Salus June 4, 2025

Bill B

We are ashamed of our sweat, we’re ashamed of our tears, and we’re ashamed of our feces. By the way,  one of the items on the MMPI concerns whether your bowel movements tarry. It’s one of the most controversial items in that questionnaire. Well, it’s in there because if you have tarry bowel movements, it’s because you have sustained levels of anxiety. This item is included on the anxiety index of the MMPI.

Bill G

It’s a fine line. In the 60s, the big movement in California was to travel up to the Russian River and go to the colonic clinics. There was a strong focus on the bowels. The goal was to be able to return to the Bay Area with a clean bowel after a weekend of selected colonics. They would take a look at your stool, and then devise a special program of directed enemas to give you a fresh start from a bowel perspective.

So, a lot of this was sort of Dr. Ozzian at the time. Obviously they had some appreciation, or were trying to connect bowel health with overall health. At that time, this was pseudo-scientific at best.

Jeremy

That’s interesting, Bill G.  I am familiar with that historical reality. And if you look back to 19th century, the most popular treatment of the 19th century were cayenne pepper enemas, because, boy, did you feel treated! You really got a treatment there, and, of course, it was less dangerous than all the other poisonous things doctors were giving people. I always found that a fascinating factoid concerned the treatments that used to be delivered. For instance, it was popular for women to swallow worm parasites to keep themselves thin. So, using pathological means to cleanse the bowel was probably happening in health care, too.

I’m trying to think of the equivalent of an Enema for health care. It might be the length of stay in a hospital. Do we try to get patients ejected out of the hospital more quickly. Is this an enema attempt, or do we just sort of pull patients out? Are we in the business of rushing people out?

Bill G

Historically, it goes way back to Galen and Hippocrates. They were big fans of looking at excrement as a way of measuring health. Of course, during Elizabethan England, and at the time of the revolution, they had a special physician who always attended the king. Part of what they needed to do every day was look at the bowel movement. These physicians figured out the state of health of their monarch based on their inspection of the bowel movement. So it isn’t that people have ignored the gut as an indicator of health. There’s a long historical tradition and medical practice of paying attention to the function of the gut. I think our appreciation has been better. We more clearly understand the functioning of the gut. We move forward with more sophistication, but it’s not that this has been an ignored part of health for thousands of years.