Gallstones

Gallstones adn the 'biliary colic' they cause can be truly horrible as the vivid and excruciating details I have been given in person by several dozen patients over the years has attested. It may also be entirely possible to prevent future attacks and even dissolve and pass small stones with the use of herbs and a high fibre diet.

Herbs that have been seen to help the most include Golden Seal, Celandine and Dandelion root. It will help a great deal to find a good herbalist to get the best of these or similar herbs in the right dosage.

Further to that there are several other factors that will either help or you should definitely know about

• Fruit and Veg
• Don’t get sun-burnt
• Don’t do the olive oil flush

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1. Eat fruit and veg

If you don’t have enough good fibre from fruit and vegetables in your diet then your chances of getting gallstones are very much higher.

If you already have some stones developing (this is true for 1 in 5 of us) then having plenty of plant fibre in the diet can help small stones to be safely excreted.

People in cultures, who eat a lot of fruit and vegetables hardly ever get this painful health problem. Gallstones are very much an increasing phenomena of modern living and a refined diet.

2. Don’t get sun-burnt

Gallstones contain a centre that is noticeably dark and this obviously led one very much ‘thinking outside the box’ scientist to wonder whether the same kind of cells that responded to sunlight by getting darker might somehow relate to gallstones. The results of his study were startling to say the least.

Two hundred and six white-skinned individuals were involved in the study and it was found that those who liked to sunbathe had on average twice the risk of getting gallstones than those who didn’t. In the people who frequently got sunburnt after long periods of sunbathing, the risk of developing gallstones was a remarkable 25.6 times greater than those who did not like to lie in the sun!

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3. Don’t do the olive oil flush

A popular remedy and much promoted ‘cure’ for a gallstone is the ‘olive oil liver flush’. There are several variations of this but they generally revolve around doing a special diet, drinking a lot (a cupful or even more) of olive oil and chasing this up with large amounts of lemon juice. Often you have to do it more than just once!

People tell of passing huge stones and huge numbers of stones (upwards of a hundred is common) whilst doing this olive oil flush and oh if only it were true! (although if we did in fact have that many stones in our gall-bladders then we would probably just about die from the blockage).

Sadly the truth does not get in the way of a good story here. This will come as disturbing news to people that have diligently collected their ‘stones’ and proudly shown them to anyone that took an interest but with few exceptions* those are not gallstones but rather a direct result of the treatment itself. The Olive oil and lemon juice become 'saponified' along with material in the bowel and form little pellets which eventually pass out.

The consumption of such large quantity of any kind of oil by its nature can cause a major contraction of the gallbladder. That can be a serious problem if there really is a stone in there which is just big enough to get in and block the duct. In that case we are back to the agonies of biliary colic and you may have to think about getting in touch with the emergency medicine services.  

*see the thread I have copied below to read more on this subject

* Online discussion on the olive oil flush

~ From: JM
I am suspicious of gallstones that dissolve or that liquefy when passing. I have done several gall bladder flushes myself using a formula from a book titled "Encyclopedia of Digestive Disorders" by F. Roberts, of Roberts’s formula fame. The flush involved taking divided doses of olive oil and lemon juice every fifteen minutes over a two hour period to stimulate the gall bladder to contract and release stones. The effects were very dramatic - one time causing drastic elimination out both ends simultaneously. It also made me lose my taste for olive oil for many years.

I also worked as a massage therapist in a clinic where a similar flush was used for detox and cleansing. The "stones" people would pass needed to be kept in the freezer or they would melt. I then read in a book the suggestion that these "stones" were a product of saponification, the olive oil mixing with the alkaline bile salts creating a soap (similar to mixing lye and fat).

At naturopathic college I obtained a real gallstone from the gall bladder of the cadaver we worked on in anatomy lab. It was as hard as a rock and it would not dissolve in olive oil and lemon juice, even after several months. I didn't try dissolving it in coke or ortho-phosphoric acid.

I believe it's possible that a gall bladder flush may cause stones to be eliminated, but these stones will sink to the bottom of the toilet. The "stones" that float and that are easily squashed are most likely soap. I have heard of people passing hundreds of such "stones" which would imply that they must have a huge gall bladder.

~ From: MM
In the early 1980s, after recommending and teaching Robert's protocol, a PhD physiologist STRONGLY suggested that these "stones" were probably artifacts of the therapy. The next time someone passed some, I took them in a cooler to a local Santa Fe medical lab I had a working relationship with. They showed only traces of chenic and cholic bile salts, and had no discernable cholesterol content. Their educated guess was that they were saponified fatty acids...probably linoleic or oleic acid salts. They were DEFINITELY not "gallstones". I have not recommended this grim regimen since.

One of the great scams amongst 19th century medicine shows was this HUGE capsule, made out of a colored and sealed gelatin capsule. It cost $1, and was GUARANTEED to pass a tapeworm. Indeed, everyone who took one raved about this long "worm" they passed.
The capsule contained a long coiled spiral of a thin strand of gutta percha (crude rubber), dusted in Lycopodium. This was the "worm".

Robert's protocol, similarly, seems to result in the consistant passing of "stones" consisting of saponified olive oil, acted on as well as possible by the stressed digestive apparatus.

That doesn't mean that the shocked pancreas and gall bladder don't, on occasion, vomit out a small cholesterol stone. But, as anyone who has worked with cholelithiasis will vouch, this is risky stuff, since an obstruction by a REAL stone of the biliary duct or common duct from the gall bladder spasms may be just as likely. Most gallstones exist WITHOUT symptoms. Most obstructions require surgery.

I find the tapeworm "pill" a safer phenomenon-inducing placebo.

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