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DETOX IN ALBUQUERQUE & SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
Every day, millions of molecules from different compounds enter our bodies through voluntary or involuntary ingestion. These chemicals come from foods, beverages, medicines, food additives, personal care, and numerous other sources. Whenever a system becomes polluted, normal functioning becomes affected.  Excessive pollution in a system may result in malfunctioning or serious degeneration of the system. You might have experienced this occurrence with the mechanics of your car. Every so often you need to change the oil, and air filter in order to keep the system clean so the car will run more efficiently and last longer. That is why when your car's engine needs repair; the mechanic first cleans the engine before any attempt to fix it. It is always easier to repair a clean system than a polluted one. If you are not successful in fixing a polluted system, you are never sure if it is the system that has not been fixed, or if it is the pollution that is causing the problem.
Every working system, as the result of normal functioning, produces pollution. Some of the pollutants that are produced within the living systems are eliminated through processes naturally built in the system. No living system has the ability to rid itself totally from all of the naturally produced or foreign pollutants. As a result, the system can slowly produce and accumulate pollutants to a point of self-destruction. The human body is no different than any other system. It has excellent built-in mechanisms to cleanse itself from all kinds of pollutants, but the system is not perfect.
The advancements in the fields of chemistry, biochemistry, biology, have definitely made substantial contributions to the health and well being of mankind. However, with the advancement of science and industrialization, numerous foreign and toxic chemicals have been produced and released in the living environments. These foreign chemicals to the human system are known as "xenobiotics". Xenobiotics also include over the counter and prescription drugs. Numerous research scientists have demonstrated that xenobiotics are among the major causes of a great number of acute and chronic health problems that have become widespread in the western societies in recent decades. These compounds, if not cleared from the system, can interfere with normal biological processes and become hazardous to one's health. The accumulation of these toxic substances in the body can produce a variety of distressful symptoms or medical conditions.
The poor nutritional habits in the western world due to the limited number of healthy food ingredients being used in the daily diet, and a variety of other factors related to industrialization has increased the number of allergy problems by tenfold within the last few decades. Most of the symptoms produced as the result of the accumulation of toxins are very similar to allergies. Mild toxicities and food allergies will produce very discomforting symptoms such as poor digestion, gas, bloating, heartburn, headaches, fatigue, chronic mild infections, hormone imbalances, and more.
Cleansing and detoxing the body from the accumulated xenobiotics and the excess biological compounds and metabolites (i.e. hormones) is known as "detoxification." Most of these toxins are subjected to numerous, chemical changes (detoxification) in order to be prepared for elimination from the body.  The major detoxification reactions take place in the liver. The goal of detoxification reactions is to transform chemicals that are fat-soluble into water-soluble compounds. Water-soluble compounds can then be eliminated through kidneys, skin, or gallbladder, in urine, sweat, or bile, respectively. Secretion of bile is one of the major pathways of body's detoxification. Once the liver has detoxified xenobiotics and other toxins, the resulting compounds are delivered to the gallbladder to be excreted with bile into the digestive system in order to be eliminated in feces. Detoxification has shown to be extremely beneficial as a preventative measure for different health problems, or as a means to enhance therapeutic procedures for a variety of medical conditions. The removal of these toxins from the system enhances the organs' ability to better absorb nutrients, improves biological functions, which, in turn, accelerates the healing processes. A healthy detoxification is of utmost importance in a variety of medical conditions and therapeutic procedures.
In a normal healthy body, the blood and most other bodily fluids should be slightly alkaline, very much like sea water, and the tissues and cells should be well oxygenated. Alkaline and oxygen are therefore the twin pillars of good health and strong immune response. Bacterial, viral, and fungal infections cannot develop in tissues that are sufficiently alkalized and oxygenated, and almost all microbes and toxins are neutralized by the presence of alkaline and oxygen elements. When internal toxicity exceeds the body's capacity to cleanse itself, however, alkaline and oxygen levels plummet, and a state of toxemia develops. This state is characterized by two primary conditions: excess acid (acidosis) and insufficient oxygen (hypoxia) as a result.
Acidosis and hypoxia are the underlying conditions that allow bacteria, viruses, fungus, and other microbes to invade and breed inside the human body. Virtually all germs that infect the human body are anaerobic, which means that they thrive in oxygen-deficient environments, such as toxic tissues. Ever since Louis Pasteur proposed his "germ theory of disease," modern Western medicine has become obsessed with the simplistic view that every disease must be caused by the specific germs that appear in diseased tissues and also believes that the cure for any particular disease is to kill the specific germ associated with its symptoms. As a result, modern Western medicine engages in an ever-escalating campaign of "chemical warfare" against germs, fought on the battleground of the human body. This approach fails entirely to account for the fact that under precisely the same conditions of exposure, some people become infected by germs and get sick, while others do not. The difference between those who "catch" germs and those who don't is that those who are susceptible to illness have lower resistance than those who don't. As the famous American physician Dr. Charles Mayo stated, "We are all afraid of germs because we are all ignorant of them. Germs are outside, what we should be afraid of is lowered resistance from within." Acidosis and hypoxia erode normal resistance and establish the conditions for germs and viruses to colonize the human body.
All microbes have a very narrow range of conditions in which they can survive and reproduce. The two most basic conditions that allow pathogenic microbes to colonize human tissues are excess acidity and insufficient oxygen. On his deathbed, Pasteur himself finally recanted his germ theory by admitting that "the terrain is everything." Without the specific preconditions of acidosis and hypoxia, germs simply cannot survive in the "terrain" of human tissues, just as flies cannot breed in the terrain of a sanitary environment. What this means is that the presence of germs in the blood is not the root cause of any disease, but rather a symptom of toxemia. Toxemia provides the breeding ground for germs and thereby becomes the root cause of all disease.
The implications of this fact find their greatest significance in the understanding and treatment of cancer. In 1931, Dr. Otto Warburg received the Nobel Prize for medicine for his discovery that all forms of cancer, without exception, are characterized by two basic conditions: acidosis and hypoxia. Like germs, cancer cells flourish only in acidic, anaerobic environments, in which they reproduce as rapidly as fermenting bacteria. This discovery clearly indicates that the best way to cure and prevent cancer is to alkalize and oxygenate the blood and tissues, thereby eliminating the conditions in which cancer cells thrive. However, modern medicine has totally ignored Dr. Warburg's work and has chosen instead to attack cancer the same way it attacks germs: poisoning it with toxic chemical drugs, burning it with radiation therapy, and cutting it out with radical surgery. None of these conventional cancer treatments provides a real cure for the underlying cause of cancer; in fact, they further aggravate the root cause by strongly elevating the levels of tissue toxicity, while at the same time severely damaging the body's own natural cleansing and healing responses.
A hundred years ago, fewer than one in a thousand people died of cancer. Today cancer kills one in every four people. While a variety of secondary factors such as malnutrition and harmful habits may also be contributing causes in these conditions, the root cause always remains the same—toxemia. Even if the secondary factors are eliminated, the condition will continue to manifest until the internal toxicity that allowed it to develop in the first place is neutralized and the toxins are eliminated from the system.
The one and only solution to pollution is purification. In the case of internal pollution of the human body, and the state of chronic toxemia that it causes, that means periodic purification of the bloodstream and complete detoxification of the bodily tissues. Unless you choose to live in a remote mountain cave and live on nothing but wild fruit and spring water, there is no way to avoid the accumulation of excess toxic residues in your body. As long as the amount of toxin does not exceed the capacity of your immune and excretory systems to eliminate it, health and vitality are easily maintained, but sooner or later the toxic overload of daily life in the contemporary world exceeds your body's ability to properly cleanse itself, and that is when toxemia develops and disease and degeneration begin.
The only effective way to deal with toxemia is to "clean up your act" with a regular program of detox, followed by a rational change in lifestyle. This means periodically purging the blood and tissues of accumulated toxic residues, then reforming the personal lifestyle habits that contribute most to acidosis and tissue toxicity.
For any detox program to be effective, you must take at least three days of complete rest and total relaxation to do it. Seven days is even better, because it takes exactly seven days of complete rest and clean living to purify the bloodstream and cleanse the internal organs. It takes that long for the autonomous nervous system to switch over to the restorative parasympathetic circuit long enough to give the body a chance to completely cleanse and rebalance itself, while giving the overworked, overstimulated sympathetic action circuit a long overdue rest.
Remember, effective detoxification and repair of the body can only take place when the mind is at rest and the nervous system is operating in the healing mode of the parasympathetic branch. There is no way you can do it simply by eating the right foods and taking the right supplements, while still remaining locked into the hectic activities of ordinary daily life.
Besides purging the blood and tissues of toxic residues, a period of detox also provides other essential long-term benefits for health and longevity. One of those benefits is to cleanse and rejuvenate the entire excretory system-clearing clogged bowels and congested lungs, cleaning contaminated lymph glands and clearing blemished skin, and flushing out debris from dirty kidneys and bladder. The more toxic you become, the less efficiently your excretory organs work, and if extreme toxemia continues for too long, serious organic damage to the excretory organs can occur. Another benefit of periodic detox is restoration of maximum immunity and resistance, which depends on adequate alkalization and oxygenation of the blood and cellular fluids. Bacteria and other germs simply cannot survive in a body that is sufficiently alkaline and oxygenated. Even a microbe as aggressive as anthrax can only infect a person whose body is already in a toxic state of acidosis and anaerobia, and this explains why, under precisely the same degree of exposure, some people "catch" it and others do not. These days, with all the hazardous chemicals and microbes that contaminate our living environment, spending three to seven days once or twice a year doing a serious detox program certainly seems worth the investment of time and effort.
FLUSHING OUT ACIDS
The first and foremost strategy in any detox program is to flush acid residues out of the lymphatic system, blood, and other bodily fluids, all of which should be slightly alkaline. Almost all toxins in the body take the form of acids, and these acids must therefore be neutralized and flushed out of the system to restore normal alkaline balance to the blood and other bodily fluids. In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the blood, lymph, bile, and other essential fluids of the body are collectively referred to as jing-yi ("vital fluids"), and the condition of a person's jing-yi, particularly the bloodstream, is regarded as a primary determining factor in human health and disease.
The late V. E. Irons, one of the Western world's leading authorities on therapeutic detoxification for health and longevity, agrees with the traditional Chinese view regarding the condition of the bloodstream as a critical indicator of health and disease. As Irons puts it, "Every cell in the body is served by the blood. It nourishes the cell, replaces worn out parts, and carries away waste products." Obviously, a polluted bloodstream carries little nourishment and is already so saturated with wastes that it cannot properly fulfill its function of carrying away cellular wastes.
The same goes for the lymphatic system. The body has six to seven hundred lymph glands. About three times more fluid volume of lymph exists in the human body than blood.  One of the primary functions of the lymph is to clean acid wastes from the blood and tissues, but if the lymph itself is polluted with acid wastes, then it cannot properly perform these cleansing functions. Acids interfere with the free flow of lymph within the lymphatic channels, thereby further inhibiting its capacity to cleanse the blood and tissues.
Regardless of what type of detox program you choose, you must always remember to drink at least 1 3/4 to 2 2/3 quarts per day of pure, preferably alkaline water, to neutralize, dilute, and flush away the large amounts of acids and other toxic wastes that the detox process releases from tissues throughout the body. The human body is composed of over 70 percent water. By saturating the system daily with abundant quantities of pure alkaline water, pollutants are continuously flushed from the blood and tissues and eliminated through the kidneys, bowels, and skin. As a result, all bodily tissues are "washed" and all vital fluids are replenished with fresh water. The whole mechanism operates more efficiently and produces less toxic waste when dirty fluids are replaced with clean.
DREDGING THE DRAINS
During any detox program, the organs of elimination must work overtime to process and excrete all the accumulated toxic wastes that are loosened and released from organs and tissues throughout the body. Since the organs of elimination are already overworked from dealing with environmental pollution and wrong eating habits, the extra load of toxins that are suddenly released into the bloodstream, bowels, kidneys, and skin by the detox process can put a very heavy strain on the excretory organs. It is therefore important to give your excretory systems all the supplemental support you can during detox, to ensure maximum efficiency in elimination, with minimum toxic stress to the organs.
There are four main "drains" in the body through which toxic waste products are excreted from the system: the skin, the lungs, the kidneys and bladder, and the colon. As blood and tissues grow progressively more toxic during the course of a person's daily life, these drains get clogged with toxic residues, dry mucus, dead microbes and other "biowaste." In the case of the colon, the situation is very similar to what happens to the drain in your kitchen sink: layer upon layer of grease, partially decayed food, and other debris adhere to the pipe, gradually reducing the size of the passage through which waste water flows. And since this sticky layer of waste is full of microbes and toxins, it pollutes the bloodstream by osmosis through the colon wall, allowing the poisons to circulate throughout the body.
A number of ways exist to facilitate the drainage of toxic wastes through the four organs of elimination, and to protect them from damage during the detox process.
Skin
An enormous amount of toxic waste passes out of the body through the surface of the skin, especially in hot weather when the pores remain open day and night. During detox, toxic residues become very concentrated in perspiration and can damage the skin as they pass through for excretion. Strong, foul body odor and clammy sweat are additional manifestations of heavy toxicity in perspiration during detox. Damage to skin may be prevented, as well as relieved and repaired, by soaking daily in hot baths with sea salt or Epsom salts, plus some essential oils that help draw toxic wastes swiftly out through the pores. Another effective method of facilitating skin detox is through exfoliation of dead skin. If you're doing your detox program by the sea, daily plunges in the ocean also provide cleansing support for the skin.
Lungs
The lungs excrete carbon dioxide and other volatile gaseous wastes from the blood, while absorbing oxygen, negative ions, and other elements from the air and transferring them into the bloodstream. When the blood is highly toxic, such as during detox programs, its capacity to carry oxygen is severely reduced, and this in turn leads to a state of hypoxia throughout the system. Therefore, learning deep breathing exercises and practicing them daily is highly recommended during any detox program. Proper breathing oxygenates the blood and tissues, thereby helping to eliminate acidosis, while also facilitating rapid excretion of carbon dioxide and other gaseous wastes that contribute to acidosis.
Kidneys and Bladder
Some of the body's most toxic wastes pass through the kidneys, which filter them from the blood and excrete them through the bladder as urine.
When these wastes are highly acidic, they can damage the sensitive kidney tissues through which they filter and can also form painful kidney stones. It is therefore advisable to drink lots of herbal teas during detox, especially those with diuretic and kidney cleansing properties, to facilitate rapid excretion and protect the kidneys from toxic damage. Another important measure to protect the kidneys and promote swift elimination is to drink between 1 3/4 and 2 2/3 quarts of pure alkaline water daily. This water dilutes the concentration of toxins in the blood and kidneys, neutralizes acidity, and flushes poisons quickly out of the system.
Colon
Of all the excretory organs, the colon is the most abused and overloaded these days. Believe it or not, the average Western male today carries about 2 1/3-2 2/3 pounds of dense, rubbery, mucoid material—a thick toxic sludge—imbedded in his bowels, and none of it is ordinary feces.  During a detox program, it is a good idea to eliminate as much of this toxic lining as possible from the bowels. To accomplish that elimination, the person going through detox should take ground psyllium seed shaken in water at least twice daily and should also drink plenty of extra water. The psyllium and the water gel to form a fibrous bolus that sweeps through the bowels like a broom, loosening and eliminating mounds of impacted wastes from the walls of the bowels. For even more dramatic results and a complete cleansing of the entire colon, an intestinal/colon cleansing is recommended, especially during the first few days of a detox program. In addition to cleansing the intestine/colon and eliminating a major source of toxins to the bloodstream, intestinal/colon cleansing triggers a strong detox response in the liver, and a major cleansing reaction throughout the body.
If you really wish to "start at the bottom" in a progressive program to completely detoxify and regenerate your whole system, then you should definitely begin with a series of intestinal/colon cleansing to dredge your bowels of all the putrefied, partially digested debris and toxic residues that have accumulated inside over the years. This is best done in conjunction with ‘master cleanser’ which is a combination of 2 Tbsp. of lime juice, 2 Tbsp. of maple syrup, a touch of cayenne pepper, and 10 oz. of warm water.
It is rather pointless to embark on a major new dietary program and spend a lot of money on expensive nutritional and herbal supplements if your bowels are impacted with toxic wastes from years of pollutants and wrong eating habits. Not only does this thick slimy lining constantly secrete toxins into the bloodstream through the bowel walls, in the small intestine it blocks the assimilation of nutrients and herbal essences into the bloodstream. Dr. Norman Walker, who lived to the age of 116 by practicing what he preached, states in his book Colon Health: The Key to a Vibrant Life:
The elimination of undigested food and other waste products is equally important as the proper digestion and assimilation of food. . . . The very best diets can be no better than the very worst if the sewage system of the colon is clogged with a collection of waste and corruption.
Those who have done intestinal/colon cleansing have always remarked on how much better they feel afterwards, and how intestinal/colon cleansing often eliminate chronic conditions that defied all other treatments. Nothing facilitates internal cleansing and accelerates the detox process as effectively as intestinal/colon cleansing.
MOVING WATER, ACTIVE HINGES
An ancient Chinese text on human health states, "Moving water never stagnates; active hinges never rust." That means if you exercise gently every day to keep your blood joints and other vital bodily fluids flowing' freely and to keep your joints and other moving parts active, then your bodily fluids won't stagnate and become toxic, and your joints won't "rust" with arthritis and stiffness. Regular, rhythmic body movements are particularly important for moving the lymph, because, unlike blood, which is pumped by the heart, lymph flow depends entirely on gravity and body movement for mobility. Since the lymph must work even harder than usual to cleanse the blood and tissues during a detox program, it is important to help keep lymph flowing freely with daily exercise.
The type of exercise required during detox is very different from strenuous sports activities such as tennis, football, jogging, and weight lifting. Western field sports and other forms of "hard" style exercise produce lactic acid in the tissues and carbon dioxide in the bloodstream as metabolic by-products of muscular exertion, and this contributes to acidosis, which is always counterproductive to detox. One of the primary purposes of any detox program is to eliminate acids and alkalize the system. Hard style exercise also keeps the autonomic nervous system locked into the "fight or flight" sympathetic branch, which switches off self-cleansing and healing responses, and causes muscular tension and tightness in the joints and tendons that then interfere with the state of complete physical relaxation required for detox to proceed.
Instead of hard exercise, one should practice traditional Asian soft style exercises, such as Zen Stretching, Chi Kung, and Yoga on a daily basis throughout the duration of any detox program. Soft-style exercise has entirely different effects on the body than hard-style. The soft, slow, smooth movements of these exercises gently pump the lymph through the system, while also assisting the free circulation of blood, without causing any muscular tension and without saturating the tissues with lactic acid or overloading the blood with carbon dioxide. These gentle body movements also help dissolve and eliminate crystalline acid deposits in the joints and keep the entire skeletal structure loose and limber.
Soft-style exercises should always be practiced in conjunction with slow, deep, rhythmic breathing that fully engages the diaphragm. The combination of slow stretching and loosening maneuvers with deep diaphragmatic breathing drives blood and lymph through the body like a strong pump, facilitating rapid drainage of toxins from the tissues and swift delivery of wastes to the eliminatory organs. Deep breathing greatly enhances oxygenation of the blood and tissues, which helps neutralize acidosis and maintains a healthy alkaline environment inside the body. When breathing properly, the diaphragm descends deeply into the abdominal cavity, providing an invigorating massage to the internal organs and glands. Diaphragmatic breathing gently squeezes the internal organs like a sponge on inhalation, draining out stale blood. Then it releases the pressure on exhalation, drawing freshly oxygenated blood into the organs. This deep diaphragmatic pressure on the internal organs and glands accelerates the detox process and extends it into the deepest, densest tissues of the body.
Most importantly, deep breathing, especially when performed in conjunction with slow rhythmic body movements, immediately produces the state of physical and mental relaxation required to switch the autonomic nervous system into the healing, restorative mode of the parasympathetic branch. Detoxification and healing can only proceed when the nervous system is operating in the parasympathetic circuit and one of the primary functions of all traditional Asian soft style exercises is to activate the body's innate self cleansing and healing mechanisms by switching the nervous system into the calm parasympathetic mode.
In Asia, exercise has traditionally been regarded as something one does for therapeutic purposes, not for fun, and it still plays a key role in most traditional Eastern medical systems. Like all "medicine," the first principle of exercise is that it should "do no harm." That obviously eliminates any activity that strains the body, injures tissues, and leaves one exhausted. Instead, traditional Asian exercises, particularly Chinese styles, are designed to help the body repair and heal itself, to assist the blood and lymph in detoxifying tissues and excreting wastes, and to energize rather than deplete the system. Such exercises are known as soft exercise. In addition to being soft, they are also very slow and smooth.
Let's take a quick look at some of the basic differences between hard Western-style exercise and traditional soft Eastern-style exercise. Soft exercise focuses on stretching the muscles and tendons and loosening the joints and limbs, thereby opening all the tissues of the body to the free flow of blood and energy. Hard exercise contracts the muscles and compacts the joints, blocking circulation and retaining toxic wastes in the tissues for a long time. Soft exercises are done in conjunction with deep, slow, diaphragmic breathing, which oxygenates and alkalizes the blood and tissues, while hard exercises force the breath into a shallow, panting mode that utilizes only the narrow upper sections of the lungs. This type of fast shallow breathing in the upper lungs exposes only a very small fraction of the lungs' surface area to incoming air, greatly reducing the intake of oxygen and the discharge of carbon dioxide. As a result, the blood and tissues become increasingly acidic and oxygen-deficient for as long as the exercise continues.
That's not all. Hard exercise causes a rapid accumulation of lactic acid in the tissues, thereby contributing to acidosis. Lactic acid is a metabolic waste produced by muscular exertion, and the last thing you want to do during detox is to produce more acid wastes. By contrast, soft exercise, which requires only minimal muscular exertion, avoids the accumulation of lactic acid in the tissues, and since it is usually done in conjunction with deep breathing, it actually alkalizes and oxygenates the bloodstream, rather than loading it with acids and carbon dioxide. Hard exercise strains the heart by forcing it to race to accelerate circulation of blood to the muscles. Furthermore, since hard exercise makes the breath grow shallow, the diaphragm is not engaged in the breathing process, and therefore the heart must bear the full load of pumping extra supplies of blood through the body. Soft exercise combined with deep breathing effectively turns the diaphragm into a second heart, engaging it to help pump blood through the circulatory system by virtue of differential pressures in the abdominal and chest cavities. This takes a huge work load off the heart, and when practiced daily, the cumulative benefits to the heart can be lifesaving.
Perhaps most important, soft exercise performed in conjunction with deep, slow breathing shifts the autonomous nervous system into the calm, cleansing, healing mode of the parasympathetic branch and keeps it in this mode.
The best type of soft exercises for detox purposes are stretching and loosening maneuvers, such as those found in Zen Stretching, Chi Kung and Yoga. Stretching the muscles squeezes stagnant venous blood out of the tissues, while the subsequent relaxation phase allows fresh arterial blood to flow in. Since these movements are always done softly, slowly, and smoothly, with minimal exertion, they do not result in the accumulation of lactic acid in the tissues, they don't race the heart, and they don't shorten the breath. Stretching also keeps the nerve and energy channels open and active and stimulates lymph drainage.
Please contact us for healing therapy, classes and training information.
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