A reader asks,
"After having gall bladder surgery three weeks ago, I am having a lot of discomfort, bloating, nausea, and in general, not feeling well. My doctor says it will pass, but it seems to be getting worse. I am a 65-year-old woman. Do you have any advice?"
The first piece of advice I have for people who are considering gall bladder surgery is to get advice before the surgery, not after it, because once you've had the gall bladder removed, your options are quite limited. Remember that conventional medicine loves to go in and remove organs that are presenting symptoms rather than addressing the root cause of the problem in the first place. They think that by removing the organ that hurts, they've cured the problem. Hogwash!
Gall bladder disease and gallstones are almost always the result of poor nutrition. For example: consuming a lot of soft drinks, sugar products, highly acidic foods like red meat and products made with white flour all contribute to the formation of gallstones.
Gallstones can be reversed, but it’s something that takes quite a bit of time. After all, they have been formed in your body over a period of decades, so it's not something you can get rid of overnight from a nutritional standpoint. At the same time, I know that a lot of people are experiencing extreme pain when it comes to passing gall bladder stones. So obviously, those people are looking at surgical procedures as a more immediate technique for getting rid of the pain.
Let's look at some information about gallstones because it is something that affects somewhere around 18 million people in the United States, and maybe even as many as 1 in every 12 people. And yet most people don't know they have them.
According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), pain from gallstones results in about 800,000 hospitalizations and more than 500,000 operations each year in the United States. Unfortunately, the NIH doesn't give people a lot of information about how to actually avoid gall bladder problems. It's also critical to recognize that the gall bladder has an important function in digestion. And, if you just remove it (which by the way is quite the barbaric thing to do), you are compromising your digestive health for the rest of your life. Surgeons who remove gall bladders are complacent in educating patients about nutritional changes they need to pursue after losing this important digestive organ.
For example, you're not going to get the same quality of digestion you would have had if your gall bladder were in place. You're not going to get the excretion of the bile from the gall bladder into the small intestine, and as a result, you're not going to efficiently digest foods that are moving through your digestive tract. This is especially true for dietary fats, including essential fatty acids.
Without a gall bladder, you're not going to be able to digest dietary fats with any degree of efficiency. This means that if you don't take bile salts as a nutritional supplement every time you eat healthy fats, you'll miss out on all-important omega-3 fatty acids and other healthy oils. That's why people who have had gall bladder removal surgery usually suffer the classic signs of EFA deficiencies: poor nervous system function, irritability, learning difficulties, heart disease, poor blood sugar control, and so on.
Doctors and surgeons flat out aren't telling patients this all-important information. It's downright criminal, if you ask me. This basic education should be required by law. It's flat-out evil to remove an essential organ from a patient's body and neglect to tell them about the long-term adjustments they need to make in order to compensate for that missing organ.
And you know why surgeons don't tell people the truth about gall bladder removal surgery? I suspect it's because if people knew the horrifying nutritional consequences of the procedure, they'd refuse to do it, and surgeons and hospitals would lose out on those paying customers. Talking to a gall bladder surgeon about your gall bladder health is sort of like taking your car to a greasy garage mechanic and asking, "Is there anything wrong with the transmission?" The answer you get is designed to pad his pockets. If you want honest answers on gall bladder pain, go visit a naturopath.
As always, I strongly recommend that people who are considering this surgery look at naturopathic options, because removing a functional organ from your digestive tract is never a health-enhancing solution. It's just something that's too easy for conventional medicine to do. They do hundreds of thousands of these surgeries a year. They don’t consider it a big deal so the patients don’t think it’s a big deal either!
But it really is a big deal. It's sort of like saying, "Well, doctor, my tongue hurts." And the doctor says, "Let's cut out your tongue." In fact, your gall bladder is far more important for digestion than your tongue.
Do everything you can to protect your gall bladder. Along those lines, one of the most important things you need to do is physically massage your internal organs through body movement. A lot of people are surprised to hear this, but your internal organs need to be massaged just like your muscles and skin.
Massage therapy is something that I recommend everyone pursue to enhance his or her health. Massage moves lymph fluid around the body. It stimulates the skin. It even stimulates the brain indirectly and helps create an immunostimulating relaxation response in virtually everyone. The internal organs need this same massage and the very best way to massage these internal organs, such as the gall bladder, is to engage in gentle body movement exercises.
One of the very best you can pursue is Tai Chi. By following the gentle, pivoting movements of Tai Chi, you will massage your liver, gall bladder, pancreas, and even your heart. These organs are not fixed in place. They're not fixed in your body like they are on an anatomy chart. Your organs move around, and they actually benefit from movement just like massaging a limb.
Also along those lines, one of the most important things you need to do is engage in breathing therapy because conscious breathing and deep breathing offers an outstanding massage to all the internal organs in your torso. Your lungs take up a tremendous amount of space in your chest cavity, and when you inhale and really expand your lungs, you are moving the other organs in your cavity and giving them a massage at the same time. Breathing is an excellent way to oxygenate your internal organs and get some movement.
And by the way, your average conventional medicine physician isn’t going to recommend any of this -- nor will he or she even believe any of it. They've never been taught that massage is important for internal organs. In fact, most doctors I know don't think massage is useful at all, which sort of just goes to show you how little they know about how the human body really works! But massage is critical. And of course, so is nutrition. Once again, your best strategy here for your gall bladder is to avoid removing it. Instead, support gall bladder health through diet, nutrition, and physical exercise.
For the reader question in particular, if you've had the gall bladder removed, and you're having a lot of discomfort. What should you do now? I'm sorry to say that these are the predictable side effects of having a gall bladder removed. And chances are your doctor or surgeon probably didn't explain this fully to you. Surgeons have a habit of making everything sound really simple, up until the day you have the procedure done. Then, you start experiencing all sorts of rather serious side effects, and they say, "Oh yeah! That could happen as well."
Hopefully, in this experience, you've learned a lesson. And that lesson is, don’t have body parts removed by overzealous surgeons. I don’t know how to state it any simpler than that. I'm sorry I don’t have a simple solution for you to regain your health after having your gall bladder removed. But the fact is, when you start removing important organs from your body, it is going to have some serious negative consequences -- by the way, bloating and nausea is really only the tip of the iceberg here.
The worst effects are the ones you probably won't feel, that is, impaired digestion for the rest of your life and chronic essential fatty acid deficiencies. In fact, people without gall bladders need to take special care of the foods they consume for the rest of their lives. And above all, they need to avoid all fried foods and any snack foods containing hydrogenated oils or trans fatty acids due to the role of the gall bladder plays in neutralizing excess dietary cholesterol.
About the author: Mike Adams is a natural health researcher, author and award-winning journalist with a strong interest in personal health, the environment and the power of nature to help us all heal He has authored more than 1,800 articles and dozens of reports, guides and interviews on natural health topics, and he has created several downloadable courses on survival and preparedness, including his widely-downloaded course on personal safety and self-defense. Adams is an independent journalist with strong ethics who does not get paid to write articles about any product or company. In 2010, Adams co-founded NaturalNews.com, a natural health video sharing site that has now grown in popularity. He's also a noted technology pioneer and founded a software company in 1993 that developed the HTML email newsletter software currently powering the NaturalNews subscriptions. Adams is currently the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit, and enjoys outdoor activities, nature photography, Pilates and martial arts training. He's also author of numerous health books published by Truth Publishing and is the creator of several consumer-oriented grassroots campaigns, including the Spam. Don't Buy It! campaign, and the free downloadable Honest Food Guide. He also created the free reference sites HerbReference.com and HealingFoodReference.com. Adams believes in free speech, free access to nutritional supplements and the ending of corporate control over medicines, genes and seeds. Known as the 'Health Ranger,' Adams' personal health statistics and mission statements are located at www.HealthRanger.org
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Sunday, May 22, 2005
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