Colon cleansing just is a pile of poop

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the website of the McGill Office for Science and Society I saw an excellent article by Ada McVean on September 1, 2023 titled Debunking Detox: Your Colon Doesn’t Need Cleansing and subtitled The slew of colon-unplugging products are not supported by science and may even do more harm than good. She noted that peddlers of detox products tell us that we are carrying around pounds of impacted fecal matter. That article is part of an earlier one in the Skeptical Inquirer on May 3, 2023 titled The fact and fiction of physiological phenomena: Volume 1 which has the following four section headings:

 

Pee after sex to avoid a UTI: fiction

Avoid dairy when you’re sick: fiction

Stress can cause gray hair: fact

Colons need to be generally cleansed: fiction

 

There is another great article by Michael F. Picco at the MAYO CLINIC titled Is colon cleansing a good way to eliminate toxins from your body? It obeys Betteridge’s law of headlines, which is:

 

“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”

 

There is a long article by David Gorski at Science-Based Medicine on April 7, 2008 titled Colon “cleanses”: A load of you know what…

 I’m old enough to have had colonoscopies, for which the preparation involved drinking huge amounts of fluid, and then NOT pooping out pounds of impacted fecal matter.

 

An image of a digestive system was adapted from this one at Wikimedia Commons.