From Nose to Tail: The Colon

my friends, the sphincter. I'm sure there are a lot, but they're a lot things, but but those are the ones we're sticking to. So I wanted to start this one off of just a little bit of a little anecdote from history that I found particularly interesting and it and it involves a Scottish surgeon, which is also good because we've been taking this journey with an imagined haggis,

which is, of course the Scottish delicacy. Would you call it a delicacy or is it just more of a Scottish cultural cultural icon of food, Yeah, yeah, which is a it's a it's a cheep's stomach stuffed with with meat and barley and organs and other things in various secrets. But but, but this is a particular page from Scottish history is a Scottish surgeon, Sir William Arbuth Nutt Lane

from the early twentieth century. And this guy is notable because he was his big idea that we should treat constipation uh and auto intoxication, which is the state of being poisoned by toxic substances produced by the body by shortening the highway by removing a couple of feet of colon.

And he later moves on to doing full colon and he later moves on to doing full colon ectomies, stitching the small intestines directly to the rectum, in other words, picking up where our last episode left off and just deleting this episode into highly so deleting the small intestine. Yeah, because he went on to judge the colon as quote, a serious defect in our anatomy, and he was all in favor of just just cutting it out. It's just let's just cut it out. Let's just connect the small

intestines directly to the end portion and uh. And as we discussed in previous episodes that the body does have a remarkable ability to to flow with with some of these uh UM replumbing surgeries that take place with our digestive system. But and the thing is, I should note that, of course of uh colon actonies are occasionally, you know, very important that they can be it can be a life saving procedure. But in this case, he was using it to treat um constipation. Boy was he wrong. He

was wrong. Now. He was apparently influenced by Russian Nobel Prize bacteriologists um Ellie Mecknkoff, who thought that that humans were evolving so fast that various parts of our bodies were going to quickly become obsolete. So he was influenced by this, and this end up kind of tarnishing his his views of of human anatomy and human digestion to the point where he said the colon and he's the colon screw that cut it out, just took it right up.

And as Mary Roach points out in her book Gulp, he was kind of saying, let's let's treat constipation with just diarrhea. Diarrhea, I guess it's more preferable, right. Well, the thing is here is that the colon is hugely important, as we are going to discuss it a many different aspects of it. In fact, Robert Rosenbluth, a physician that Mary Roach interviewed for GULP, said no engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine tuned as an anuses to

call someone an hole is really bragging him up. Yes, and uh and I and I want to add one more note about sir William here. Later on, after his reputation took a dive because of this, uh, this this opinion of his regarding the colon, because he's trying to remove all his friends Colin's Yeah, and the medical establishment um pounced on him and said you were nuts and

this is awful and rightfully so. Um. He later abandons it and does a complete turnaround and starts saying that exercise, fruit, vegetables, and brand cereal are the keys to fighting constipation. Well, there you go, you know. So he had a bit of a revelation there. Yeah, and I think maybe he realized that, Yes, well, I don't know if he really came around to thinking the colon was great, but he definitely came around to saying, well, we don't need to

remove it. There are better ways to deal with colon problems. So I wanted just to kind of go ahead and dive into the colon if you can, because we've got a lot to get to. And I thought that if we start talking about the physical description of what it looks like inside, it could serve and start contrast to the small intestine, which remember, is pretty fancy, right. It's got all of micro villa in it, and it's where

most of the nutrients are absorbed. This is gonna be vital with some stuff we're gonna talk about later on. I use the example in another podcast that the whole digestion system is like bringing in a stolen Chrysler and then stripping it down of everything valuable and then spitting out an empty shell on center blocks um in an abandoned part of town. So most of the car is stripped down, all the all the really good stuff, that really important stuff is stripped away in the small intestines,

and it does. It's super fancy in their right. It's got those mucoastal folds in it. But in stark contrast, we have the interior walls of the colon, which Mary

Roach says are as smooth and shiny as cling wrap. Okay, And the reason for this is because of course that is uh constructed in that way so that the feces can move through it with ease, yes or its as it sometimes referred to at this point, or or maybe a little more towards the very end as the fecal bullus, in the same way that we were forming this bolus in our mouth to transport the matter down the throat. At this point, the bolus is on its way out,

a different bolus entirely, but but still a bolus. Yeah. Now, the path of the colon is pretty circuitous. It's kind of like an upside down you that surrounds the small intestines and as if it's were sort of like a frame for for your digestive system, or at least the lower part of your digestive system. So the hagus on its journey through the colon, this former hag us, right, this now bullus that is forming, would have water and salt extracted, which would leave more of a solid waste

product for us. And you begin to see that mucus is produced throughout the colon, and that helps again the now mostly solid feces to move through the lower portion of the colon to the anus. I wanted to point this out. This is going to seem pretty obvious, but you might as well know what the mechanism and play here. When the feces is big enough and it pushes against the rectum walls with enough pressure, this pressure is measured

by stretch receptors and the defecation reflects is triggered. Yes, And as Mary Roach points out in her book, she has a whole chapter, well really, I think a couple of chapters, the one really powerhouse chapter dealing with the rectum and the anus and everything going on here. It is a very sensitive part of the human anatomy because it has to it has to be able to make judgment calls, essentially on exactly what's what's knocking at the door.

Is it liquid? Is it solid? Is it gas? Is is it something that is it something that needs to come out now or is it something that can maybe late wait until the end of the movie that you're watching. A note on diarrhea, by the way, the more water in the feces, the more pressure in the colon, and the more urgent the call of nature. So that's one of the reasons why there's a certain sort of diarrhea look that passes of our eyes, and it's why we need to do that. Yeah, it's it's why when when

diarrhea is coming. Uh, there's there's no waiting until the end of the movie. It's it's getting up and running to the to the Yeah. Yeah, it's a direct path to the bathroom. And the reason for this is because the small intestine is actually moving the food through m or the time through so quickly that the nutrients are an absorbed the food molekills aren't completely absorbed in. This again creates a a load, if you will, in the colon. The colon, sorry, colon's out there, um that is watery

and larger and is putting more of that pressure on. Yeah. Now, as we can all attest to you, when there is pressure there, generally you can you can hunker down and say not now, not now, and the body will back off a little bit. You can suppress it. You can suppress it. And if you suppress it too much, though, you can get into this situation where it's actually a little difficult to convince your body. No, seriously, now is a great time to poop. We should do this now.

There may not be a time later. This is the designated pooping time. And the bodies like, I don't know, I'm really into holding it back these days. I learned that from you. Okay, But here's the problem. When you hold it back, when you suppress, that reflects that defication reflects what happens. Well, the stool hangs out and your colon longer and longer, and the longer it hangs out there, the more water is absorbed from it, and the harder

it gets. It basically kind of ears to concrete really more like hardened clay, is the description that we kept coming across, though there was one mention of actual concrete. But that's that's that's a whole other that's a whole different So it's sort of more of a vicious cycle going on here. The longer you suppress it, the longer it sits up there, and the harder is to get it out. Yes, and then this can lead to some rather serious conditions as well, and and even in some cases,

I mean, this can be lethal over time. With the more with the more ponderous examples of compacted to colon's. Yeah, we'll talk a little bit more about the role of constipation um and another aspect of the colon in a bit, but I wanted to talk about another very infamous byproduct, which is gas. Yes, gas, you knew we were going to talk about it. We may even dedicate an entire episode two flatulence in the most elegant way possible that we can. But for now, um, we should probably talk

about the role of beans. Yes, because really that they're a huge culprit. They contain complex carbohydrates called all the Ego Saccard's and the small intestine is unable to absorb these complex carbohydrates, so they make their way to the colon where bacteria and enzymes get to work on them, breaking them down, and in the process a lot of

hydrogen is created. Now in a third of us, only a third of us, there's also methane yes, which, as as as Mary Roach pointed out and her previous book Packing from Mars, this is one of the things that that the screening process for astronauts has has sometimes looked for which individuals that past gas are going to create flammable methane as well. Those individuals arguably should maybe stay on Earth and not go into a compact environment where

there's going to be uh potential risk for explosion. And there's a way to actually test this is through your breath because methane is absorbed through your bloodstream, so actually is not the thing that's causing any smells. By the way, Princess, there are planets um out there that are largely methane in composition, and you might think, oh, I get there, it's just gonna smell like fart world. But it's not gonna smell like fire world. It's just it's not anything.

If they were filled with soulfur, though, it would be fart world. Right, Like Mars apparently smells like rotten eggs because of the because because of the chemical components there, but it's not because of methane. So okay, what's the

what's the big deal with hydrogen being created in your colon? Well, it builds up your colon begins to balloon with it, right, and if you have too much gas, then those stretch receptors let the brain now, and the brain then interprets the stretching as threat in the form of a pain. Okay um. And this is when the body then says, hey,

let's just go ahead and release the hounds. And then nobody, I'm in yoga class and no, right, you're like I'm in I'm in yoga class, or I'm not in yoga class, I'm maybe in my car alone, hopefully, and the sphincter loosens and a fart is born. It's particularly difficult in in yoga classes because you're going through a you're going through so many poses, and then so many times you're doing the left side and the right side, so you're doing the post twice, and so I find myself in

those situations. I'm first of all, I'm I'm mortified by the possibility of being the person who farts in yoga class, even though it's perfectly natural, and I don't judge people who do it. You know, the yoga teacher is going to kind of be like a little bit proud of you. Yes, I sometimes they are. Sometimes they're very goung ho like they basically like standing, Oh you are in touch with your doing it right, and in a sense we should feel that way. I mean, it's we'll talk more about

this later, but I mean, it's the human body. It's gonna do what it's gonna do, and yoga is about putting your body through the ring or do a certain extent. So that kind of thing is gonna happen. But I find myself in the in the habit of thinking about the body from uh as this dichotomy of left and right. We're doing left side and the right side. So I

find myself fearful. I'm like, oh, well, I suppressed uh flash once on my right side, but now I have to worry about on my left side, as if there are two different valves there, as if you have two different in exactly. And then I have to remind myself in the midst of the post, Robert, you only have one anus. It's fine. These are the thoughts that are going through your mind while you practice yuga. Alright, a

little insight. I like that. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we will get even more into the colon. We will discuss oddities of the colon, things the colon can do that you might not think about on a normal basis. Um so this podcast is going to become even more amazing in just a few moments. All Right, we're back and we are going to start talking about some of the oddities

of the colon. And uh, I will tell you you all, and you probably already know this, that I have a strong stomach for the world of schatology. But brace yourselves, because we're going to talk about reverse food consumption. Now. Probably the the entry point for for discussing reverse of food consumption is to talk about things that when we're a little more familiar with. Of course, UH, suppositories comes to mind. Uh, taking drugs in the rectum and then

experiencing the effects of said drugs again in the rectum. Uh, drugs take up. Drugs take effect faster in the rectum because you put them there. You're bypassing the stomach, the liver, the body's vomit up, the poison defense mechanism. Uh, You're you're getting it in through the back door literally. Uh. And and there's this is where it can be a little dangerous too, because there's the defense systems are not there. It's just absorbing the the narcotic, the medication, what have you.

And so for for a long time, people have known about this. Back in the third century a d. The Mayans use suppositories or perhaps quote unquote intoxicating enemas to receive various narcotics, and then over years people have used everything from opium to alcohol to tobacco, peyote, uh fermented agave a sap Um software pioneer and expatriate murder suspect John mccafee is a big fan of bass salts in

the anus so um. He has a whole message board where he was apparently saying that this was the correct way to do it. So what I'm saying is that it's it's not a new idea. There is some there is some absorption going on there. It's not the it's not the the upper intestines, it's not the small intestines where most of the nutrients are absorbs. So it's not the real money area of the digestion track. But there is some absorption going on there. And yes, you can

take medicine this way. In fact, you can potentially poison somebody this way. Some historians think that Emperor Claudius was poisoned vias depository at the behest of his wife Agrippa. So what I'm hearing here is that people have been have been sticking things up their pituites since time immemorial. Yes, in some cases it's for medical purposes. Uh, sometimes it is just for recreational purposes, as any your staff member

can tell you. And we have a humdinger of an example of it as an attempt to, as you say, absorb nutrients. The example comes by way of gulp Mary Rich's book and she details President James gar Fields for a into this. We're talking one. We're talking about him taking a bullet to the liver. Yeah, we're talking about a nutrient enema which has thankfully fallen largely out of

a favor, especially the type that you're about to discuss. Yeah. Well, unfortunately, when he was his liver was grazed by that bullet. His doctor tried to perform surgery on him and actually did not wash his hands and infected him. And he had a bacterial infection, and so presumably he could not eat in the traditional way that we eat. So that same doctor then prescribed the nutrient enema to him. And I would like to read out the contents of this enema.

And this is a recipe from Assistant U. S. Surgeon General C. H. Crane for rectal beef extract. Infuse a third of a pound of fresh beef, finally minced in fourteen ounces of cold soft water, to which a few drops of muriatic acid and a little salt have been added. After digesting for an hour to an hour and a quarter strain it through a sieve. The yolk of an egg is then added, along with two DRAMs of beef peptonoids and five DRAMs of whiskey. Do you know where

we're going with this, guys? Well, I know exactly where it's going up the bump because it actually it sounds it's a recipe goes. It doesn't sound bad until you realize that where it is going, that it stopped. That we're talking about firing this up the anus in an attempt to get the nutrients in that food absorbed by the body. I mean, it's it's ultimately really it's kind of sad and disturbing to think about it because here's a man that's dying. His the assassination attempt took place

in eight one. He died the same year, So this is the man who was who was dying, and they're trying this thing that doesn't really work because it doesn't matter how nutrition solve this stuff is you're not going to be able to shoot it all the way up to the small intestines, to the area where where again most of the energy, most of the nutrients were absorbed

by the human body. Yeah, and if you had noted the salt in the muriatic acid was not added as as some sort of flavoring obviously, but to break it down to try to uh, sort of simulate those sort of sort of same things that we're having in the stomach and the small intestine. The problem here again is is that the small intestine is the part of your digestive system that takes those nutrients away. The colon is

not a good place for this, right. You can you can put it up there, you can put it in the rectum, but there's not much that's going to be absorbed. It is actually incapable of absorbing large molecules fats um, albumans and according to Mary Roach, salt and glucose, some short chain fatty acids, a few vitamins and minerals are about it. It's not much ssorption going on. Yeah, and it just created I mean, she has descriptions in there talking about what this was like and how they abandoned

put using raw eggs in it after a while. It was a stink. It was just horrible. So, I mean, I just really I really felt for Garfield the whole time I was reading this because I'm like, oh my, this is just not a dignified way for a man to have to spend his um, you know, his final months. But then again, i mean there are a lot of

undignified ways to spend your your final period unearthed. So yes, and it may have prolonged his life a bit, it would not you obviously could not be kept alive from this method of eating or digesting whatever, reverse digesting or but it wasn't a time. I mean, you're you're you're in a desperate moment, so you're going to try anything. And certainly his his physician was doing something that probably at the time was the most cutting edge thing that

you could do in this situation. Yeah, and there was a fair amount of rectal enthusiasm of the time anyway, I mean, people were this was you know, age when people were a little more interested in and what's going on in digestion. And we've we've talked about this before and and I keep coming back to memories of the movie The Road to Wellville, which featured Anthony hop Gunn,

says Kellogg. In fact, there's a great scene in that where he's prescribing um yogurt to Matthew Broderick's character and he says something to the fact of oh, I like yogurt, and he tells him, Oh, it's not going in that end, so right, Yeah, and he was Kellog was absolutely obsessed with feces output, yes, because he felt like this was pointing to the healthiest status of a body, that it could produce as many feces as possible. Yeah, and it you know, it's one of the things that really comes

out in our study of this. And and Mary Roach really touches on a lot too, is that Okay? To one extent, was you know, we look at people like Kellogg, We we look at some of these scientists who study the lower end of digestion and or in proctology and in all of these areas, and there's a tendency to say all these people are way too into this topic. But it's it's really more so many of us are not into it at all, Like we don't want to

think about it. And to to to a large extent, it's it's often an under underappreciated area of study and and even an understudied area of the human body. Um Mary, which points out that like when it comes to various like rectal cancers and cancers of the bows like they they've they've largely not received as much attention and his and that there's it's it's harder to to get across the importance of these things to two people. And and so it's it's it seems like it's an area that

we still need to to work on. So many obviously just culturally have an aversion to even thinking about what's going on down there. Well, it's taboo right to a sense, because anytime that you start talking about your digestive system and what it produces, there's this idea that we feel shameful about what our body produces. It becomes this taboo subject. But it is us like that stuff down there is not It's like the whole idea of the mind body connection that we're not a rider on a horse, we

are a sent are. We are one creature that is mind and body. And you are your your rectum, you are your your anus, you are your small and large intestines. So that's going to replace you are what you eat. Yeah,

I mean you are the you're the whole shebang. And uh like, For instance, not that long ago, I was in the yoga class and the teacher made reference of the anus and and referred to like, you know how they're always saying like, oh said in your set bones, you know our tra back and referring to various parts of the anatomy, and you're just you referred to the anus. And it was actually really refreshing because I'm like this, this is good that we're in a space where we're

talking about our bodies. We're trying to improve our bodies. Let's treat our bodies with some monichum of respect and and and and and don't fall into this trap of thinking that that there are parts of us that are gross and parts of us that that aren't worthy of

studying attention. Well, Mary Richard kind of alluded to the fact that she thought that there was a sea change happening in terms of medicine and um in the digestive system, and she was talking about fecal transplants being so completely off the wall four years ago but now starting to enter a mainstream and the I think some of the reason why we're looking at things differently as we're beginning

to understand bacteria's role in the digestive system. And I think that is sort of an opening for people to say, oh, what is actually going on here? And wow, did you know that small intestine does the following things with the stomach is ferreting out good bacteria bad bacteria. So I think that helps the interest level to know that it's not just our waste um that sort of sins of a bad diet moving through us. Yeah, digestion doesn't stop

at the stomach. It as I mentioned the last episode, it in a sense, it really doesn't get started until after we're done with the stomach because again, all that nutrient absorption that's taken place in the small intestines. Well, here's something I want to ask, and this is this is a question we can't really answer because we don't know anything, but it um. The color of our feces

is brown. Right, generally speaking, it depends me write right sometimes and it just depends on what you eat too, right. There can be some some odd things that come out on the other end. Generally it's brown. And this is because the bile comes from your gall bladder and it helps your body digest food and then it's metabolized by the bacteria and your leg in testine, leaving behind a byproduct called stair colbalin. Uh. And it's that stacobalin that

gives stool the brown pigment. So without it, your poop would actually be sort of a pale gray color, like white clay. What if it what if it were just white? We had? Is this a psychological thing to brown? Why I suppose brown get the association it did because of poop? So you know, Uh, it's just one of those little mind play questions. Yeah, it seems like I have I

have heard reference. There's some somebody had had joked about having um white poop based on some sort of weird diet, not to be confused with the episode of thirty Rock where Jinn of Morowing has ice cold diarrhea drinking too much John bad juice. But but you know, if it were rainbow colored, which we then look up in the sky and look at the rainbow and be like that disgusting rainbow. Yeah, I mean it does color the way

we think about the world for sure. Yeah. Alright, speaking about coloring the world, um, we should probably talk about the colon as not just a storage unit for feces, but also in some cultural aspects just a storage unit. Yes, so we've we've all heard account. We've all probably read or seen some sort of like a prison movie where there's something smuggled inside somebody's rectum um. You know. So

there's some great films to deal with this. Uh, Like I instantly think of Papillon with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. Dustin Hoffman's character had it was it was of some wealth before he ended up in the in the penal colony um and he has I think, like a pair of spare glasses and some money stowed away up in there.

And as anyway, you can think of a million different stories, a million different books and shows that feature this plot point, because ultimately it is a great place to hide something, and it's ultimately not that far. It's not like a huge deviation from what the colon is there for. It's not it's not like you're you know, you know, hacking a hole inside your head and storing things in there. Ultimately,

your colon is a storage facility. It is, and if you are in prison then and it's an important way to conduct commerce. Right. So this is from very Witch's book. She talks about this. She talks about how the rectum is actually referred to as a prison wallet cases of vault if you're particularly limber and spacious. Indeed, and uh, now keep this in mind that the reason why people do this uh pound bag of tobacco on the outside is worth twenty six dollars on the inside in prison,

it's contrabands. So the value of it is, yeah, it's quite a mark up. You can make quite a pretty penny or a lot of really good trades with its material. Yeah. So the question you quickly becomes to what extent are is one willing to limber up down there and uh and create a little room and deal with a little uh in you know, in patience of the bowels to

move this material into the prison. And then the other thing being too is that for something like tobacco, the prison guards and prisoners she was talking to an interviewed in this fabulous chapter and goal. They said that the consequences are not really that steep. For smuggling and some tobacco or a cell phone, lots of cell phones coming into you temporarily lose your visiting privileges. Right, Yeah, so it's you know, you weigh the risk versus the reward,

and it tends to to work out, okay. At least with these particular items, but there's a whole list of contraband items that make their way into prison facilities, uh, through these rectal wallets. Now, there are physical consequences, and the physical consequences here are that these stretch receptors in your rectum, well, they begin to get worn out of it. It's sort of like the poop that Cried Wolf, right, because they began to say, hey, there's something in my

rectum which probably empty it. And then you, as the inmates, say to your body, no, that's just a smartphone. Shut up. And this goes on and on and on until your body is able to suppress that stretch receptor. And then of course the defecation reflects the consequences that later on you're going to have constipation. Yeah, I mean, it's the same thing if you get if you're one of these people that is always finn an excuse not to poop.

If you were like, I don't want to use a dirty bathroom, I'm getting I don't want to use this batom mom in the middle of something. Then over a long period of time, that could have its consequences, right, because the stretch receptor starts to say, oh, you know what, you just keep suppressing this never mind, and then of course if you have pieces up there, then it's just going to sit there. And again, as we've talked about it, the water is going to be absorbed more and more

from it. It's going to be more difficult to get it out. But you see this in the prison population, is that there's a large complaint of constipation because of this um prison wallet. Yeah, it's a fascinating chapter. The individual she talks to, the prisoner is really awesome because he's just he's very I mean he's a convicted murder, a caveat to the awesomeness of the individual, but still he's very open about it all, just very like, yeah,

this is how it works. This is uh like his account of how the first thing he smuggled in uh to the facility happened to be some razor blades I believe, or some blades from a work site. This was also under pressure, by the way he was thinking, and they basically said, look, you can either smuggle these blades in or you can wind up with one of these blades, you know, stuck in you. So he had to limber

up really quick. It was not a pleasant experience for him, but he wrapped him up, got him in and sort of kick started a prison career of of smuggling things in. Anyway, I could go on and on. It's a great chap. There's really illuminating, uh in as far as it's what this kind of culture of smuggling things in consists of. Because again we've seen it a million times, We've heard about it a million times in various TV shows and

movies and and whatnot. But Mary Roach doesn't a nice clinical analysis and cultural analysis of how it works well. And what I like about it too is that it's not sensational, is respectful, because she really is interested in this idea of this body cavity, what what can be done? What do we know from this from from culturally what people have been doing? And you know, there's as we say, a very long history of people using the rectum for

for this purpose. I mean, the fact is is that as humans, we we kind of, as much as we sort of try not to think about the digestive system and the colon the anus, we are a bit obsessed with it. You can just look at something like colon irrigation as an example. Yeah, the idea let's flush it out. Let's flush out the works. Let's get some some liquids up in there, either just some straight water, some water with some chemicals, and then let it all come out.

As we mentioned before, if you have solid waste up in there, then it's a lot easier to control. If you have water waste up in there, especially with a certain amount of pressure, it's coming out. Yeah, and um. Colon cleansing has been around for a long time, also called colonic hydrotherapy. I always think about it in that movie l A Story. I don't think if you've seen that, but it's it's one of the one of the characters is introduced to this. You're gonna say that the colon

cleansing is a character in the film. It is. It's got a lot of feelings. Um, it's constantly being purged. Um. But you know, as you say, some chemicals are sometimes involved. Sometimes it's just herbs. Um. And what we're talking about is a tube and sorted into the rectum some water switch through. It does have ancient roots, but it was discredited by the American Medical Association in the early nineteen hundreds, and yet it persists, keeps kind of having its hadi

and coming into vogue. I guess you could say it's hard to dismiss the first of all, the idea of it, like the just the basic like moral id of there's this part of my body and it's loaded with stuff I don't like to think about. But clean water. Let's

shoot that up in there and just make it sparkly. Well, you know, you just did a video on cognitive purification exactly in a way, it's cognitive purification of of our lower intestines, of our colon, and it doesn't really make sense when you really get down to the fact that the colon does what it does. There's no sense in spot cleaning, you know. Um, nobody's gonna stay for a week up there. Yeah. And then the other thing too, Um, the sensation of of of receiving one of these cleansings.

I've seen it described as it can be kind of intensive, but the line between pleasure and pain is often very very slim, very ambiguous, and so there's something to be said just for also the physical experience of this occurring, where I could see that would be so you're going in, you're getting cognitively cleaned, and there is a definite physical

component to the experience. Throw in some you know, some some basic fluff about what's happening to you and why it's good for you, and I can see why people

would come back again and again. Well. In two thousand eleven, Georgetown University doctor ran It Shorey and her colleagues examined twenty studies that were published in medical literature in the last decade, and she says that while these reports show very little evidence of any kind of benefit, there is an abundance of studies that show that the side effects following the use of a colon irrigation produces cramping, bloating, nausea, vomiting,

electrolyte imbalance, and sometimes renal failure. So this is one of those things that it's like, oh, well, it seems like, you know, maybe it does have a benefit, I'll try it. It actually has some some very serious side effects to it, um that people should consider. Now, are we saying no,

don't ever put anything up your button. No, we're not saying that that's your discretion, you're not yours, And we're just saying, like, if you were going to, if you have the choice, if you were like I would like to get ear candling done and have ear wax removed from my ear canal by burning a flame to suck it up, right, versus I'm going to have a clonic irrigation, go for the ear wax removal. Now. Someone was telling me O the day that doesn't work. Um, I mean

that it's not helpful. I don't know. I think, well, it's the idea. Is that idea is great? Well that again, it's cognitive purification, right. I don't want to see this yuck stuff come out of my body, but yes, you do. That's the thing we really do. We want to see young stuff come out of our body. I think that's the fascination. It's the fascination. We want to be like, oh, that pus that just came out of my body is discussing, but it's not inside me anymore. But that that ear

wax is the first line of defense. Okay. So, because if you've got some sort of bacteria or stuff that's entering through your ear canal, it's going to get caught in the ear wax, so you don't want to remove it. But it's a great bonding experience because you generally have to trust somebody a lot to for them to hold that candle in place over your head and almost catch your head and the sofa on fire. Well, I was gonna say it is quite I did it, of course

crazy in my twenties. Um no, no, with a friend, because you've got the paper plate and you've got the thing that's on fire over as you say, over your ear, and then you've got the crackling going on that you can hear from the flame. Um, it's I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone one thing we can be sure about.

Do not use it rectally. If you're going to do it, only use it in the ear canal, Like if you had to choose between the rector irrigation and uh and using the ear candle erectly, I just go for the area. Well you know hydrogen, right, hydrogen is up there, it's in the rectum. You do not want Uh, it's some sort of source like a flame near that. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like legally this episode is just no. That's the thing we need. We keep stressing it's this is

all part of our body and how it works. And the more we understand how it works, the more the more free we are with talking about it and hearing discussions about it. Then the morning tune we are with the overall mind body connection. All right. So, just for the lawyers out there, maybe even our lawyers, we are not at all recommending that you do ear candling or Anna's candling or colon irrigation at all. Don't do it. Oh another thing you should never do um rectully by

the way, probably avoid um holy water enemus. Uh, this actually existed. Mary Roach goes into this as well. In the six hundreds in France, one exorcist to use this as a means to get holy water into the possessed, allegedly possessed person. The idea here being that a lot of times salt is added to holy water. And there are a few different reasons that this is done apparently, but uh, the bottom line is if it's salted holy water,

you cannot drink a bunch of it. So how's a man to get holy water into someone possessed by Bielzebub? Well you use an enema apparently. Because so the idea is that lab is taking refuge in inside the body. Yeah, perhaps inside the guts where all this uh you know, unholy, unwholesome stuff is going on. Uh. So let's pump some water up in and flush them out. It's not not advised. It's not a part of the like the official exorcism uh documentations. That's good. That's good, the updated one. Huh.

All right, So that is all. Hopefully that's just a nice overall about about the colon, about the rectum, a little bit about how the ainus works, and uh and again hopefully we can in a way. We've we've had some fun with it, but we've be mystified it. I recommend picking up Mary Roach's book reading more about it, and just in general, I recommend reading more about how your digestive system works. So we have an article pretty good overview on the website on how stuff works, how

the digestive system works. It'll take you through everything we've discussed in very basic details. And so as we uh, as we take it out here, as we call it a day in the podcast studio, I'd like to close with a little music you're all familiar with, screaming Jay Hawkins, who did the classic song I Put a Spell on You. He had kind of this voodoo man vibe. Well, he also did another little number in nineteen nine called Constipation Blues.

Not quite as popular, not quite as popular because this is sixty nine and uh and especially then, like people didn't want to think about people straining on the toilet and about the the agonies of of constipation. But screaming Jay Hawkins, he's a he's a brutally honest man. So let's let's hear a little from this fabulous number, Ladies and gentlemen. Most people record songs about love, heartbreak, loneliness, being broke. Nobody's actually went out and recorded a song

about real pain. The band and I have just returned from the general hospital. Where are we called a man in the right position? We named this song constipation Blues. M h Yeah. In the meantime, we'd love to hear from you. You can find us online and step the law your mind, Tom Mind, and find us on Twitter where our handles blow the mind, and on YouTube. We have a video channel Mind Stuff Show, and if you'd like to drop us a line, please do so at below the Mind at Discovery dot com. H let go.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff works dot com. Don't clean, I can take much more, lit it go