunky half-legal hardware.
Why is it that so many people are more comfortable self-medicating for conditions that exist only in advertisements, than they are simply taking their doctor's advice? It's because doctors are burdened with the need to actually practice medicine. They won't hide bad news from you or make up easy answers to please you. But that's what people want: The easy answers promised by advertisements and alternative practitioners. They want the fantasy of being in complete personal control of what goes on inside their bodies. A doctor won't lie to you and say that a handful of herbal detoxification pills will cure anything that's wrong with you; but since that's the solution many people want, there's always someone willing to sell it.
References
© 2009 Skeptoid.com
Discuss!
5 most recent comments | Show all 272 comments
Remember, you should always read with skepticism the comments of anyone too lame to put their real name & city.
On the Detox foot baths myth
It basically comes down to the fact that it is not medically possible to detox through your feet as the skin is not directly involved in the detoxification process but rather through the process of sweating will your body push out whatever toxins are already deposited in the outer dermal layers only.
To relay and expand on an analogy; You would have to sweat continuously from your feet, day and night for over 200 days straight in order to detoxify as much as you would in one urination. So you see the marketing of the detox foot baths is one of this century’s medical fallacies, bordering of fraud and deception. But what is even more frightening is that many medical doctors are actually falling for it.
The only foot bath, or rather full body bath which is what it all started with, that actually works is the Q ENERGYspa®. This is the original invention from Australia in 1996. Furthermore, it has never only been about detoxification but rather an energy supplement for your body, giving your body the energy resources to heal itself and for that purpose the Q ENERGYspa® works extremely well.
For more information on this technology, check out the website www.QEnergySpa.com or email info@QtheExperience.com for more information.
Q The Experience Australia
Ivan Krell Serensen, Toowoomba, QLD Australia
May 24, 2009 5:03pm
Brenton,
I was surprised because I didn't take the "clay", or betonite, that supposedly mixed with psyllum, causes the "rubbery" poop. What came out of me wasn't necessarily mucilagenous...it was rubbery and did not break apart. I just took the metamucil, and believe me, I can tell the difference between a good ol' Metamucil poop and what I saw in the toilet. I have still been taking Metamucil 2-3 times a day, and nothing like what I saw before has come out since a day after I posted. It happened over the course of a few days, and I have to say, I do feel so much better and my cravings for sweets has greatly diminished.
I really don't know what to say or what to tell you to make you believe me. If it was just from the psyllum, it would have been more gelatinous, and it was not gelationious at all. It was rubbery.
I am not selling anything, so there is really no reason I should care if you believe me or not. I am not crediting just the metamucil either...like I said, I started a very stenous workout regimine which I believe has a lot to do with my body getting rid of the nastiness.
A few years ago, I did get a colonic, and nothing like that came out. Maybe it wasn't from the colon, but maybe from the small intestines???? I don't know...I just know what I saw, and it looked just like the stuff on the internet.
Kim, NH
May 26, 2009 10:42am
Kim, your testimony is certainly believable. The reason is because UNBIASED medical doctors have ALREADY documented mucoid plaque coming out of people who have not taken ANY psyllium nor bentonite. In 1899, Byron Robinsona, M.D. reported what he described as “leathery” mucous masses shaped like “membranes” or “ropes,” which he chemically determined to be "mucin." (1) In 1932, Bastedo, M.D. writes in JAMA: “When one sees the dirty gray, brown or blackish sheets, strings and rolled up wormlike masses of tough mucus with a rotten or dead-fish odor that are obtained by colon irrigations, one does not wonder that these patients feel ill and that they obtain relief and show improvement as the result of the irrigation.” (2) In 1989, a M.D. took a full color photograph of a long, rubbery, shiny, blackish-brown “bizarre stool” removed from a young women.(3)
Furthermore, there is not one study on psyllium describing it coming out like mucoid plaque.
This truly demonstrates that modern MDs and their worshipers lack critical thinking skills. Fashionably, wearing an Einstein T-shirt does not make one a scientific thinker.
1. Robinsona, Byron, M.D. "The Abdominal Brain and Automatic Visceral Ganglia". 1899 pages 210-213. http://books.google.com
2. Bastedo, WA. “Colonic irrigations: their administration, therapeutic application and dangers”. JAMA (1932) v98 p736.
3. Pounder, Allison, and Dhillon. “Color Atlas of the Digestive System” 1989 page 155. http://www.worldcat.org/
Joe Shmoe, Portland, Maine
May 27, 2009 2:16pm
I find that a simple three day juice fast with a daily enema and lots of rest will bring me back to normal after a few months of living in the fast lane.
It's cheap and works effectively without the need to buy a lot complicated equipment. I do remember seeing those pictures of weird black rubber stools at those websites years ago. Amazing.
Dennis Francis
http://tinyurl.com/npzy2t
Dennis Francis, Sacramento, CA
June 09, 2009 10:33am
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Let us please differentiate between being critical of the product itself and it's legitimate uses and those handful of marketers who sell the stuff with silly claims. Bentonite clay and psyllium both have legit medical uses and benefits to you. I personally don't buy the weight loss marketing part of selling it but I do know that bentonite can quite often get one over a case of food poisoning way better than any pepto bismal or similar 'traditional western' med found at the drug store. It is proven itself as a product that can remove harmful things from your digestive tract. Combined with psyllium it is more effective as it trasnports better. I would certainly be dubious of any claims of curing mental disorders or excess weight loss, but the stuff is a legitimate medicinal substance, like it or not. It's not some black and white thing you can dismiss as quackary or endorse as a cure all. it is neither.
the public in certain areas are so completely brainwashed by the notion that if it isn't a prescription med it is useless is just plain stupid. How many million people took Zithromax last year for a viral infection? How many millions took an SSRI without even needing one. I dare say the makers of Z-Packs and Lexapro are hardly crying about it and praising their marketing techniques which at times are often less moral than the idea of flying a plane into a building.
Steve, Chicago
May 22, 2009 5:03am