Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Detoxification (alternative medicine)" in English language version.
A woman has been awarded more than £800,000 after she suffered permanent brain damage while on a detox diet.
The researchers warned that, at worst, some detox diets could have dangerous consequences and, at best, they were a waste of money.
By the 1830s, the increasingly widespread view that many well-established remedies, such as bleeding and purging, were actually useless or worse, made it easier to poke fun at old-fashioned doctoring.
Your liver represents the human body's primary filtration system, converting toxins into waste products, cleansing your blood, and metabolizing nutrients and medications to provide the body with some of its most important proteins.
Colon cleansing refers to a more invasive procedure of water and hoses stuck you-know-where. It's not clear when this practice started. [...] The golden age of the colon in America was in the late 19th century when—perhaps influenced by a new emphasis on hygiene and proper sewage removal—serious-minded doctors developed the theory of colonic autointoxication. [...] The idea was that the intestines were a sewage system and that constipation, although never specifically defined, resulted in a cesspool within the body where food wastes would putrefy, become toxic, and get reabsorbed through the intestines. Some scientists also claimed that constipation caused fecal matter to harden onto the intestinal walls for months or years, blocking the absorption of nutrients (yet somehow not blocking toxins). [...] The beginning of the end of the (first) era of autointoxication came with a 1919 article in Journal of the American Medical Association by W.C. Alvarez, 'Origin of the so-called auto-intoxication symptom.' Soon after, and still to this day, direct observations of the colon through surgery and autopsy find no hardening of fecal matter along the intestinal walls. There's no cesspool either. Cesspools form from copious amounts of feces from entire neighborhoods, which is why crowded cities with inadequate sewage systems smelled so awful and why autointoxication made sense. [...] By the 1920s, colon cleansing was relegated to the realm of quackery.
[...T]here's little evidence that detox diets actually remove toxins from the body. Indeed, the kidneys and liver are generally quite effective at filtering and eliminating most ingested toxins.
[...] detoxing – the idea that you can flush your system of impurities and leave your organs squeaky clean and raring to go – is a scam. It's a pseudo-medical concept designed to sell you things.
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