Coffee: The Royal Flush
Books | Treatment
Centers | Colon Cleansing Products
From
The Cancer Chronicles #6 and #7
© Autumn 1990 by Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D.
The most controversial alternative procedures has to be
the coffee enema. Along with other detoxification routines,
the coffee enema is a central part of both the Gerson and the Kelley programs. It is always
good for a laugh: "with milk or sugar?" This
bizarre-sounding treatment can also be used to scare people
away from alternatives in general. No quackbusting article
these days is complete without a reference to "enemas
made from roasted coffee beans." So what's the story?
Is the coffee enema crackpot faddism or is there some
rationale behind this procedure?
An enema is "a fluid injected into the rectum for
the purpose of clearing out the bowel, or of administering
drugs or food." The word itself comes from the Greek
en-hienai, meaning to "send or inject into."
The enema has been called "one of the oldest medical
procedures still in use today." Tribal women in Africa,
and elsewhere, routinely use it on their children. The
earliest medical text in existence, the Egyptian Ebers
Papyrus, (1,500 B.C.) mentions it. Millennia before, the
Pharaoh had a "guardian of the anus," a special
doctor one of whose purposes was to administer the royal
enema.
The Greeks wrote of the fabled cleanliness of the Egyptians,
which included the internal cleansing of their systems
through emetics and enemas. They employed these on three
consecutive days every month said Herodotus (II.77) or
at intervals of three or four days, according to the later
historian Diodorus. The Egyptians explained to their visitors
that they did this because they "believed that diseases
were engendered by superfluities of the food", a
modern-sounding theory!
Enemas were known in ancient Sumeria, Babylonia, India,
Greece and China. American Indians independently invented
it, using a syringe made of an animal bladder and a hollow
leg bone. Pre-Columbian South Americans fashioned latex
into the first rubber enema bags and tubes. In fact, there
is hardly a region of the world where people did not discover
or adapt the enema. It is more ubiquitous than the wheel.
Enemas are found in world literature from Aristophanes
to Shakespeare, Gulliver Travels to Peyton Place.
In
pre-revolutionary France a daily enema after dinner was
de rigueur. It was not only considered indispensable for
health but practiced for good complexion as well. Louis
XIV is said to have taken over 2,000 in his lifetime.Could
this have been the source of the Sun King's sunny disposition?
For centuries, enemas were a routine home remedy. Then,
within living memory, the routine use of enemas died out.
The main times that doctors employ them nowadays is before
or after surgery and childbirth. Difficult and potentially
dangerous barium enemas before colonic X rays are of course
still a favorite of allopathic doctors.
But why coffee? This bean has an interesting history.
It was imported in Arabia in the early 1500's by the Sufi
religious mystics, who used it to fight drowsiness while
praying. It was especially prized for its medicinal qualities,
in both the Near East and Europe. No one knows when the
first daring soul filled the enema bag with a quart of
java. What is known is that the coffee enema appeared
at least as early as 1917 and was found in the prestigious
Merck Manual until 1972. In the 1920s German scientists
found that a caffeine solution could open the bile ducts
and stimulate the production of bile in the liver of experimental
animals.
Dr. Max Gerson used this clinically as part of a general
detoxification regimen, first for tuberculosis, then cancer.
Caffeine, he postulated, will travel up the hemorrhoidal
to the portal vein and thence to the liver itself. Gerson
noted some remarkable effects of this procedure. For instance,
patients could dispense with all pain-killers once on
the enemas. Many people have noted the paradoxical calming
effect of coffee enemas. And while coffee enemas can relieve
constipation, Gerson cautioned:
"Patients have to know that the coffee enemas are
not given for the function of the intestines but for the
stimulation of the liver."
Coffee enemas were an established part of medical practice
when Dr. Max Gerson introduced them into cancer therapy
in the 1930s. Basing himself on German laboratory work,
Gerson believed that caffeine could stimulate the liver
and gall bladder to discharge bile. He felt this process
could contribute to the health of the cancer patient.
Although the coffee enema has been heaped with scorn,
there has been some independent scientific work that gives
credence to this concept. In 1981, for instance, Dr. Lee
Wattenberg and his colleagues were able to show that substances
found in coffee—kahweol and cafestol palmitate—promote
the activity of a key enzyme system, glutathione S-transferase,
above the norm. This system detoxifies a vast array of
electrophiles from the bloodstream and, according to Gar
Hildenbrand of the Gerson Institute, "must be regarded
as an important mechanism for carcinogen detoxification."
This enzyme group is responsible for neutralizing free
radicals, harmful chemicals now commonly implicated in
the initiation of cancer. In mice, for example, these
systems are enhanced 600 percent in the liver and 700
percent in the bowel when coffee beans are added to the
mice's diet.
Dr. Peter Lechner, who is investigating the Gerson method
at the Landeskrankenhaus of Graz, Austria, has reported
that "coffee enemas have a definite effect on the
colon which can be observed with an endoscope." F.W.
Cope (1977) has postulated the existence of a "tissue
damage syndrome." When cells are challenged by poison,
oxygen deprivation, malnutrition or a physical trauma
they lose potassium, take on sodium and chloride, and
swell up with excess water.
Another scientist (Ling) has suggested that water in a
normal cell is contained in an "ice-like" structure.
Being alive requires not just the right chemicals but
the right chemical structure. Cells normally have a preference
for potassium over sodium but when a cell is damaged it
begins to prefer sodium. This craving results in a damaged
ability of cells to repair themselves and to utilize energy.
Further, damaged cells produce toxins; around tumors are
zones of "wounded" but still non-malignant tissue,
swollen with salt and water.
Gerson believed it axiomatic that cancer could not exist
in normal metabolism. He pointed to the fact that scientists
often had to damage an animal's thyroid and adrenals just
to get a transplanted tumor to "take." He directed
his efforts toward creating normal metabolism in the tissue
surrounding a tumor.
It is the liver and small bowel which neutralize the most
common tissue toxins: polyamines, ammonia, toxic-bound
nitrogen, and electrophiles. These detoxification systems
are probably enhanced by the coffee enema. Physiological
Chemistry and Physics has stated that "caffeine enemas
cause dilation of bile ducts, which facilitates excretion
of toxic cancer breakdown products by the liver and dialysis
of toxic products across the colonic wall."
In addition, theophylline and theobromine (two other chemicals
in coffee) dilate blood vessels and counter inflammation
of the gut; the palmitates enhance the enzyme system responsible
for the removal of toxic free radicals from the serum;
and the fluid of the enema then stimulates the visceral
nervous system to promote peristalsis and the transit
of diluted toxic bile from the duodenum and out the rectum.
Since the enema is generally held for 15 minutes, and
all the blood in the body passes through the liver every
three minutes, "these enemas represent a form of
dialysis of blood across the gut wall" (Healing Newsletter,
#13, May-June, 1986).
Prejudice against coffee enemas continues, however. Although
this data was made available to Office of Technology Assessment
it was largely ignored in their box on the procedure.
They dismissively state "there is no scientific evidence
to support the claim that coffee enemas detoxify the blood
or liver."
No medical procedure is without risk and OTA is quick
to point out alleged dangers of the coffee enemas. For
instance, they cite one doctor's opinion that coffee "taken
by this route is a strong stimulant and can be at least
as addictive as coffee taken regularly by mouth."
This may indeed be true. Yet one wonders where the data
is on this, and whether OTA would issue a similar warning
about the perils of coffee drinking.
Another potential danger, they say, is physical damage
to the rectum—"fatal bowel perforation and necrosis"
which have been associated with "various other types
of enema." The risk of perforation comes from the
insertion device used. At the Gerson clinic, for instance,
they use a short nozzle which couldn't inflict much harm;
Gonzalez uses a soft rubber colon tube. In neither case
would this caveat seem to apply. On thin evidence, OTA
also suggests enemas can cause colitis.
The agency also cites the case of the two Seattle women
who died following excessive enema use. Their deaths were
attributed to fluid and electrolyte abnormalities. One
took 10 to 12 coffee enemas in a single night and then
continued at a rate of one per hour. The other took four
daily. As OTA points out, "in both cases, the enemas
were taken much more frequently than is recommended in
the Gerson treatment."
In general, coffee enemas are an important tool for physicians
who try to detoxify the body. This is not to say they
are a panacea. They certainly require much more research.
But coffee enemas are serious business: their potential
should be explored by good research—not mined for cheap
shots at alternative medicine or derisively dismissed
as yet another crackpot fad.
Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D. is the author of eight books and three documentaries on cancer-related topics. He is
an advisor on alternative cancer treatments to the National
Institutes of Health, Columbia University, and the University
of Texas. He researches and writes individualized Healing
Choices reports for people with cancer. For information
on Healing Choices, you can contact coordinator Anne Beattie
in the following ways:
Address: 144 St. John's Place, Brooklyn, NY 11217
Phone: 718-636-4433
Fax: 718-636-0186
E-mail: mail@ralphmoss.com
Web site: http://www.ralphmoss.com
Gerson
Institute
PO Box 430
Bonita, California 91908-0430
Phone: (619) 585-7600
Fax: (619) 585-7610
Toll-Free: 888 4 Gerson
Nicholas Gonzalez, M.D.
(A follower of Dr. W. Kelley, author of One
Answer to Cancer)
36 East 36th Street, Suite 204
New York, New York 10016
U.S.A.
Phone: (212) 213-3337
Books
by Ralph
W. Moss, Ph.D.
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