Coffee Enemas

The Coffee Enema - It's Unique History and Amazing Detox Properties

The following information is adapted and excerpted from "The Royal Enema" by Dr. Ralph Moss

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 health 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, (1,000 B.C.) mentions it.  Millenia 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 (11.77) or at intervals of 3 or 4 days, according to the late historian, Diodorus.  The Egyptians explained tot their visitors that they did this because they believed that health imbalances 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 procedure.  Then, within living memory, the routine use of enemas died out.  The main times that doctors employ them nowadays is before or after surgery or 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 1920's, 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.  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 therapy in the 1930's.  Basing himself on German laboratory work, Gerson believed that caffeine could stimulate the liver and gallbladder to discharge bile.  He felt this process could contribute to the health of the 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 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% in the liver and 700% in the bowel when coffee beans are added to the mice's diet.

Dr. Peter Lechner, who investigated the Gerson method at the Landeskrankenhaus of Graz, Austria, reported that, "coffee enemas have a definitive effect on the colon which can be observed with an endoscope."  F.W. Cope (1977) postulated the existence of a "tissue damage syndrome."  When cells are challenged by poison, oxygen deprivation, malnutrition, or 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 prefers 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 no malignant tissue, swollen with salt and water.  

Gerson believed that health imbalances 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 likely 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 in 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 3 minutes, "these enemas represent a form of dialysis of blood across the gut wall." (Healing Newsletter, #13, May-June, 1986).

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