65: Coffee Enemas 101: What You Need To Know (safety, how to, studies, and more)

Commonly claimed to be unsafe, but the data says otherwise. Coffee enemas have been shown to improve detoxification, liver health, bowel function and reduce symptoms of things like headaches, joint pain, and much more.


TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• History of enemas 
• Potential benefits of enemas
• Safety concerns and best practices
• How to perform a coffee enema
• Detoxing 101
  
  

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Transcript

0:00

There is nothing like a good liver cleanse to improve bowel function, to reduce inflammation, and relieve your gut symptoms. But I'm not talking about just any cleanse. This one is, we'll say, controversial. It's very powerful and, of course, a little bit unusual. We're talking about coffee enemas. Now, in this lesson, you're going to learn about the history of enemas and, of course, coffee enemas, where they come from, how they clean your liver, and why you might want to consider trying them. Or might not, it's up to you. We're going to talk about the reported benefits, the risks, and the safety concerns of coffee enemas. We'll get into why some people are against them and how to do coffee enemas safely, should you choose to of your own free will. Of course, we'll talk about materials, timing, cleaning, etc. And we're actually going to look at some of the studies and the data that are out there around coffee enemas, which is very little. You'd be surprised. That being said, before we do this, because of how controversial this is, it's obviously not an approved medical therapy, but clinical outcomes are incredible, which is why this episode is strictly for information and educational purposes only. It is not medical advice. Let's get into it. 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. So, first things first, enemas go back thousands of years. I'm not kidding, thousands of years. There's actually ancient Greece. There's stories of Hippocrates talking enemas to balance the four humors of yellow bile, and black bile, and phlegm, and all the things that he did in medicine. We even have papyrus discussing enemas from ancient Egypt. In fact, fun fact, those who were tasked with what's called rectal medicine or medicine men of the rectum were actually named shepherds of the anus. So, there's a fun little tidbit for you today. But here's the thing, coffee enemas actually became popular somewhere around the early-mid 1900s. And the documents are kind of wishy-washy as to what, whether it was 30s, 40s, 50s, but the idea was it actually came from a fella named Dr. Max Gerson. You may have heard of something called Gerson therapy, and this is where it came from. He was using coffee enemas with a bunch of reported benefits from his patients, such as migraines, cancer, chronic illness, arthritis, the works. The issue with this report is that these were self-reported, and it's considered anecdotal evidence, which means it wasn't documented, studied, tested. And so, therefore, the evidence around coffee enemas weren't accepted by the medical community. And even more recent studies around coffee enemas have not successfully been able to directly determine if these enemas actually produce any measurable benefit at all, as far as a scientific method in the medical standard is concerned. Now, here's what I'm going to tell you about it. You're like, Josh, it doesn't make any sense. You're telling me they're garbage. Why are we doing the lesson? Because I have seen over nearly 500 clients now. At the time of recording, it's like 470 clients in our program with bowel disease. And many of them have chosen to do coffee enemas. I've done many myself, and every single person has seen some pretty staggering results from them. Anything from immediate relief of symptoms or what seem to be parasites coming out. They've seen better sleep, better energy, mental clarity. Now, maybe the energy and clarity come from an I don't know. But the idea is, we've had a lot of people talking about the benefits in their immune responses, their calmness, their entire body after doing these enemas. Joint pain goes away. The works. Very similar results to what Dr. Gerson got in the early 1900s. So, what I want to do now is we're going to talk about the potential benefits. And I have to call them potential because we know the mechanism of action and how they work, but we don't have the studies to clinically and evidently say, yep, this is exactly what it's doing. So, we're going to say potential benefits, though we've seen them in clinical. So, first things first, we're going to talk about here is the purpose of an enema. Enemas were used for detoxing and drainage. Remember, detoxing is collecting your trash. Drainage is bringing it out to the curb. And so, if you're collecting all this trash inside of your system, your body's trying to detox by gathering and neutralizing these toxins. Those toxins still have to leave. We call this drainage. That's the exit doors inside of your body. And two main drainage pathways are going to be your liver, gallbladder, and the bile ducts inside of them. So, we're doing coffee enemas. They're huge in drainage, getting things out of your body, the exit door, because they actually improve or increase biliary contractions. Biliary is going to be all those bile ducts. It actually forces them to contract and squeeze to be able to move things through, which means it's increasing bile flow. Now, we have also seen parasites can physically block these tubes inside of your liver, these bile ducts. When you look at your liver, your body has these little tubes that run through it into the gallbladder, and that connects with your pancreas. And your body sends bile from here into your small intestine. Now, these tubes can get congested. There was an interesting little study. You can look it up from the New England Journal of Medicine. You can type into Google N-E-J-M. New England Journal of Medicine, and look for parasite camera study. They actually took a camera through somebody's bile duct, the tube inside their liver, and they saw physical parasites swimming around. And those can physically block your bile ducts, which can create pressurization, poor drainage, all kinds of nasty stuff. Other potential benefits we can see from coffee enemas is increased detoxing. Things like mold, which affects 70% of US homes, and they're probably... I'm guessing again. I don't have the data, but I've seen approximately in my practice about 80% of all clients coming through who are dealing with mold as the primary cause or one of the major layers of their bowel issues. And so, mold toxins are both lipophilic, meaning they bind onto fat, and they like the bile. They capture in bile and they bind to it. So, by promoting that bile flow and good cleaning or good cleansing or say escaping of the bile... I'm a little distracted. I got a puppy down the bottom here. Sorry, guys. But by getting that bile out, you don't reabsorb those toxins inside of it. And coffee enemas can help promote that detoxing and that drainage. You get better clearance of toxins, so you don't reabsorb and don't stay inflamed. Therefore, you have decreased inflammation as another benefit, improved mental clarity. Again, is that the elimination of toxins or an ass full of caffeine? Who's to say? And then we also see some other benefits like improved detox pathways. And with less toxins in your body, your immune system and your immune responses also improve, meaning you'll be less prone to going into flares or having hyperactive reactions, mast cell reactions for those of you who get itchy, anxiety, palpitations, etc. So, lots of good benefits. Now, coffee also contains some pretty interesting compounds. Now, again, most people do prefer to drink coffee the traditional way down the front. But if you go up the other side, it has the same benefits. There are lots of vitamins inside coffee. There are vitamins, B2, B3, B5, B9. You can get magnesium, potassium, chromium, polyphenols, antioxidants, and of course, the caffeine. Keeping in mind, caffeine is not a stimulant by itself. It actually blocks the adenosine receptors in your brain. Now, adenosine is one of those things that makes you go relaxed and kind of calms you down, put you to sleep at night, it builds up during the day. But by taking caffeine, you block those receptors so your body doesn't get that relaxation. So, it's less a stimulant, more of a blocker. Interesting tidbit. But the question we want to be asking is, does this coffee just mobilize toxins in your body? Does it actually get rid of these things from your system? Or does it just get into the crips and folds inside of your intestines and clean out a bunch of junk on the surface level? Or does it actually pull things from your bowel, from your liver, from your bile? And that's the idea behind them. So, we want to ask the question, is it actually promoting drainage? Or is it just simply pulling things that are in the bowel, like making you have a really good bowel movement? But what I can say is, I've had many, many clients going through protocols for things like parasites and fungal infections, viral infections, who do these coffee enemas and the next day, they feel better than they ever had before. Accelerates a lot of their health and healing. Remember, not medical advice, just letting you know. Or people who are on parasite programs or parasite cleanses for a month or two, have no movement, do a coffee enema, suddenly they got them all wrapped around their stool and they're coming out everywhere. So, we've seen a lot of positive benefits. But it's also important, this isn't just a fantastical conversation. This is a very practical conversation. I want to talk to you about some very real concerns that you may have about things like safety. And this is where the internet gets up my ass about it, pun intended, because they want to say, well, you're a quack, it doesn't work. You're right, there's no data on it. I'm just giving you the evidence and what we've seen in clinical, what self-reported versus what the actual studies say. And the more you look into studies and read them, the more you realize they're guidance at best. Like most studies are just guidance at best and many can be fabricated in a lot of different ways. So, we have seen some safety concerns. So, some safety issues we've seen are going to be things like caffeine sensitivity. So, if you're somebody who has a sensitivity to caffeine, gives you headaches or migraines, maybe don't do it because you need caffeine in coffee. Maybe we're seeing an increase of hyper-mobilized toxins. That might be something worth noting. There's a potential for that. This is why we always go slow and we'll talk about that in a minute here. We always want to use binders. Also, for those who might be pregnant, 200 to 300 milligrams of caffeine hasn't been connected, but it's been correlated to increased risk for pregnancy. So, for those of you who be worried about lower birth rates, of course, there's risk of miscarriage, stillbirth. That might be concerning that we've seen potentially in pregnancy with 200 to 300 milligrams of caffeine a day, which you can get through a full 2-liter, fully packed, fully concentrated coffee enema. Some of the other risks, of course, are going to be rectal injuries. Now, this is a no-brainer. You put things up where it's not supposed to go, something might hurt. This is why the catheters are often very small. There have been rectal injuries reported like burns. Guys, I should not have to tell you, if you're doing a coffee enema, don't put hot coffee in your butt. I shouldn't have to say it, but it's a disclaimer, okay? I'm not telling you to do this. There have been medical trauma, people who insert too fast, too far, or don't use any kind of lubricant. If you're putting a tube in your butt, use lubricant, okay? This is rocket science, but there are some concerns we have to know regardless. Other things we want to look at for the coffee. Guys, look at quality. If you decide to do a coffee enema, don't go off the shelf and just buy Folgers, or Tim Hortons, or whatever it is you can find that's cheap. It needs to be medical-grade, like enema coffee. It should be mold-free, pesticide-free. Ideally, it's going to be medium to light roast at best to preserve the nutrients. It's going to be air-roasted. It's going to be heavy metal-free. It's tested through the roof to make sure it's as pure and clean as possible. And then, of course, another risk that people have reported or that have been reported on some studies is infections, obviously, if you're not sterilizing your equipment properly. It's like anybody who does injections at home, if you use insulin pumps, you've got to clean your sites. If you're not cleaning your equipment properly, you're prone to infection. So, every report that's really been there that we've seen studies, and there's actually a study. I wrote down the number. I'll get there in a sec. I'll get you the actual PubMed article number you can read where they actually assess nine different case reports that were all self-reported. It was all just improper use. So, it's like saying cars are dangerous. Everyone gets injured because nobody knows how to actually drive. It is a medical procedure. So, you need to be trained and have to be confident on how to do it properly and safely. That's all I'm going to say. Other reports that people have found, electrolyte imbalances. Of course, it can be dehydrating, increasing bowel movements, moving too much water, the osmosis can change. If you're not hydrating properly during the day, you're prone to dehydration. There's also, here's an interesting one. They say there is a on some of these studies of increased biliary spasms. What does that mean? Well, the literature will tell you there's no evidence that it promotes increase in bile flow or liver detoxification. Well, biliary in the bile ducts inside of your liver, spasms or contractions. Well, if you're contracting tubes full of fluid, those tubes are going to move. So, we do see an improvement or increase in bile flow. Again, I've never seen it be a problem. This is all studies done on anecdotal reports anyway. So, take what you want from those. On other notes as well, if you do them too much too often, there's dependence risks and people can get addicted to the feeling, you can argue the caffeine, getting too much clearance or having motility issues or not enough clearance after using them too frequently. For example, the Gerson therapy we talked about in some of these protocols, he was having people do four or five coffee enemas a day. That's like a full day in the bathtub with coffee in your butt, right? So, it's crazy. But in clinical, some practitioners may have their patients or their clients do them once or twice a week for a short span if they can tolerate them and if they get benefit. But by doing them too much, of course, those rectal stretch reflexes can lead to lower bowel tone and poor evacuation. So, you just want to be careful. That being said, after all these warnings, I have to give them to you for all the legal reasons. This is not medical advice. This is not considered a safe medical procedure. The people who do them do feel amazing much of the time. For those of you who might be crazy enough to try. That being said, how would you do them safely? If you were to do them, not that I'm advising you to do it, how would you do them safely? Well, first thing you're going to need is your equipment. So, first things first is going to be an enema kit. Now, that can either look like a medical grade silicone bag or like a steel bucket, stainless steel. Most of those can often be bought on Amazon. Just watch your suppliers because you don't know where it's coming from. But proper medical grade, you don't want some kind of kit. Now, that kit's going to come with the tubes, the catheters, the bags, all the things that you need. I recommend hydrogen peroxide. Cleans very, very well without alcohol, which may strip some of the silicone. So, you want to be careful to preserve your product. But you're going to need enema grade coffee like we talked about. Clean, organic, pesticide mold, heavy metal free, fully tested. The works. Whatever it is that you need. You want it to be not instant coffee. Again, medium roast. Preserve a lot of those things. And don't run it through a coffee filter that's full of plastics. If you're going to do it, use a French press or a glass French press. Just to keep this as clean as you can. And of course, you want to make sure that you're using some form of either distilled, reverse osmosis water. Not like a Brita filter or tap filter. There's a lot of junk in those. So, make sure it's clean water. So, first things first, what you're going to do is just start very, very slow. The idea is for most enema, common practice will be filling up to a two liter bag full of coffee. Anywhere from one to four tablespoons of coffee inside of the enema bag. Now, if you're going that route and it's your first time ever, you can fill the two liters. You might not end up using it. That's okay. But try a half a tablespoon or a tablespoon at best if you're going to go this route. Just to make sure you don't overload yourself. Too much caffeine at once can stimulate a lot of motility. It can stimulate a lot of detoxification. Can make people feel nauseous at first if you're not used to it. I've done several dozen of these things for my bowel protocols. And it's been incredible what it's done for me and how it's accelerated my healing process. And again, the world says, that's stupid. It can't work. Show me the studies. You can't talk to those people. So, here's the thing. Studies are important, but data is important. Okay. And so, you're going to start nice and slow. Brew two liters and let it cool. You don't want those burns. Anywhere from 97 to 100 degrees. So, temperature check. Use a thermometer. With that clean water, you're going to sterilize your kit right before and right after use. Sterilizing it, then bagging it doesn't count. It must be sterilized right before and right after use. And then, of course, you flush the coffee through the tube so there's no air. In the bathtub on your right-hand side on a towel. Get it in there. Lube it up. Get it in just a little bit to get the coffee in and go slow. There's different types of enemas. You can call it the pump and dump. You put some in, hold it for a minute or two, dump it out. Most common is going to be a retention. For as long as you can, up to 10, 12, 15 minutes. Depends on what your goals are. And then empty and evacuate. Pretty straightforward for the most part. But there are some things to watch for. I'm just going to put a note. Some things you should know. It's very, very common to get spasms because just like having a full bowel full of stool, your body wants to get rid of it. It's like, this shouldn't be here. The stretch reflex kicks in. Your body wants to evacuate. Easy breeze. So, spasms are common. Oftentimes, for those who have the ability to, you can just breathe through it. It often passes. If it doesn't, just dump it out. Let it go. You also want to test your clearance if you're going this route. If you're detoxing too much too fast, you can feel sick. It might cause some bloating. It might cause some irritation or even worse case like diarrhea into the next day. That's the worst I've ever seen people do if they go too concentrated too quickly. But I've never seen it cause a big problem. It's all dependent on volume and your tolerances. But there's a PubMed article here. I actually have a number written down. If you guys want to go check it out, you can just Google PMC. That's going to get you onto your PubMed. The number is 7478478. So, if you want to go and check this one out to say, hey, I heard there's bad reports, this is one of the ones I could find. It's nine self-reports of people who said, oh, yeah, I got hurt doing it. So, if you took nine reports from bad drivers, they got injured, driving's bad too. That's just my thoughts. But they talked about the electrolyte imbalances. Some people actually got colitis due to infections, things like that. And I have never seen these ever in the hundreds of people I've suggested this research to who have done them. I have never seen this actually happen to people. There have been some other things. People complaining of infections and burns. And there was one or two reports that some people claim that there was death involved. So, Josh, why on earth are you talking about this? Sounds like a radical, crazy, nonsensical type of liver detox. I have to give you the cautions. Even as rare and extreme as they are, it's kind of like going in and getting your blood drawn or donating blood. A lot more people get blood infections, illnesses, sepsis, and maybe even die if they didn't do the procedure properly. If they didn't use sterile equipment, if they didn't sterilize the site, if they injected like they do in the movies, they go straight in with the needle rather than on an angle into the vein. There's a lot of things that can go wrong if you're not doing it properly. Under supervision, honestly, it's a very safe procedure. Extremely safe. People give themselves home injections all the time. You just have to know the procedure to sterilize the sites and things like that. So, I'm not obviously saying you should do coffee enemas. I don't know you. I can't make that recommendation. It's not medical advice. But I'm here to give you for information and educational purposes only that I have seen these do incredible things for people dealing with detox, drainage issues, inflammatory issues, autoimmune conditions, bowel disease. And I make this a very important point in many of the people that I work with in our practice to actually take a look at to find information to see if it's something they want to try for themselves because it really does produce powerful results. Josh, show me the studies. Look at the clinical data. Look at the self-reports. Do some research on them. Don't look at your research from the people who have heard that they're bad. Look at the research from the people who have done them and see if it's bad or good for yourself. And that's the information I can tell you. Here's what I'm going to wrap up with. Detoxing and draining your liver is extremely important for those with bowel issues. Drainage is one of the most important things you can do. It's one of the most important preparatory phases that you can do because draining, getting toxins out of your body is as important, if not more so than detoxing itself. There's arguments on both sides that your body detoxes already. Your body's already detoxing your liver. You're right. But so many of us are so toxic and we're so full, our drainage pathways also become congested. If you're somebody who goes out to the gym and it takes you a while or you don't break a sweat at all, that's a drainage pathway, your skin. If you're somebody who gets swelling in your ankles or your feet, your belly or your feet or your thighs, there's lymphatic tissue there, your armpits. You put your arm up and it's like a bulge and it's kind of waterlogged. That's a drainage pathway. That's your lymphatic system. If you're somebody who either gets oily, greasy stool or it's green or it's gray or it's yellow or it's really foul and rancid smelling with any of those things, that can be a bile flow issue, which is a drainage issue. If fatty foods make you nauseated, you have issues that way, that's a drainage issue. All these things indicate problems you might be having under the surface. So you can say, Josh, I'm going to detox. What you do is you collect all of that trash into your little trash bucket and your body says, okay, it's time to get it out. And then it goes nowhere. It's that trash piles up and piles up and piles up until it overflows. And now it's all over the house. So that garbage, those toxins move from one room to another. They move from your liver where they're congesting into fat cells where they're congesting into nervous tissue. Now you've got anxiety. You've got headaches and migraines. You've got light sensitivity. You've got all kinds of issues. Those inflammatory markers build up. Your body becomes more reactive. Now you've got asthma and rashes and hives and other issues happening. Food sensitivities. Because your body is accumulating toxins, it's collecting them, but it has no exit door. So these coffee enemas are used in drainage protocols. Drainage precedes detoxing because your body's already detoxing. But if you promote more detoxification without proper drainage support for those of us who are congested, you make things worse and you spill. And that's how we're doing it. If this is making sense to you and you want to get some help with this, I'm going to show you how you can do that. But I want you to know there are a ton of resources available. If you don't already know, I got two podcasts. You can find these in my profile on Instagram. Go to joshdech.com. You can find me all over the place, but they're all free. My mission is to make this information free to the world because everybody needs to know it so you can be your best advocate. So I've got a podcast called Reversing Crohn's and Colitis Naturally. I've been doing these lectures for years. I just recently started putting them up on the podcast. You can access it for free from anywhere. They're also available on YouTube. If you want to check out another podcast, not just for bowel diseases like Crohn's, Colitis, other health stuff, other gut stuff, check out my other podcast called ReversABLE. Also in the my profile. It's on my website. You can find them all over the place. But we talk to some of the world's best experts. Dr. Stephen Gundry, Dr. William Lee. We've had Dr. Jeffrey Bland, Dr. David Perlmutter. We've had the works. They're incredible, incredible. And we just talk about how you can heal your body naturally. But if you're there and you're like, Josh, I need some help. This feels really complicated. I've heard about this stuff. You're looking at root causes. You're actually getting to drainage. And I feel like there's a way I can get some help. We're here to help you. It's all we want to do is just give you the information to help yourself. So you do that very simply. If you're on YouTube, you're on the podcast listening right now. Check the links down below. Send me an email. Ask a question. Check out the website. There's a ton of free resources. But if you want some hands on direct help, this is how you're going to get it. That's all we got for you for now. If you missed anything, you can always get back on the replays. Thanks so much for being here. We'll see you guys next time. 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 my doctor in 15 years. And if this, for the first time, is really starting to click, and it's starting to make sense, 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.