The book “The 7 Phases of Detoxification” is now available to download for free!
In this lecture, Dr. Conners summarizes his latest book, “The 7 Phases of Detoxification” explaining the importance of dealing with all 7 phases to help heal from any disease:
Transcript:
Dr. Conners
Hello, this is Dr. Kevin Conners, and this is going to be a video talking about my new book called The Seven Phases of Detoxification. I’m going to go over some of the details of the book in this short video so the people that don’t have time to read can at least get a preview of the book. It’s a free download. Go to our website, ConnersClinic.com, and you can download it for free. It’s not that long, but it gives you some ideas on things that you want to do when you’re considering going through a detoxification program. Those of you that have listened to me in the past know that I’m not a big fan of box detoxes because of what I really wrote about in this book. You really have to go through all these phases of detoxification.
Now, understand, you can do many of these concurrently, but if you’re not dealing with these seven phases, at least concurrently, you are setting yourself up for a possible problem. So let’s walk through what I mean by these seven phases of detoxification so you can better understand it. Many of you understand a lot of these pieces, but I’m just trying to put them together for you. So detoxification: everybody thinks of that as dealing with poisons in your liver, doing what your liver is supposed to do.
When people talk about the phases of detoxification, usually they say phase one and phase two. They might expound it to phase one, two and three. They’re really talking about specific phases of detoxification that are going on in your liver. And I incorporate those in the Phases of Detoxification because obviously they’re very important. But there are other phases that you ignore to your own peril, and we need to deal with those. No one would argue that we are poisoned today. We are being poisoned in our environment. We’re being poisoned by things we eat. Don’t mistake yourself that it’s just things that we eat though. You are receiving toxins from things that you put on your skin. You are receiving toxins from things that you breathe. The fastest way to poison yourself is through an injection. So people are getting vaccines with a bunch of adjuvants in them, with all sorts of unknown things. Those things are going right into your bloodstream, right into your tissues and often right across the blood brain barrier and damaging things. If you choose to do that, you have to be really supporting liver detox pathways so you can get these toxins, these poisons out of your body.
But things that you’re putting on your skin on a daily basis, from deodorant to lotions to creams to beauty supplies and makeup, have just an enormous amount of poisons in them that are cancer causing poisons. They absorb through your skin, they get into your bloodstream and can wreak havoc in your body and overwhelm your liver. It’s easy to think about pesticides and herbicides when addressing toxins, as there’s a lot of knowledge about those. This includes GMO foods, things that were breathing in, and things that we’re absorbing through the gut. These all affect us in many different ways. Don’t think that it’s just your liver or your tissues that are being harmed. Probably the most common detrimental effect to toxicities, and overwhelmed detoxification pathways, is the brain. We’re seeing such an uptick in early dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, demyelinating diseases that you have to look at the damage that is being done to the brain, the neurons, and most importantly, the glial cells of the brain that is causing these problems.
And it’s most often caused from toxicities that are supposed to detox through these liver pathways. But because of different backups that we’ll talk about and things that we need to support, they continue to circulate and then damage the blood brain barrier or cross an intact blood brain barrier and then cause all sorts of problems and inflammation in the brain, microglial priming, et cetera. I have some videos on that that you should look at too. So when we talk about the seven phases of detox, we have to start at the last phase. So you think the last phase is phase seven, but actually it’s phase zero through six because I had to put it in order to tie in the liver phases. So phase six is really the end game, the last stage of detoxification. It really has to do with proper elimination. If you’re not eliminating through your kidneys, through your urine, through your bowels, through your feces, properly in a healthy manner, you’re going to be reabsorbing poisons. You’re going to be toxifying your kidneys, and you’re going to end up with early death. People will often tell me that they have normal bowel movements. They say that they go at least a couple of times a week. That is severe constipation. Even people that are having bowel moments, and going once a day, it’s better to go two or three times a day, but if you’re having a bowel movement once a day, you really also want to look at your intestinal transit time.
How long is it taking for things that you eat today to get into your stool? Is it one day? If you ate corn today, would you see it in your stool tomorrow or would it take three or four days to see it in your stool? If it’s taking three or four days, you have a very slow intestinal transit time. This is the time it takes for something you need to get into the toilet. If you have that long intestinal transit time, you have feces backed up in your colon, even if you’re having a daily bowel movement. And when you do, you are absorbing a lot of the poisons that your liver is getting or that your intestine wall is preventing from being absorbed. So we’re consuming different things in our foods and in our environment that’s getting into your gut that shouldn’t cross the gut border. So if I have an intact gut border, and I don’t have leaky gut, but I have a long intestinal time, I can end up absorbing some of these things that I’m not supposed to be absorbing, even if I don’t have leaky gut.
Also, if my liver is doing its job in dumping poisons and toxins from the blood that I absorbed through the gut, or I absorbed through breathing or I absorbed through injection, and my liver has done its job, it’s throwing the toxins into the small intestine, and goes through the large intestine. If I have a slow intestinal tract, food is going slowly through the gut, and I’m going to reabsorb those things. So we have to be eliminating properly. Some things to consider to help with elimination is using magnesium with vitamin C before you go to bed, using a product called Cape Aloe, that works very well. Cape Aloe increases peristaltic waves. So it can really help move things through the gut. You can increase your fiber simply by using prune juice or fig or plum. That can be very helpful with more stubborn constipation. A product called Cascara Sagrada also works well. You only want to use that short term. Lastly, using coffee enemas can be very helpful. Nobody likes to talk about coffee enemas, but since we’re mainly a cancer clinic in our office, we talk about coffee enemas all the time with joy. Coffee enemas can be beneficial to help with elimination. But really the reason why we push coffee enemas is really to stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system.
So think of your nervous system split into two sides. You have your voluntary nervous system, which can move this arm, and you have your involuntary nervous system, which is like a heartbeat, your liver, and detoxifying. All your organ function that you don’t have to think of is a function of your autonomic nervous system. Think automatic nervous system. Well, your autonomic nervous system is then separated into two different opposing categories, your sympathetics and your parasympathetics. Your sympathetic are your fight or flight or flee mechanism, or your fight or flight or freeze mechanism. It’s how you deal with stresses. So if a polar bear jumps down in front of you, your sympathetics kick in and do very specific things to help prepare you to either fight that polar bear or run away. Your blood pressure goes up, your smooth muscles and the outside of your arteries contracts, which increases your blood pressure, shunts blood to the extremities so you can run away from that polar bear or that you can fight. Your eyes will dilate, your bronchial tubes will dilate so you can get oxygen in your tissues as fast as possible to be able to run away from that bear. That is your sympathetic nervous system. It has a very distinct purpose that is very necessary. So it is not a bad guy. It just has to be in balance with the other side of the nervous system called your parasympathetics.
Your parasympathetics are your rest and relaxation side of the nervous system, but also your immune function is controlled solely by your parasympathetics. Your detoxification pathways, your sexual function, all these are controlled by your parasympathetics. So think of anything that you don’t really need to function well if you’re running away from a polar bear. You don’t need to think about detoxifying mercury if you’re running away from a polar bear. That is a parasympathetic function. You don’t need to consider procreation if you’re running away from a polar bear, that is a parasympathetic function. The problem is that we live in a society that we’re so stimulated with stressors that most of us are imbalanced on the side of sympathetic dominance. So our sympathetic nervous system is stressed because of deadlines, and the lifestyle that we live in this country, that we’re in a state of sympathetic dominance. Our parasympathetic is low and is deficient.
So then what is lacking? If we’re sympathetic dominant, our immune system is going to be shut down, our detoxification is going to be shut down. Everything’s going to be slower. We’re going to be poisoning ourselves even if we’re eating really healthy and doing everything right. If we have a sympathetic dominance, we’re going to be poisoning ourselves. This is where we talk with our cancer patients so insistently that they need to deal with their anxiety in life. This means to either get counseling, or use some adaptogenic herbs. You have to develop some relationships so that you can reduce that level of anxiety, because anxiety is going to push that sympathetic drive and it’s going to shut down parasympathetics. What do you need to do to conquer cancer? You need a healthy immune system. You need a healthy detoxification pathway system. Your liver is going to basically be shutting down if you’re in a sympathetic drive or a sympathetic dominance. Why does this have anything to do with coffee enemas?Well, the main purpose of coffee enemas is to get caffeine into that lower rectal area where cranial nerve ten can be stimulated. Cranial nerve ten, or your vagus nerve or your vagal nerve, is really your primary nerve system of your parasympathetics. So you stimulate the parasympathetics by doing coffee enemas. A side effect of coffee enemas is if you have some constipation, you will help relieve that constipation. But we don’t tell people to do coffee enemies for constipation.
We tell people to do coffee enemas to stimulate their parasympathetic nervous system. When you stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system, you are going to stimulate detoxification, your liver function. You are going to stimulate your immune system to fight off disease, whether it’s cancer or a virus or a bacteria or any other pathogens. You want to be stimulating that parasympathetic, and then you will also contrastly, by stimulating the parasympathetics, by using coffee enemas to stimulate that vagal nerve, you will suppress the sympathetics, so you will decrease anxiety. One of the common comments that we get from our cancer patients is that people feel much more relaxed after doing a coffee enema. Why? It’s because you’re stimulating the parasympathetics and calming the sympathetic. It is just straight neurology. So don’t shy away from doing coffee enemas.
Phase five. The next thing that we want to move upstream here is helpful binding. So, remember we talked about intestinal transit time. Food sits in your colon for a period of time. Especially if we have leaky gut, which pretty much everybody does because of foods that they eat. GMO foods basically act as antibiotics and damage our gut wall. The epithelial lining of the gut becomes damaged, that’s called leaky gut. So things get across the gut that shouldn’t be getting across the gut. This is overwhelming our detox pathways, stimulating immune system hyper function, increasing inflammatory cytokines. The list goes on and on. The damage that leaky gut does. Intestinal binders are now kind of a class of nutraceuticals that help grab onto things in the gut and keep it in the gut. Things in your diet that would qualify as an intestinal binder would be fiber that you’re eating in your food. That acts as an intestinal binder, and it holds things in the gut so that you don’t reabsorb them. Now, here’s a list of some different nutraceutical intestinal binders. Humic and Fulvic Acid, Zeolite, Bentonite Clay, and other different clays, Activated Charcoal, Sodium Alginate.
As I said, Fiber and Aloe and Chitosan act as binders. They grab onto things in the gut so that you don’t reabsorb them. And that’s the whole idea. You don’t want your liver doing its job through phase one, phase two, phase three, and dumping things into the smaller intestine. Now it would get into the large intestine and it would get reabsorbed. If you think of it that way, that stuff getting reabsorbed and circulating through the bloodstream again. If you could kind of put it into a cartoon idea, your liver would be saying, what in the Sam beans am I dealing with you again? Didn’t I just dump you in the colon three days ago? What’s going on?”
So we really can overwhelm our liver by allowing things to reabsorb. It’s very common for estrogens, bad estrogens that our body is getting rid of, to reabsorb in the gut, and then they can cause all sorts of problems. We deal with this with any hormone-driving cancers. You want to be binding these things in the gut so that you don’t reabsorb them in the small intestine. Using an intestinal binder could be very beneficial.
And then phase four. So understand, we’re kind of just going upstream. You got to start at the bottom of the stream. I like that analogy when you talk about detoxification. If we’re throwing stuff in the Mississippi in Minneapolis thinking that we’re getting rid of it, but there’s a blockage in the Mississippi in St. Louis, all we’re doing is poisoning the waterway all the way down and it’s seeping into other waterways and poisoning the ground. That’s probably a bad example because that’s probably exactly what is truly happening with our rivers. But we don’t want that to happen in our body. So if we are trying to bind things in the gut and we’re trying to now work on bile flow in phase three, phase two and phase one, we’re supporting all these liver detox pathways, but we’re constipated, all we’re going to be doing is reabsorbing this stuff no matter how many binders you use. So you have to work on phase six, phase five, phase four first. Again, you can do these concurrently, but you have to work on all of these or we’re really just circulating poisons around our body instead of detoxifying poisons. If they’re not ending up in the toilet, they’re still in our body. So phase four is bile flow. So you have to understand what bile is. So bile is a nutrient, let’s call it that, a chemical that’s made in your liver. So it’s made in your liver, and the purpose of bile is to put into it poisons from phase one and phase two pathways in the liver. So phase three, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, is actually creation of bile. And phase four then, is that bile then flows down the bile ducts into the gallbladder. And don’t worry, if you had your gallbladder removed, this function still takes place. So the purpose of bile is to carry toxins from the liver into the small intestine. The second purpose of bile is also that it functions as an emulsifier for fat. So bile helps break down fats that you eat and consume and go into your stomach and into your small intestine. And it carries with it poisons from your liver, that your liver did a great job filtering out of the blood, getting those poisons out of the blood, putting it in the bile. It will flow through the bile duct into the gallbladder and it sits in the gallbladder until you eat something fatty. When you eat something fatty, that causes contraction of the gallbladder walls, squirts bile down the common bile duct into the first part of the small intestine, along with pancreatic enzymes like lipase to help digest fat. It helps digest fat, and it is carrying all those poisons from the liver into the small intestine. Now, those people that have not done phase four, meaning that they’ve not helped with bile flow, can end up with Biostasis and that can cause gallstones. If you have a gallstone attack, meaning an inflammatory process going on with a lot of pain, you go in with getting ultrasound and they say, we’re going to remove your gallbladder. They get their gallbladder removed. Well, they still have bile flow, they still have the same bile production. Now they get a bile flow that’s a trickle into the small intestine at all time, maybe not adequate when you eat a fatty meal to deal with that, or to help digest and emulsify the fats with that meal. That’s a whole other story. You might have to take some oxbile or some more lipase to help digest fats or break down your meals where you’re not eating a lot of fat at any given time because of the lack of gallbladder. But you still have bile flower. So you still need to work on this whether or not you have a gallbladder.
So things that you want to work on with bile flow are taking phosphatidylcholine because that’s a precursor to production of bile, using nutrients that have artichoke leaf, ginger, dandelion, taurine and glycine can be really helpful to decrease the viscosity of bile so that it will flow better. But very simple things that you could do are putting a hot pack over your liver gallbladder area. Castor oil packs are really good, but they’re messy and tend to take more time and clean up and such. So if you just use a hot pack, that can be very beneficial. Again, coffee enemas are super beneficial for this also. Why? Because it stimulates the parasympathetics and your muscles of your ducts. The smooth muscles that layer underneath the epithelial layer of the ductwork are controlled by sympathetic and sympathetic tone can increase that tone and decrease the flow. So if you could open that up, stimulating the parasympathetics with coffee enemas, it can be very helpful as well. And then we can get into more detail with liver gallbladder flushes. Make sure that you have a practitioner that you’re working with the liver gallbladder flushes. And I do have details in my book and on our website and different blogs on the details of the liver gallbladder flushes.
Phase three is really bile creation. And bile creation has to do with all those things that we talked about with bile flow, really these top things here: phosphidelcholine, artichoke leaf, ginger and dandelion. You need to support creation of bile and bile flow. That’s phase three, using those products to help support that.
Phase two is really conjugation. So remember, you got poison circulating through your body goes through the liver. The blood goes through the liver and it moves out into the liver going through phase one detoxification. Phase two detoxification then takes the poisons from phase one. Phase one you have different genes that make different enzymes that cause often a more poisonous end product than the poison itself. In order to make this toxin water soluble so that in phase two, it can be conjugated and then put into the bile. So things that will help with phase one and phase two are these types of products. I’m not going to just read them off here because they’re both phase one and phase two. Now, we always suggest, when you’re looking at phase one and phase two function, you look at your gene pathways because there are very specific genes, the P450s, the PON1 genes, and many others, that actually are the process of how we make the specific enzymes for phase one and phase two liver functions to actually take place. So when a person has defects on many of these genes in these gene families, there’s many genes in the P450s and the PON1 pathways. If I have a lot of defects in my P450s, I’m already predisposed to slower phase one liver function. So if I have a lot of defects on my P450 pathways, but my next door neighbor has very few defects on their P450 pathways, and we have very similar lifestyles. We don’t abuse alcohol, we haven’t abused other toxins in our life, so let’s pretend our livers are equally as healthy, but I happen to have inherited a lot of defects on the P450 pathways from my parents, my phase one pathways are going to be slower. So I’m going to be a slower detoxer. Let’s say both my neighbor and I go out to the golf course and play golf. We’re exposed to the same amount of glyphosates from that golf course. And now I might have issues from it, but he has none because his phase one pathway is larger, so as those glyphosates enter his bloodstream, they are able to filter out through phase one, phase two detoxification pathways, dump into a small intestine and be deposited ultimately into the toilet. Where in my case, the glyphosate circulates around the blood again, circulates around the blood again, basically asking,”hey, liver, can we come in? Hey, liver, can we get out of this body?” Because of my defects, slower pathways are like, “hey, we’re overwhelmed at the time. Wait till next time.” That’s how toxins get shunted to your extracellular spaces and then into your cells. And that’s really the problem. I like to kind of make a cartoon of it, but that’s really what’s taking place. When toxins get into our bloodstream, they circulate around our blood and go through the liver. If the liver can take that toxin at that time, it accepts it.
Our liver is overwhelmed because of issues with our genetic pathways, so it has slower phase one, phase two pathways, because of just overexposure to poisons. If I’m out on the golf course all the time, and I’m exposed to a lot of glyphosates and poisons, herbicides and pesticides, or I’m eating a poor diet or I’m drinking a lot of alcohol. The list goes on, right? If I’m overwhelming my liver, my liver is going to say, “hey, we’re at capacity. We can’t take you.” It will continue to circulate around the body and eventually it’s going to be pushed outside of the bloodstream and into the extracellular spaces. That in itself can do damage. It could cross through a cell membrane into the cell. It could do major damage there. If it damages or affects the nucleus of the cell, it can cause rapid replication. This is how toxins, pesticides, herbicides, chemicals, heavy metals, et cetera, get inside the cell, affect the nucleus and can be a cause of cancer. So we deal with this all the time. You have to support phase six, phase five, phase four, phase three, two, one before you start pulling it out of the tissues. So hopefully you’re understanding this process. It’s really like a stream.
We have to pull it out of the tissues because it’s causing cancer or causing symptoms, causing brain inflammation. But you better make sure that you don’t just pull it out of the tissue using a chelator of some sort, and there’s no way it’s going to get through the liver because we haven’t addressed any of that. So it’s just going to circulate somewhere else and be deposited in some other tissue and cause damage somewhere else. And we see this all the time. We don’t want to let this happen. These things can be done fairly concurrently, but you need to work on all these phases.
Then phase zero is pulling it out of the tissue. So things that you’d use to pull toxins out of the tissue are chelators. I have a list of multiple chelators in my book and that’s where people tend to gravitate to want to go to first. They’ll say, Hey, I have heavy metal toxicity, so I’m going to start using some
sort of chelating agent, even a mild chelator. Still, if you’re not dealing with the liver and beyond that, you’re going to possibly just cause more harm than good. I just warn you against it. That’s really why I wrote this book. Other things to consider, and this is what everybody should do is make sure you’re decreasing exposure as best as you possibly can. Consider doing fasting or fasting mimicking diet or time restricted eating. That can be one of the most healthful things for a person to do. You’re just decreasing the burden on your organs when you do this. Everybody should be eating organic as best they possibly can. You should eliminate GMO foods as best as you possibly can, as it damages your gut, causes leaky gut, and causes all sorts of problems. Use clean products for your house. Everybody thinks of their diet and it’s so important when you’re trying to decrease exposure, yet they’re using Lysol in their house with all sorts of toxins that our ancestors were just never exposed to. Stop using cleaning products that are poisonous. Stop using personal care products that are poisonous. I interviewed a gentleman who is a specialist in this, and I always refer to this because it was mind boggling to me. There’s over 1300 chemicals used in personal care products in the United States that are banned in the European Union because their cancer causing, but they’re allowed in the US. Mind boggling that we are exposed to so many poisons in our personal care products, and for women, it’s just so much worse for you with using makeup and things like that. Be conscious of those. Make different choices. And just start to become more conscious of things that you’re doing and you’re exposed to. Make different purchasing choices and lifestyle choices, as this is going to be the most beneficial for people.
So remember this: proper elimination, helpful binding, binding things in the gut, helping bile flow with heat packs over your liver, bile production and use of bile, conjugation in the P450s, which you often want to go to first to start to chelate things out of the body, but you want to really do that last so if you can follow these steps these seven phases of detox. You’re going to have a better detoxification process and it’s really not just a two week thing. This is a lifestyle so you have to be working on this constantly. It’s not a two week detox program. If you can think of it that way, you’re going to be better because, if you are not detoxifying properly, you are damaging tissue and you’re increasing your risk for serious diseases, such as cancer. So you want to be doing this constantly on a daily basis. All right, this is Dr. Kevin Conners again. You can find my book, The Seven Phases of Detoxification, on our website along with all my other books on our website. They’re all a free download so there’s no excuse for not having information. So go get it alright? Bye.
NOTE: All of the above statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
Dr. Conners graduated with his doctorate from Northwestern Health Sciences University in 1986. He holds AMA Fellowships in Regenerative & Functional Medicine and Integrative Cancer Therapy.
He is the author of numerous books including, Stop Fighting Cancer and Start Treating the Cause, Cancer Can’t Kill You if You’re Already Dead, Help, My Body is Killing Me, Chronic Lyme, 3 Phases of Lyme, 23 Steps to Freedom, and many more you can download for FREE on our books page.