45: How to Detox Safely and Effectively with IBD (Crohn's and Colitis)

Detoxing can be dangerous. It's obviously a big part of healing, but if you do it wrong, it can also put you in the hospital. 

TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• What detoxing is
• The mistakes you keep making
• The critical steps you're missing with detoxes
• "Drainage" and why you need it
• Detoxing your bowels, liver, lymphs, skin, sinuses and kidneys
• The risks of detoxing
• How to detox yourself safely

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Transcript

Josh Dech:

Detoxing is absolutely a critical part of healing your body and taking that stress off your immune system. But if you don't do it properly, it can make you very, very, very sick. It can trigger autoimmune reactions and throw you into a bowel flare if not the hospital. And so I'm going to be showing you how to safely detox your body when you've got IBD — that's of course Crohn's and colitis.

In this episode, you're going to learn some very important differences between detoxing and drainage. We're going to talk about the steps that everyone is actually missing when detoxing, and of course, the tools and steps that you need to do to do this safely and effectively — to ultimately heal yourself without any dangerous repercussions.

Contrary to what your doctors told you, Crohn's and colitis are reversible. Now, I've helped hundreds of people reverse their bowel disease, and I'm here to help you do it too. Because inflammation always has a root cause — we just have to find it.

This is the Reversing Crohn's and Colitis Naturally Podcast. Now, I do these live trainings in my Facebook group every single week and put the audios here for you to listen to. If you want to watch the video versions of these episodes, just click the link in the show notes to get access to our Facebook group and YouTube channel. And for weekly updates, information, tips, and tricks, you can sign up for our email list by clicking the link in the show notes below.

Now, if you don't know me, my name is Josh Deck. I'm an IBD specialist, medical lecturer, and physicians consultant for Crohn's and colitis, as well as a scientific strategist and education director for the Root Cause for Crohn's Colitis organization. And today, we're talking about detoxing your body safely when you have IBD.

Now of course, we are still raising a 5-mon—6-month-old puppy who's an absolute hell raiser, and she's nocturnal. So now she's awake. She was just sleeping. There she is.

So we're going to be talking about detoxing. What is detoxing by definition? Now, before we do this, let me back this up. Huge shout out to Theres, the preschool teacher. She sent me an email. She's like, "Dude, store your markers upside down. It's made a world of difference." So thank you, Theres.

Getting into this one — what is detoxing?
If you think about detoxing, it's technically the removal of toxic substances from a biological organism — so you and me, human beings, or your pets, whatever. But simply put, it's collecting the trash within your body. So detoxing is a very important part of this.

What is detoxing? Well, if we're going to detox, we have to do a few steps first. We actually have to convert all of these toxic substances into less toxic things to be able to excrete them safely. So it's kind of like a neutralization process.

Your body has different detox phases. We have to neutralize them first before we can excrete them from the body. Otherwise, you're moving around and mobilizing toxic and inflammatory stuff.

And so this is primarily happening in a few different places. It's going to happen, of course, in your liver — that's one of the primary sites for detoxing. It's also going to happen in your cells. It's all throughout the body. It can happen in the kidneys. And of course, it's going to even happen within your brain — there's detoxification going on through there.

So your body's neutralizing all these toxins. And we could take kidneys — I'm actually going to put gut lining — it's going to be a bit more accurate. Kidneys, we're going to put that into the next phase — that's more of an excretion thing. But liver, cells, brain, and gut lining — this is where your body is actually neutralizing these toxic substances to be able to remove them from the body. That was my fault. Typically, by the time they get to the kidneys, you're neutralized, so I'm not going to worry about that right now.

But here's what happens: you have liver enzymes — this is the primary site of detoxing. These liver enzymes, specifically something called cytochrome P450 — I'll put that on the board for you science nerds. That's cytochrome P450, if you want to look that one up — really neat little diddy. But basically, this helps convert these, what we call xenobiotics, in phase one — the initial detoxing process — to excrete them through phase two, the next one. And it's a whole thing about adding oxygen and making it, you know, changing the polarity — but don't worry about the biochemistry.

Here's what we have to know — your liver, your cells, your gut lining, and your brain are binding or detoxing and neutralizing all these substances. It's happening through liver enzymes. We have things like glutathione — that's like the master antioxidant — or NAC, which is N-acetylcysteine — it's even a precursor. It uses B vitamins and all kinds of goodies to actually properly get these toxins neutralized and excreted from the body, or moving on to the next phase for excretion.

But here's what's important about this. We know what detoxing is, right? It's converting and moving. It's collecting the trash. It's taking it from something stinky in your house and putting it into a bag. Well, it has to go somewhere.

So we've done our detoxing. The next phase — this is what everyone's really missing — is drainage.

If detoxing is collecting your trash, drainage is bringing it out to the curb. It is the physical excretion of substances from your body. We've collected and detoxed — out to the curb — that's drainage. That's the exit doors.

So here's what we have to understand. You have seven main drainage pathways or exit doors in the body — seven exit doors. Now these are going to be your:

• Liver
• Gallbladder and bile ducts

I'm going to put those as the same drainage pathway, because you know, they're all connected. So liver, gallbladder, and bile — these are the primary things that I see junked up or needing love when we're dealing with things like IBD. So you have to get those opened.

Of course, your next ones you're going to see are going to be your:

• Lymphatic system
• Skin

This is going to be fluids and immunological waste products — toxins moving through. Skin is how things get out, right? Of course, you sweat.

And then we got a couple other ones that you may not suspect:

• Your sinuses
• And of course your lungs — because you can actually exhale. Certain toxins can come out through the lungs — that's an exit door.

And your last two, of course, are bathroom breaks — that's going to be your:

• Kidneys
• Colon — so bowels, kidneys

So detoxing — we've collected all the trash, your body's neutralized it, it's got it kind of squashed. Now it says, "Let's get it out." Your liver, gallbladder, bile ducts are part of that movement, so we add them into drainage. But the exit doors — of course your skin, sinuses, lungs, kidneys, colon — that’s how things leave the body.

They transport through liver, gallbladder, bile, lymphatics — they escape through skin, sinus, lungs, kidneys, colon. This is drainage. That’s how things move and get out.

Here’s the biggest issue — when your detox pathways are overwhelmed, what's going to happen is you're having a partial conversion. Remember, detoxing is converting and then excreting. So if your detox pathways are overwhelmed, you have a partial conversion of toxins to neutral substances, which means you have highly reactive substances moving around your body which can become extremely inflammatory.

It’s a partial conversion. It creates reactive byproducts, which means your body's going to be inflamed. It creates oxidative stress, it leads to hormone disruption, immune system dysregulation, which can throw you into a flare — and I've seen people put themselves in the hospital.

So by taking all these substances — these detox teas or formulas or shakes — you're actually trying to push too much through your body at the same time, but your pathways are already congested. The exit doors are closed.

If you ever — if you know a landlord who's tried to evict a tenant from the building and then the doors were locked, they couldn’t get out — but they know they have to leave. Guess what they do? They light a fire in the kitchen, they pee on the rug, they spray paint the walls — 'cause they suck.

Detoxing is collecting the trash. Drainage is getting it out to the curb. If you want to evict these tenants from the building, the doors have to be unlocked. You can't take your trash out if the doors are locked. And if you move it around from one house to another before it gets out — right, you're pushing detoxing, but it can't escape — so you're just moving it around the body. It lands in other places, causes inflammation, causes these immune reactions and boom — you're in a flare, of course.

So we have to open drainage.

When your drainage pathways are overwhelmed — think about this — if your lymphatic system, you're prone to tonsillitis, you get swelling. I spoke to a woman recently who got a lot of swelling in the thighs, maybe around the belly, the armpits, the backs of your knees. Your armpits, when you put it up, it's not a pit but it's more of like a bulge — that's a lymphatic issue.

If you're prone, especially in pregnancy, to things like mastitis — swelling of the breast — that's lymphatic tissue. If the backs of your knees look puffy, that’s lymphatics — you're not draining, things aren’t moving.

If you're constipated or have diarrhea, your exit doors are compromised. If you're somebody who has trouble sweating when you go to the gym — you're like, “I'm not really one who sweats” — that’s a drainage pathway that's blocked up, right?

So we have to understand: if these are blocked up, things are recirculating and they're reabsorbing, so you're becoming more toxic and burdening your immune system further.

It comes right back to the same analogy I use on nearly every video — you have to think about your body being like a cup of water. Detoxing is putting all the garbage into your cup. Drainage is when we drop it out the bottom — we press that little button like one of those David's Tea Bottoms, and all the water falls out the bottom of that cup.

That's detoxing and drainage. The problem is, so many of us are detoxing — we’re putting all this junk into our cup, but the exit door out the bottom of the cup is closed.

So what happens? It overflows. It goes to other parts of the body. Now you're sick, now you're inflamed, and now you're in a flare, and you wonder why.

We have to open drainage, and we have to use that to support detoxing. If you push detoxing too quickly, it’ll make you sick.

So how do we do this safely? That’s really the ultimate question. How do we safely detox you to take the burden off your immune system, to give your bowels and your body a chance to rest and recover without so much load on top of them?

We’re going to be getting into safely detoxing. There’s a few steps, and these are going to be—maybe sound pretty obvious—but the first one we need to do is: stop.

I feel like Michael Scott with, like, “Don’t stop. Don’t not pick on Luke.” If you guys know the reference, you know the reference.

Anyway, so we have to stop adding things to the problem. If you want to drain the bathtub, what do you have to do? First step is turning off the tap.

If you're actively doing things that are putting toxins into your body—inorganic foods, junk foods, inflammatory foods, if you’re drinking alcohol… I had a conversation with a woman recently, and I realized, like, my body—like, I just crossed my arms, like “ugh.” It’s really unfortunate because she—“I want to get my bowels better”—she’s got colitis, but she’s eating Chick-fil-A four or five times a week.

I asked her, “Are you drinking alcohol?” “Well, on occasion.” “How often?” She says, “One or two times a week.” I had the wherewithal. I said, “Okay, when you’re drinking, what does that look like?” “I don’t know. Half a six-pack of beers, couple of shots.” I’m like, great, so you’re getting drunk a couple nights a week, you’re eating fast food several days a week, you’re actively adding toxins to your system and you’re asking me to help you?

You have to turn off the tap first. Stop toxifying your body. Stop creating immune reactions or adding things that are compromising your liver, gallbladder, bile duct, lymphatics, etc.

The next thing we have to do, of course—and I’m going to put a very important note on here—is to say: go slow.

If you are not going slowly, you’re going to be pushing too much. The cup is going to fill and it's going to overflow. So we have to understand: opening drainage slowly to tolerance is important, especially if you're somebody who’s really reactive, or you say, “Hey, I can take a quarter of a half of a Tylenol, and I get the same effect.”

Because your liver is so junked up, it’s not processing that properly, right? All drugs are calculated with what's called the first pass effect. So it has to process through your liver, and then your body gets most of the remainder of what's left over.

And so, if your liver is not able to do that, you need less drugs to do more of the job. And so we can see through a simple symptom like that—like, “I'm very reactive to drugs or pharmaceuticals or whatever”—your liver is gked up. So we have to take care of that, right?

That’s just one example of many. But consider this: if you're going too quickly, you’re going to create an inflammatory issue.

Next up, we’re going to start to open up the bowel. Now, if you're somebody who says, “Hey, I’m having diarrhea all the time, my drainage must be open,”—the inflammation is part of that compromise to your drainage. Because things have to travel in and out safely between those cell walls, and if they’re highly inflamed, they’re not doing their job.

So if you are dealing with a lot of constipation, of course, you’re reabsorbing. So we want to get those bowels moving—whether that’s going to be aloe vera, slippery elm, magnesium citrate or magnesium oxide, even like a senna if you needed something like that just to get things moving along. That can be okay. You just have to find your balance—not to go from constipation to diarrhea, but consistent in the bowel movements, where they’re predictable with very little urgency.

If you’re someone who’s constipated, maybe again, that slippery elm, aloe vera can be soothing and cooling. I’m not a fan of Imodium with the aluminum, but something to maybe slow those bowels down, so you have a chance to move things to and from the cell walls within the bowel.

That’s very important. That can look like ginger, which is also a prokinetic, which means it’s going to move things along. So there’s all kinds of things that we can do. It’s also soothing and cooling.

The next one we often look at after we go through the colon first, then we want to look at liver and bile.

Now, this one can be a little bit touch-and-go, and here’s why. If you’re going to the liver and bile ducts and supporting it, you can accidentally push too much detox, right? So pushing trash before the doors are open.

So if you're pushing a lot of this junk—taking a whole bunch of supplements to stimulate your liver detox—it still has to go out.

So we're primarily talking about bile support more than anything else. And this is going to look like supplements like TUDCA—I’ll put that on the board. That’s T-U-D-C-A — something acid. TUDCA — very good supplement. Great for bile support, great for a lot of things.

Milk thistle sometimes, again, that sort of pushes more the detox side, but it can be very supportive. Magnesium, artichoke extract, dandelion, even castor oil packs can be very beneficial.

If you don’t know what castor oil is—it’s a plant-based—but what you do is you get like a cotton pad and you put a tablespoon or two of castor oil on it and you rest it across your liver—that’s on the right side, it’s tucked up under the rib cage, kind of between the nipple and the rib, and it comes right from the half side of your body, like right along the side of your hip to about the center line. It’s a big organ in there.

And you take this cotton pad, you put some castor oil on it, and you rest it across your liver, and that’s going to absorb into there, helping stimulate bile flow and move things along and help you detoxify.

Generally speaking, if you want to crank it up a notch more time, start at 10 minutes, 15 minutes, working up to—when I was doing it regularly when I was really sick—I was up to 2 hours several nights a week with a heat pack to really help permeate that oil in there.

And I woke up the next morning with like cloudy urine, ‘cause things are moving and detoxing. And so castor oil can be very beneficial to help with that.

The next one we’re going to move on to—again, this isn’t a perfect order, it’s based on you—we often will see lymphs being a problem.

Now I described that earlier—if your armpit is more of an arm bulge, if you have swelling around the ankles, the hands and wrists, if you’ve got puffy backs of your knees, something like that—you’re not draining very well.

And again, get someone to look at it for you. If you're like, “Nah, I don't think I'm puffy, I’m not sure.” Just—not going to hurt you. There’s a video you can look up actually on YouTube, it's called the Big Six Lymphatic Drainage or something.

But this guy coined the term the Big Six, and what it is, it's six major lymphatic spots throughout the body—starting at the neck, the clavicle, the armpit, the belly, the hips, and then behind the knees—where it’s rubbing and then padding to get these things moving.

You can do that morning and night—like, takes you 30 to 60 seconds tops to do that—and that can help stimulate lymphatic.

But keep in mind—your blood vessels, for example, right? Blood pumps through your blood vessels—arteries and veins—through a pump, that’s the heart. It squeezes and pushes blood through, and then you have valves that open and close based on the pressure. The heart pumps, opens up, that’s lub, and then dub—lub-dub, lub-dub—that’s the heartbeat. That open and close.

Your lymphatic system has valves as well, but there’s no heart to pump fluid through there. The only way your lymphatic system really opens and closes and moves stuff around is by muscle movement.

This is another reason regular activity, not being stagnant, exercise is so important. These muscles will physically squeeze and clamp down and move around that lymphatic tissue, which pumps fluid throughout your body.

So movement is extremely important in the way of detoxing—not just to make you sweat but to move your lymphatic system.

So you can do manual work, movement, you can also take supplements like Burdock or cleavers—are really well known to help lymphatic movement.

The next exit door we’re going to worry about here is going to be your skin.

Skin is a very common one—we all have it, otherwise we'd be dead. So, whoop-dee, gold star for everyone.

But skin needs to detoxify. If you go, “I’m not very sweaty, I’m not a sweaty person,”—can you make yourself sweat?

Can you try a sauna or a steam room? Can you wear a sweater when you go to the gym to see if you can stimulate some sweating?

Going out to the sun, getting healthy amounts of sun exposure—not burning, but get as much as you want. Otherwise, maybe red light therapy if you start very slowly and are actively able to sweat—these can be ways to get things moving.

On the other hand, if you're someone with sinus issues, you're chronically inflamed, chronic drip or chronic stuffiness, prone to sinus infections, that could be a wise time to start on sinus rinses, for example—with saline or even a little bit of like humic fulvic acid in there to clean those sinuses out, to get them moving.

And of course, we have your final pathway we’re going to worry about here—so we’re not talking about lungs right now, because you’re all breathing—we’re going into kidneys.

Kidneys are the next exit door we want to worry about. How do we move things through kidneys? Well — hydration, water, electrolytes — that’s how things can transport out of the kidneys.

It’s like your bowels make poop, well your kidneys are filtering your blood to make pee, so you want to get things moving through.

Drink water, add your electrolytes. I’m not a big fan honestly of the packages of electrolytes and the stuff that you get—like the flavored stuff and the things that have all kinds of additives and coloring—it's going to jack up your gut, don’t do dumb things.

But if you want to use simple stuff—a little bit of sea salt, Redmond sea salt or something like that. If you want to use a squeeze of lemon or a little bit of coconut water, if it’s pure, not additives, that’s great.

They’re electrolytes. Watermelon, tropical fruits are high in electrolytes. That’s going to be a great way to hydrate as well to help your kidneys.

You can again use supplements like dandelion or what’s called uva ursi—I’ll spell that, that’s U-V-A U-R-S-I. Can be antimicrobial and also help with the kidney movement.

This is how we do it. Detoxing is collecting the trash. Drainage is bringing it out to the curb.

If you try to detox and push all these supplements to get yourself to detox really heavily and there's no exit doors, it moves around your body and makes you sick.

It basically retoxifies your body—doing the opposite of the detox you were attempting to do.

On the second hand, we have to open drainage—those are your exit doors—it’s how stuff gets out. And then your body can begin to properly detox and start healing you.

But here’s what somebody—what we’re often missing. When you’re doing detox—and we talked about drainage, we talked about the exit doors—so we know the difference now between collecting the trash and getting it out to the curb.

But there’s something else we’re often missing, and I don’t want you to make the same mistake.

As these toxins are moving around through your body, once the drainage pathways are sufficiently opened, or you’re working with a professional who can eyeball this for you, this is where we’re going to add in certain things like binders.

Binders—they’re not the flippy things you used to get back in school. In this case, we’re talking about things that physically bind—they capture toxins. And there’s a whack of them out there.

Certain probiotics, like Lactobacillus strains, Saccharomyces boulardii can be really good for this. But specifically, we’re talking about:

• Humic acid
• Fulvic acid
• Zeolite
• Bentonite clay
• Activated charcoal (has its place but can absorb more nutrients than the others)
• Chlorella
• Spirulina
• Modified citrus pectin
• Even okra—like the vegetable—okra powder can be binding
• Certain fibers can be binding

These are how toxins get captured in your body, and it helps them be excreted more easily through the bowel. So you consume these binders orally, it pulls things out.

Now humic acid—let me get this one right—humic acid, I believe, is more cellular, so it gets a lot deeper into the tissues. Whereas fulvic acid is more central to the bowel. I might be mixing those up, but either way, they typically come in combos.

And so that’s going to pull and capture these toxins. And what it’ll do is it’ll trade like ions, where it’ll take this positive and give it to you, and take that negative and capture—and it binds onto the bad guy, right?

It sort of donates and then collects.

Something like activated charcoal—made out of like bamboo or whatever burnt plant material they’re using—is actually very porous, and toxins can also get stuck inside of there, and it captures that and pulls them out.

And that’s how your body can get rid of things—binders can really assist that.

But remember—they’re pulling toxins. So if you’re someone with bowel issues, constipation, diarrhea, and you’re pulling all these toxins without managing your other steps, they’re going to get reabsorbed in a concentrated area, and you’re going to make yourself pretty sick.

So we’ve got to be careful about that.

But once your drainage is open, you’re detoxing properly, using binders, if you want to push more detoxing, you can do that.

This is where we’re adding in supplements that your body needs, right? Or vitamins, minerals, especially things like B vitamins. Your liver uses B vitamins for that detox process.

We can also use other things like NAC—again, that’s N-acetylcysteine—and that’s going to be really good for the detox process and helps push those detox pathways.

But your major risks, if you don’t know what you’re doing, is going to be:

Number one — pushing detoxing too fast with poor drainage. So you have to open those proper drainage pathways—again, your bowel, liver, skin, sinuses, kidneys—all those things—that’s how things move.

And then of course, if we’re not capturing those toxins with binders, they have a—they run a large risk of recirculating them and moving them around your body. And that can be a big, big problem.

Here’s what I’m going to tell you. Whatever your condition you’re dealing with—whether you’re on the low spectrum of IBS, you have IBD, Crohn’s, colitis, diverticulitis—it’s all the same spectrum of irritation or inflammation in the bowel.

Your body can get better. That’s what inflammation is.

This is a conversation you need to have with every single human being on planet Earth who believes your medical system and your doctors are actually going to heal you.

You know—big congratulations to Pfizer, I think it’s their 150-something birthday, and they’ve never cured a single disease. Because they’re managing symptoms.

Your body is inflamed because it’s trying to heal you.

We have to ask, what is it trying to heal you from?
Some kind of toxin, some kind of microbe, and some kind of deficiency. It’s the only three reasons we get sick.

We have to figure that out, and your disease becomes reversible. We’ve reversed hundreds of cases.

If you’re watching right now, or you’re listening on the podcast, and you’re like, “Dude, this makes sense to me. Like I—I want some help,” easy way to do that now.

If you’re watching on YouTube, or you’re listening on the podcast, there’s links below the video or below this episode where you can get in there and click to schedule a call, or just send me an email with a question.

We’re here to help you.

Here’s what this looks like. All we’re going to do is sit down and have a conversation, and say, “Look, number one: can we identify your root causes?”

I had a call with a gentleman the other day—he’s got 15 years of issues we’ve been dealing with. It took us 9 minutes, and we pinpointed exactly where it came from, when it started, what his layers were, and what’s been compromising his immune system this whole time.

Nine minutes—after like 15 years of drugs and biologics and all that—we went back to childhood, found that he moved into a moldy home, and then there was stress.

And then we saw when skin issues started, so you could put in parasites there. And then we saw when his food sensitivities started. And on and on the list went until he developed this Crohn’s colitis condition.

It was a wear and tear.

It took us 9 minutes to figure it out. I’m on a roll right now trying to get a record in under 5 minutes, but I digress, okay?

Everything can be figured out. We just have to go back through history and stories—beyond your lab results, beyond just assuming this illness is part of your DNA, which frankly is—that’s not how illnesses work, right?

We have to understand there’s a root cause, and your story can tell us that.

Now if you have any questions, now is an awesome time to put them in the chat. If you’ve not done so already—let’s go to Instagram first, as I’m trying to get through this.

Okay, so the question was—if you guys couldn’t hear Kate over there—it’s she’s worried about something happening with her daughter.

She’s detoxing, and every 3 weeks she’s getting sick, and something’s happening.

So here’s what we have to look at.

Number one, are we detoxing every couple of weeks, or is it a consistent detox we’re doing?

She happens to be getting sick every 3 weeks.

When someone has any kind of illness that’s on a cyclical basis, we have to look at two things:

1. Either the intervention
2. Or what’s happening inside

So if you’re detoxing, say, every two to three weeks, you decide, “I’m going to do a detox,” and she’s getting sick, then that detox is pushing toxins, and she’s getting sick.

And so we have to manage that properly through, of course, drainage and support and binders and all that.

On the other hand, if it’s every 3 weeks—like one week out of a month—either aligned with her period or aligned with, oddly enough, the full moon, or even not—this is when we start considering:

Are parasites inflaming you?

A common thing that happens with parasites in a cyclical manner, typically if it’s going to be around the full moon or around your menstrual cycle—if it’s going to be even sometimes seasonal or every few months, depends on the parasite and their life cycle.

They hatch, and now you have all these little hatchlings running around. Your immune system goes, “Whoa buddy, what are you?” And it jumps on top of them, and it raises the alarm bells, and all your immune cells hyperactivate, and your inflammation goes way up, because your body’s trying to protect you.

And so, if we’re seeing a parasitic infection, that can explain these cyclical symptoms.

Now oddly enough, parasites block up drainage, they cause inflammation, they produce toxins which toxify your body, and it plugs up your drainage pathways.

They also can physically block things like your bile ducts.

There was a really cool little video—it was attached to an article that came out, I believe it was in New England Journal of Medicine like 6 months ago—and they showed a physical liver fluke in the bile duct.

It’s like a tube inside your liver, and this fluke—it looked like a little manta ray just swimming around.

They can physically block these ducts, and so your drainage is already compromised. And because bile is something that actually recirculates—about 95% gets reused—you need those ducts open.

And so you recirculate toxins, and you have all kinds of issues with digestion and inflammation.

And then the life cycle of some of these bugs—whether they’re worms or flukes, or individual, like we call protozoa, like little one-cells—they can cause these inflammatory reactions.

That’s something to watch for.

Carrie had asked, “What are your thoughts on lymphatic massage?”

Carrie, I think lymphatic massage is amazing—in context and in the right timing.
If you're going out to get lymphatic massage and you're getting sick afterward, you’re mobilizing toxins because the rest of your drainage is not there.

Not all those toxins you move around your lymphatic system are going to be pushed out through your skin.
A lot of them, of course, are going to get reabsorbed or mobilized, and if your other drainage pathways or exit doors are compromised, you're moving them around, and again—they’re still reabsorbing.

So it can be helpful, but I don’t typically go to heavy, like intense, of going to see a massage therapist—not at least after I do that Big Six myself.
Like, that’s what I’d recommend—just looking at that YouTube video, the Big Six Lymphatic—it’ll be the first one, it’s like a 2 and a half minute video, and it’s great.

But you don’t want to go intense until you try slow.
So like everything, we have to go slow.

From Karen, “The only swelling I have is in my torso area. Is that lymphatic?”

Yeah, you have a whole lymphatic system running around here and even into the pelvis, like around your hips.

But keep in mind—your lymphatic system, even though yes, you have lymphs around your belly, they’re actually tied in to the mucous layer in your gut.
They’re tied in to all the tissues in your gut, your intestines.

We call it the GALT and the MALT—that’s the gut-associated lymphoid tissue and mucosal-associated lymphoid tissue.

So you can have bloating in the abdomen and swelling in the intestines, and it not necessarily be lymph, but it does impact your lymph.

The question is—is there a traffic jam in there or not?

Next question was:
 “What was the sinus rinse that you mentioned? I use a saltwater rinse. I’ve clogged sinuses all the time.”

If your sinuses are clogged chronically, we have to consider that something is inflaming that mucous layer, that mucous membrane that’s in your sinus.

You have mucous membranes all over the place—the big ones we’ll see are going to be, of course, your sinuses, we’ll see them rectally, we’ll see them in your mouth, even vaginally.

If you’re having issues in any of these areas, there’s typically some kind of microbe overgrowth, an infection, yeast or fungus, parasites—something causing those issues.

Sinus issues, at least in our symptomatic assessments, are commonly tied to either toxins like mold or infections like parasites.

And so you have to actually remove them from the area, because that inflammation in that space is there because your body, again, is trying to heal you.

So you're inflamed because that’s your inflammatory healing response.

And so if your sinuses are inflamed all the time, a sinus rinse can be really helpful. Just saline is great.

I recommend distilled water.
If you don’t have a distiller, get one—that’s a great investment, couple hundred bucks and it’s amazing.

So I use distilled saline rinse, and I’ll also use—I use a product from CellCore called Carboxy, and it’s got a combination of humic and fulvic acid in it.

I put a little sprinkle in there, and that can bind and capture any toxins that are inside the sinuses.

In fact, my coach actually told me, he’s like, “Use that, because I think you’ve got mold.” And so I’ve been using that inside my sinuses as well to take care of what might be colonizing, the toxins being produced.

The next question was:
 “What is the best detox for the bile ducts?”

Simply put, I would go with TUDCA and castor oil.
TUDCA and castor oil are a great way to go.

Again, the TUDCA—quality stuff.
If you’re getting it from like Nutricost or something cheap, you’re going to get a cheap product.

TUDCA is expensive, but you get what you pay for.
I’d rather you use one bottle of the expensive stuff than four bottles of the cheap stuff and spend more and get lesser results.

But that’s a great one to start with. And again—castor oil or castor oil packs, which is that cotton pad with castor oil applied to the liver, starting out slowly, working up to 60, even 90 minutes or 2 hours.

And you can start applying a heat pack on that as well to help promote some of that bile flow.

That’s an easy place to go for right now.

But again—consider—if you have a parasite physically living in these tubes, blocking them up, eating whatever they’re eating, right—as food—your nutrients, your tissues, all kinds of stuff—you have to get those out.

So the bile flow and pushing it around them is not the answer.
It’s getting them out that’s the answer.

It’s like saying, “I’ve got hair in my drain, so I got a plunger.”
Your solution is not to plunge it every day—it’s to remove the hair, and it’ll flow on its own.

Same concept with the bile ducts.

Guys, that’s it. Thanks so much for being here.
Appreciate your time and attention.

Remember—if you need help, it’s so easy to do. Just reach out.

If you’re watching on YouTube or listening on the podcast, it’s as easy as just reaching out, saying, “Hey, I need help.”
 Click the link, schedule a call, we’ll just have a conversation to see is this a good fit and can we help you?

That’s all there is to it—it’s one action step.

I’m going to reiterate this like I’m beating a dead horse here, but here’s the thing:

I’ve got a list of about 450 names of people I’ve spoken to over the last 3 months or so that have DM’d me saying, “I need help. Get me help. I don’t know what to do.”
And they’ve ghosted.

And I’ve established—people who don’t show up to calls, people who ask for help and don’t engage—the number one reason I found that people are still sick is because you’re not taking the steps you need or not taking the action steps to actually get yourself a solution.

It’s new, it might be uncomfortable, you might be antisocial, but it’s you versus you when it comes to getting you better.

The information is here—you just have to walk through that door and say,
“Is this for me or is it not?”

But I’m telling you—I’ve got 30% of these people on the list of 400—it’s because they are not doing the thing they need to do to take that step forward.

So don’t be that person.
Don’t kneecap yourself for getting better.
It’s a very reversible condition—let’s start a conversation.

And if I’m a weirdo—I mean, I am—but if I can’t help you, somebody else can.

So take that step in whichever direction you feel best for you.

On that note, we’re going to see you all next week.

One of my favorite things to hear as an IBD specialist is something along the lines of,
 “I learned more from you in 15 minutes than from my doctor in 15 years.”

And if this, for the first time, is really starting to click, and it’s starting to make sense, and you’re going,
“Wait a minute. This might be reversible. I think there’s more that I can do. This condition came out of nowhere. It happened to me out of the blue. I was healthy for 10, 20, 30, 40 years—and suddenly I wasn’t. And you’re telling me there’s no cause?”

If you’re understanding finally that there is a cause, that something is driving this—I want to invite you to check the link in the show notes below, send me an email, ask a question, see if a program is the right fit for you.

Because I promise you—this doesn’t have to be a lifelong sentence.
You’re not doomed to this.
And IBD can be reversed.