Detoxification Why detoxification? There were many clues but the one I picked up on was the peculiar greyish-green color under my skin. I call them “liver spots” (they aren't) The clue I wish I pursued came almost five years ago. I could no long detox alcohol very well. I'd drink ½ a glass, stay drunk for 2 hours then fall asleep and wake up hung over out the yin-yang. Everybody rejoiced because I gave up alcohol. Big problem solved eh? No one, not even the doctors stop to ask, what happened to all that alcohol dehydrogenase in the liver? When a doctor fails to take any action when you shows signs of impaired liver function, FIRE THEM! More clues. Suddenly my allergy medication Claritin started to work really really well for the first time in 20 yearsâ€" 24 hours long as promised on the label. Cyp3A4 is the liver enzyme that metabolizes Claritin. In addition, I'm a fast metabolizer. Claritin hits fast and hard and wears off fast. So that 24 hour pill wears off after about 16-18 hours for me. Something is slowing down my production of another liver enzyme. Side note: Cyp3A4 and Cyp2D6 both metabolize Claritin but I don't have any Cyp 2D6 because I don't metabolize narcotic medications. Luckily for me, the liver regenerates. How do you track progress as you detox? It helps if one of your toxic (?) compounds has a gray-green tint and collects under your skin. How do I know it's not a normal pigment ? Well if I rub my skin for about 5 minutes, I can get the pigment to move away leaving a pink spot on my skin. I'm pretty sure I had a Candida infection. One of the products to eradicate the Candida - a bunch of enzymes that attack it, left a growing gray-green tint under my skin. I've had this stuff under my skin for most of my life but faintly. It was most pronounced as a "moustache" on my upper lip. But now, the stain was growing until I only had two pinkish patches on my cheeks.... right above my lymph nodes. Aside from the visual are there other symptoms? Listless/low energy, burning sensation under the skin and in the muscle, patches of skin tender to the touch, irritability, shortness of breath without cause Well, the stain could be something from the Candida or it could be a by product of the enzymes. But I'm betting on the Candida because... Every time, I read about Candida, people recommend a detox program especially for the liver. Candida by-products and wastes are particularly rough on the liver. Additionally, my gut was down. Constant Diarrhea means your body isn't eliminating waste products efficiently. Or at all. But the gut recovered recently. I'm certified Candida-free. Now is the time to support the liver. And milk thistle is almost universally recommended. The silymarin in milk thistle helps 1) protect the liver (antioxidants protect the liver from free radical damage), 2) assists in liver function (stabilizes liver membranes, increases ability to filter toxins from blood), and 3) may regenerate the liver helping with recovery from cirrhosis and other types of liver disease/damage. The therapeutic dose varies - but 100 - 200 mg of silymarin is pretty standard Does the milk thistle/silymarin work? Based on the color changes in my skin: the more silymarin I take, the cleaner my skin looks. I've tried anything from 500 to 1500 mg of this powder. I've tried to cook up a tincture (too much work, didn't like the alcohol). If I stop taking the milk thistle for a week, the stain just starts piling up again. Whatever this stuff is, it's been accumulating for months. I suspect a steady, rational approach with milk thistle would have this cleaned up in about six months. But let's be systematic. It's not just the liver. It's all of the detoxification mechanisms in the body that are overwhelmed: Liver, lymph, skin & sweat glands, the gut, kidneys, bile and probably more that I don't understand. It's rather lengthy, if bored skip to the bottom under Results and then read the detox procedure below. 1) Drink pure water. At least 1/2 gallon is the minimum. A gallon would be better. Supports all the organs. I do this normally so this ends up at the bottom here 1a) Add juice from 1-4 lemons/8oz of cranberry juice/1 oz apple cider vinegar (not all at once!) to a gallon of water. The juice helps drain the lymph nodes and helps kidney function. Adding any one of these juices created a synergistic effect and the stain under the skin started to clear out faster. 1b) Skin and sweat: heat therapy - hot (Epsom salt, baking soda or Toors mud) baths or showers, sauna's. Foot baths are recommended for those who cannot take a bath. The key is to raise your core body temperature and sweat. For some toxins, this is the easiest way to expel it. Unfortunately for me, bathing & sweating does remove some of it and clear the skin fast but the heat just seems to draw out the internal mother lode and bring fresh stuff to the surface. It's a bit discouraging to see more of this stuff after a particularly hot bath. Hot baths and cold showers (keep cold therapy short. It's beneficial if it feels refreshing, if you're shivering, you've gone too far) also trigger production of heat shock proteins. Toor's mud is particularly good for a detox because it's high in magnesium, calcium and sulfur. All three are beneficial if the body is toxic or stressed. You may wish to consider using a biomat (far infrared sauna) as well. 2) Basic gut support (for the gut cleanse) a) use a quality fiber. I use WellbetX PGX because I'm diabetic but if you can't afford it, glucomannan is very good. b) use a probiotic. Probiotics can be super specialized. Pick a formulation that is designed to address your issues c) Use a resistant starch. Resistant starches resist digestion (by you), it is your helpful probiotics that digest this stuff. If you don't want to use a lot of products, then pick this one. Bob's Red Mill unmodified potato starch is the most concentrated form of resistant starch that is also readily available. Start SLOWLY, try 1/2 or 1 tsp and work your way up to 1 tbsp 3x per day. I'm a BIG fan of resistant starch. This stuff has got legs. It helps you at lower levels and it just keeps going. d) if you experience Diarrhea, a tablespoon of arrowroot powder per day for a few days maybe helpful. Very few people have trouble digesting arrowroot powder, very low allergen potential, it works as a demulcent soothing the gut. It has also been shown in the laboratory and in real life to neutralize insect, toad, frog and plant poisons AND it was used as a early antiseptic/antibiotic â€" they packed poison wounds with this powder. But apparently no one has done clinical trials and therefore can't even speculate on what's happening in the gut. So I will â€" it's a war in your gut. Bad and good bacteria alike put out toxins in an effort to prove Darwin right. Ya think something like arrowroot with it's ability to neutralize all those other toxins might be up to it's usual tricks in your gut? That's the reason why it's soothing? Plus it's an antiseptic. Do you think a millennium of munching on arrowroot tubers might have... you know... done something to our gut microbiome? Therefore, our probiotics might be arrowroot resistant and those bad bugs unused to a diet of arrowroot get clobbered? At any rate, one tbsp of arrowroot seem to prevent Diarrhea for me. For about 3 hours it felt like nothing much. Then from the 3-24th hours, there was a nice soothing sensation and little pops of gas that tootled on. From the timing, the action is all in the large intestine. It works on my present mild Diarrhea. 3) Liver support - milk thistle â€" highly recommended. Progress using any of these methods is accelerated with the milk thistle. 4) Kidney support - the acid in the lemon/cranberry juice helps the kidneys function better. A gallon of water is serious kidney support 5) Lymphatic support - the increased water & lemon juice helps drain the lymph nodes faster 6) Bile â€" milk thistle support bile production by supporting the liver. 7) Support glutathione production. Glutathione is the master enzyme that regenerates ALL your antioxidant enzymes. Glutathione is made up of N-acetyl-L-cysteine (NAC). You can purchase this. Glutamate, I purchase this as a powder. Glutamate can only be absorbed on an empty stomach. So I dissolve in water and drink when I wake up in the middle of the night. Finally, glycine. I don't worry about this too much but it is readily found in collagen (buy as a powder or drink bone broth). You can also buy glutathione but it's not very bioavailable There are special methods to create bioavailable forms but it's technical and you need special equipment. Why glutathione? Most toxic chemicals generate free radicals; your antioxidant enzymes mop them up. But if your glutathione is stripped then the war is over and you just lost. 8) Alpha lipoic acid (ALA) - this is an antioxidant that is normally produced by the body and is found in the mitochondria. It is soluble in water AND fat. It can cross the brain-blood barrier. Normal therapeutic doses of ALA range from about 1200 mg to 1500 mg. Because it has a sulfur group, it is one of the few antioxidants that can bind mercury and stay bound. ALA is used to treat mercury poisoning (there is a special protocol). The levels suggested here are too low to treat mercury poisoning but they are sufficient to prevent mercury poisoning from regular everyday exposure. 9) Other antioxidants - melatonin, Vitamin C (7-8 gms for optimal function), A, D and E, lycopene, lutein, ALA- detoxification can sometimes draw out stores of toxins from the fat and other organs especially heavy metals. Neutralize them with antioxidants. Choose a mix of antioxidants. Also make sure you have some that are fat soluble and others that are water soluble. 10)vitamins in general: to restore normal function 11) Focus on sulfur, magnesium, calcium and zinc. These are required for normal function and they are protective. Some will compete with toxins forcing the toxin out into the blood / other organ to be flushed. Unfortunately, they aren't very bioavailable. For example, the zinc will block the absorption of magnesium. The easiest way to take them is separately. Or you can go very high end and get Hardy's Essential Nutrients (it's over $100 per month, you need to take 12 capsules daily but Hardy's has the clinical trial data to back up their claims about bioavailable). 12) Exercise. This item only just made it back to my list in the last six months. Before, I was so loaded up with toxins, that exercise made things worse. Two months ago, I would go for a 45 min walk and then be utterly listless for a week. Now, I can take a walk every day and it doesn't affect me noticeably. That's still not good. You're supposed to feel good after a walk, not grateful that you made it back without danger of collapse. 13)Food: The one food that I avoided religiously, yup, organ meats. I settled on chicken livers. Because liver has everything you need to support your liver. Old Chinese adage. RESULTS I started off the detox as simple liver support using milk thistle and lemon juiced in a gallon of water. I noticed the effect of the thistle/lemon addition within a few days. The stain under the skin was moving out faster but it was begin replaced almost as quickly. Separately, I'd been advised to try 1200 mg alpha lipoic acid a powerful antioxidant for my abnormally low energy. This led off into a entirely new line of inquiry about mitochondrial biogenesis. Suffice it to say there are many reasons to take ALA and I had all of them. And if I had to pick only a handful of antioxidants it would be CoQ10, ALA, resveratrol, melatonin, vitamin C, D. CoQ10, ALA and resveratrol for their versatility and power and the rest because they are cheap, powerful and versatile. And you're gonna need to think about this because during a detox, there is no telling what you'll stir up. Therefore every antioxidant becomes recommended to neutralize it. If you force me to trim this list down further, then I will recommend CoQ10 and ALA. CoQ10 because it's so all purpose and ALA because it can detox some heavy metals (mercury and lead). But at this point, I will also recommend you avoid detox altogether. I noticed ALA had the peculiar effect of driving my energy up, way up and then I crashed around 4PM and felt like I couldn't move again. I learned later that's a common effect with ALA, it cleans up everything in sight, you feel great, then you feel lousy because it can also extract toxins from fat cells (a common place to stash your body's trash). I found out I could mellow out the crash if I used more milk thistle than recommended â€" about 15 times more. Luckily I ran across another brand of milk thistle which was 30 times more concentrated. Their recommendations were exactly in tune with my needs, so I switched over to Jarrow. I ended up taking a capsule of milk thistle for every capsule of ALA (I take in 300 mg doses 4x per day). Smoothing out the ALA and beefing up the milk thistle had the effect of leaving me agitated, in mild pain, listless and irritable. But I was able to tolerate 45 minute walks, hot baths and other activities like building defenses to protect myself from my stalker (another story) without becoming limp from stirring up all that toxicity. So the protocol is able to keep up with the toxic sludge but why not increase the ALA and everything else too? It's the rate of detoxification in the liver. The liver can handle only so much. If you start pulling stuff out of the fat too fast then it just has to go back in but not before it's caused all sorts of trouble. Mercury is a great example. It gets stored away in fat and brain. ALA is one of the few antioxidants that does a good job with mercury but slowly. Finally, after about four months plus a bit, the first break came. I'd done my usual exfoliation and discovered long scratches in my skin that showed pink instead of more greyish-green. So something was killing the stuff from the inside. Update Nov. 3 - I seem to be cycling around to a higher energy again. The gray-green tint is definitely receding. I asked my doctors about this stuff and they both got so technical they started to mumble. I still don't know what this is but both my docs said my detox protocol was the right way to go. There is no harm in it as long as I stay within recommended doses for the antioxidants. And yes, it's a long, slow grind waiting for the situation to correct itself. Conclusion: something is working! But there's more months of this still

This is the only product of it's kind that passed Consumer Labs.com's potency and purity tests. I found that after all the studies came out showing that most supplements have very little (and at times even none) of the ingredients it claimed to have. I don't want to be taking pills that provide no benefit to me. I did my research and chose to purchase these milk thistle supplements because this brand had many great reviews and passed the appropriate consumer and lab tests. I had gallbladder surgery earlier this year which made me more aware and forced me to really consider my health. Many people who have had gallbladder surgery recommended taking milk thistle and digestive enzyme supplements to aid in my digestive health. I've read horror stories about people who had upsetting complications after surgery like chronic Diarrhea, abdominal pain and overflow of acid from indigestion. A combination of milk thistle and digestive enzymes tends to lesson these after effects of gallbladder removal. I have been using this brand of milk thistle for many months and have to say that I have not had any digestive problems. Business as usual for me and I am thankful for that. I feel healthy and refreshed

I have taken other brands of milk thistle before to aid in cleansing the liver. I have been taking one of these a day with a meal for about a week and have not witnessed any side effects. I should mention I also eat a very nutritious and well balanced diet, as well as stay active. I chose this product for its online reviews, of which I have compared many, and they all seem to point here. Our livers are the oil filter, if you will, of our bodies, and process many many toxins a day. Milk thistle is meant to aid in this process; there are many available research documents on the subject. Now, I can't tell you if my liver feels healthier at all, but I CAN tell you that unlike others, I have not had any problems with an upset stomach or Diarrhea. Again, everyone is different. I will report my overall health in a month or two of taking this product to update. Feel free to ask any questions. An honest and unpaid review, -shaoli

This made a world of difference in stopping my liver/stomach pain. I'd get occasional discomfort over the past 5 years, but lately that discomfort increased, gradually turning into frequent dull pain. Doc was gonna put me on Omeprazole for a month to see if it subsided, but I researched and found this. It took about a month for me to see and feel real results, but the pain went away all together! I take 3 daily, one before each meal. I try to take it 20 mins before each meal but, life. For the most part I end up taking the pills right before meals. I definitely know if I missed a few doses (I always remember to take them now). Weight loss! After the first month, I was a little worried that I'd keep losing weight but I just lost the fat that I've always had trouble losing. Keeps me regular (along with daily yogurt/probiotics for general gut health). I eat whatever I want (while still trying to eat healthy, too) and I gain no weight. I just stay stagnant. On my 3rd bottle and I will honestly never stop taking these, for the pain elimination alone. This is a safe milligram dosage to take on a daily basis (not to exceed 600 mg daily). Love, love

For the last three nights I have been awaken with hard indigestion nausea Diarrhea and nose congestion. I suspect this my be the milk thistle I have been further reading and I found that milk thistle can mimic estrogen. I'm currently taking DIM to lower estrogen in my system because I'm estrogen dominant. I also found that individuals who are allergic to ragweed should stay away from milk thistle. I'm going to take a break and see what happens. I want believe this good for me. But... maybe not