Benefits of charcoal - 037

SPEAKER A The following program presents principles designed to promote good health and is not intended to take the place of personalised, professional care. The opinions and ideas expressed are those of the speakers. Viewers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions about the information presented. SPEAKER B Welcome to healthy living. I'm your host, Margot Marshall. Just in case you think that charcoal is just for fuelling, the Barbie you will read think that when today's guest shares its medicinal benefits. SPEAKER C Healthy Living is a production of 3ABN Australia television focusing on the health of the whole person, body, mind and spirit. You'll learn natural lifestyle principles with practical health solutions for overall good health. SPEAKER B If you don't already have charcoal in your first aid kit, I think you will when you hear Dr. Clark talk about its amazing benefits. Welcome, Dr. Clark. It's really good to have you talk about this. Why should Australians be interested in charcoal? SPEAKER D Well, there's at least 4 million Australians that should be interested. SPEAKER B Why is that? SPEAKER D Because they get food poisoning every year. SPEAKER B Okay, so it's good for food poisoning. SPEAKER D Good for food poisoning. Another reason is we all know that there's a lot of interesting things out in the environment that can sting you and bite you. SPEAKER B I know that only too well. Can I just tell you this? When I was a little kid, I used to run around barefooted, actually, I still do. And we had grapevines that went right down the big, long path. And we weren't supposed to eat them as we walked along, but we did, and the birds did, too. And so once a grape had been pecked, it made it really easy for the bees to come and have some nice grape, and they were usually a bit fermented after a while. And so the bees would do that. They would get drunk and fall on their back on the ground, and I would tread on them. And it's a wonder you couldn't hear me all the way to the US. Of A. And so, yes, I'm very, very painfully aware of bites and stings. So we've got food poisoning, and when we've got bites and stings, and what else do we have? What else would it be good for? SPEAKER D Good for wound care, for improving wounds, for healing wounds. SPEAKER B Tell us about that. SPEAKER D Yes, one of the things that happens when a wound is made is that it gets colonized with bacteria, some of which are not very helpful. Maybe like golden staff. SPEAKER B Oh, right. That's definitely not definitely not helpful. SPEAKER D No, not helpful. And so when you have a wound that's trying to be healed up, using charcoal, as we'll talk about here, as a way of treating it, helps to keep the body from collecting too many of those bacteria that aren't helpful and letting the body fight the healing process or improve the healing process without having to fight infection. SPEAKER B How does that work? How does it remove problems? SPEAKER D Yes. How does it work? It actually has the ability to trap bacteria on its surface. It also collects their waste products. It also helps to reduce the inflammation by collecting the inflammatory mediators out of the wound, making the wound less inflamed. Yes. SPEAKER B So that's amazing. It's got a great capacity to absorb. SPEAKER D All that sort of stuff right on its surface. It can collect a lot of poisons toxins. We call it adhering to it or adsorbing. And charcoal can absorb a lot of stuff. If you're looking at toxins such as ammonia gas, an empty jar that's a liter will hold a liter of ammonia gas. But if you fill that jar full of activated charcoal powder, it'll hold 68 liters of the same gas. SPEAKER B Isn't that incredible? That's just incredible. And you mentioned activated charcoal, and I think it's very important at this point that we just distinguish what we use on the barbecue from what we would use in the first aid kit. What is the difference there? SPEAKER D What you use in the barbecue is usually charcoal briquettes, and while it has some charcoal in it, it also has some igniters and some other things that aren't going to be helpful. SPEAKER B Definitely not helpful. SPEAKER D But there's also hardwood charcoal you can buy in the grocery store that's in big chunks. That stuff can be used in an emergency when you can't get a hold of the, quote, unquote, activated. The activated charcoal has been treated with high pressure steam to crack its surface and give it a higher surface area and thus a stronger drawing power. SPEAKER B That's wonderful. I have an idea that indigenous Australians might know a bit more about charcoal than most of most of the rest of us. Is that right? SPEAKER D This is true, and it's also true of Africans. A lot of them have used charcoal for generations to whiten their teeth, to clean their teeth, to care for their teeth after a meal. But the Aboriginals also used charcoal when they had food poisoning or when they had digestive issues. SPEAKER B So they seem to have worked that out a long time ago. SPEAKER D That's right. They have figured out and they also used it for heartburn in case they were having reflux disease. They found out charcoal was beneficial. SPEAKER B You've done a whole program on heartburn, so we can take more of that later. So what would be some of the ways that you could actually apply charcoal? How would you use it? SPEAKER D We use it in several different ways. We can use it topically, meaning on the outside of our body. We use it as fermentations or as a poultice. We also take it internally, as in eating it or drinking it, and it has different benefits in each different application. SPEAKER B Do you want to describe what's a fermentation for? Maybe someone who hasn't used one of those. SPEAKER D What's that in a fermentation? The way the charcoal is prepared is you put charcoal powder inside a bag, like a cloth sack, where the charcoal won't actually be coming out of the sack, but its drawing powers will be used from within the sack. That sack then will be dipped in water, usually either hot or cold water for application, and then placed over a part of the body. So, for example, if you had a terrible abdominal problem, such as more than just an upset stomach, then you could make a large pillowcase full of charcoal. SPEAKER B That'S a lot of charcoal. SPEAKER D Dip it in either hot or cold water and put it over the abdomen and it'll take the poison toxin out of the abdomen and improve the intestines for fighting whatever infection or problem has occurred. SPEAKER B So it actually draws through the skin to wherever the problem is and draws that's an incredible drawing power, isn't it? SPEAKER D Oh, it sure is. SPEAKER B Have you ever had the opportunity to use charcoal in that way? SPEAKER D You talk about bees and stepping on them reminded me. Oftentimes wasps like to build their nests right in the arch of a doorway. And I went walking through a doorway and I'm tall enough that I was pretty close to the nest and some of them looked at the top of my head and thought it was very attractive. Oh, no, I'm losing some hair. And so that gave them a target. One of them came down and did the drilling process on my head and left me with some great pain. And so I went rushing to the house and I was in a hurry, so I just made some charcoal slurry. In other words, I took a jar, put some water in it, put in a tablespoon of charcoal powder, mixed it up and went to the bathtub. And I just started pouring it over my head and massaging it into what was left of my hair and what was the area of the sting. And within a few seconds the stinging was gone. SPEAKER B Really. I wish I had known that. My mother used to have a little wreckitz blue bag that she used to use to make the whites white. I don't know. Never did know how that worked, but anyway, I don't remember that it was that helpful, but it was nice to get a bit of attention, I suppose. But I wish she'd known about charcoal back then. That's really good. Have you had any other ways of using it for your own personal self? SPEAKER D I sure have. One of the ways I had somewhat of an industrial accident. I was working at a place where we were working with big heavy metal objects and one of them slipped off the metal bench and landed on my knee. It was bruised. I couldn't walk on that leg. I was worried I had broken it. I was like, this is not good. I didn't really want to take time off work well, so I went home, I made a big charcoal poultice. I put it over my knee where this big metal object had hit it and was now swollen and blue. And I wore that charcoal poultice all night. In the morning, the swelling was totally gone. There was still a bit purple, but I could walk on it. And so I went back to work sort of limping, and I didn't have to do a lot of physical activity that day at work. So I worked through that day and did a charcoal poultice the next night. And during the day I put on comfy cream to help it to heal. And that was beneficial. And by three days I'd hardly could remember that I'd hurt my knee other than looking at it and seeing it was still a little bit blue. SPEAKER B Wow. So it really took away a lot of the pain, a lot of the inflammation, yes. Even from a really nasty injury. That's really good, really good to have it on hand. SPEAKER D Yes. SPEAKER B And what about other bruises and wounds and things like that? Have you had any other treated other people in any way with those? SPEAKER D Oh, yes, we've had an opportunity to treat a lot of people. The neighbor boy was running around without shoes and socks on and in short pants, and he and the children, neighborhood children, somehow tripped over the septic system cement thing, and he ends up falling on it and getting a wound on the front of his shin, front of his tibia. And it didn't go well because septic systems have a lot of bugs that aren't going to help you. And it got all uninfected. It went from a little tiny wound to an area up and down his shin that was quite large and it was looking raised red. It had blisters purple areas and it wasn't getting better. And he had tried antibiotics and it wasn't getting better. And we looked at that and said, oh boy, this is a bad place to have a wound. So I made a charcoal poultice a little larger than the area that was looking bad. We wrapped it on there with a plastic. First we put on the charcoal poultice. I should talk about how we made our charcoal poultice. SPEAKER B Yes. SPEAKER D We put one part of psyllium powder as a thickener, which is psyllium husk powder you can get in most stores. And then we put in three parts of water and two parts of charcoal and we mixed it up until it was sort of like a Playdoh or Silly Putty. SPEAKER B It wasn't running anymore. It was firm or like a pancake. SPEAKER D And we put that over the front of his shin. Then we wrapped it with plastic wrap, glad wrap, and then we wrapped it with a stretchy bandage Ace wrap just to keep it good. He wore that that evening, came back the next day. It was looking dramatically better. We put on a new type of charcoal poultice, same charcoal poultice. But within three days it was looking dramatically better and looked like it's going to get better. And it did. Then we went on to using comfrey, savs, and so forth to make it heal fast, but it healed right up and it was very good. SPEAKER B That's amazing. That's amazing. What about, say, arthritis? Would it be helpful for arthritis? SPEAKER D Arthritis is a serious problem for Australians, and we covered that in another program. But arthritis has a lot of inflammation and that's what charcoal is good at, pulling out. I met a trucker. A truckee, he had a flatbed truck. He was always jumping up on the truck and jumping down, and he was in his seventy s and he'd worn out his knees. They were painful and he was stiff and he didn't know what to do. And so he went to see the doctor. The doctor said, okay, you're in trouble. We're going to send you to the orthopedic surgeon. Sent him to the orthopedic surgeon. And the orthopedic surgeon looked him over, took his x rays and said, you need to have that knee replaced if you really want to get around well, so he signed him up for surgery and he was on the list two weeks, he'd be coming into the hospital for a big surgery and a stay in the unit. And so he went home and told his family and friends, and they said, well, why don't you try charcoal? You got a chance to maybe fix this. And so he put on a charcoal poultice, put it on his knee, wore it overnight, a couple of nights of that, and his knee was totally fine. I mean, the pain was gone, inflammation was gone. Of course it won't fix the bone on bone arthritis, but bone on bone arthritis doesn't have to hurt. I've had patients come to my office that had bone on bone arthritis and they didn't hurt. SPEAKER B Seriously? SPEAKER D Yeah. SPEAKER B So it's the inflammation that hurts and not the bone on bone? That's a bit hard to imagine, to be honest. Yes, but that's what happened. So he didn't have the knee replacement. SPEAKER D So he went into the hospital for the day of the surgery, but it's all better. And he told the doctor, hey Doc, I've used this natural remedy. It doesn't hurt anymore. And the doctor's like, well, if it doesn't hurt now, it'll certainly hurt after surgery. And so maybe we better put off the surgery for a while and you just come see me when it gets unbearable and your natural remedy isn't working. Well, that was three years previous and he was still going fine. Wow. SPEAKER B I bet a lot of people who've had knee surgery would wish they'd known that. I know a couple of people who've had knee replacements and, well, you can't kneel for a start. You can't get to the floor as easily, for all of those reasons. And it's just not nice. I mean, it's very, very restrictive. It may solve part of the problem once all the pain and the rehab is over. But it's not a great solution. What about, say, skin lesions? Would that work for a skin lesion? SPEAKER D I'll tell you a couple of stories. We had a lady that was running our lifestyle programs, and she got a lesion on her back that was big and black and growing, and she's worried about it. And so she went to see a surgeon, and he said, yeah, we can take that off for you. We'll cut it out, we'll send it to the lab, we'll figure out what it is and see if there's more treatment needed. And she came back and she thought, now, wait a minute, I should try natural remedy on this since I'm in the business. And so she put a charcoal poultice on this growing black lesion on her back, and within three days of doing that, it totally disappeared. It was gone. SPEAKER B Three days? SPEAKER D Three days. SPEAKER B Three days. SPEAKER D Wow. And I took a look at it, and there's nothing there. And I'm like, wow, that was dramatic. SPEAKER B So you were surprised at how quick that was? Well, I thought it would take a bit more than that to surprise you. SPEAKER D Yeah. And so she didn't go for her surgery on it. It was gone. Another lady we met and we had did a whole program for her community on natural remedies, and she had learned about charcoal. She had a lesion on her nose that was growing and wasn't necessarily something she wanted to keep. And so she started putting a charcoal poultice on. Now, hers took a little longer every night. She'd put on this charcoal poultice, tape it on, and took her, as I remember, a few months really that long, but the thing just totally dried up, fell off, and was gone. And their nose looked perfectly fine after that. So it has the ability to take away any toxins or inflammation or even viruses and bacteria from a lesion and allow the body to treat that lesion naturally. And so it makes it so the body can heal things. SPEAKER B Yeah. So what about people who maybe take an overdose? Would that be something that you could use? SPEAKER D It definitely is. And in most hospitals, they will have the charcoal already made up. In the United States, we would have a bottle that was labeled charcoal, and it was mixed with other things to keep it suspended. And when the patient came into the emergency department with an overdose of a certain drug, we had a book that would tell us what we could expect by giving charcoal what percentage of the drug could be absorbed by charcoal and removed from the body. And often the procedure was to put a tube down their throat, pump their stomach, and then pour down this charcoal mixture and let it sit there and maybe exchange it a few times. But anyway, it's definitely a part of standard emergency care. SPEAKER B Well, if they're using it in hospitals, I think even people who are a little bit. Some people aren't really too confident about alternative therapies, but if hospitals are using it, I think that gives it the stamp of approval. And I guess too, once it's in the system like that, it would follow any of the drug that hadn't been pumped out. They would be able to follow that and hold hands with it. SPEAKER D That's right. And in the state of Kentucky, they had a time when they required every household to keep charcoal in their house, really? In case a child overdosed or something. And it was a dramatic improvement in health care because then the child or the family could apply the charcoal orally and it reduced the amount of time between the poisoning and the charcoal by hours. So that people are getting a lot better results. SPEAKER B That's right. So children, what sorts of things would children ingest that might be helped with charcoal? No, for the need of it. I mean, children don't usually go and take an overdose of sleeping tablets. What would they be having? SPEAKER D A lot of them would go under the sink and find bright colored bottles and drink the contents. Or they'll love their candy vitamin pills and eat the whole bottle and end up with an iron overdose. Or they can get into mom and dad's pills that are bright colored and look good. SPEAKER B Right? Yeah. So they haven't been well kept. Well, that's very important. And you say they're saving maybe a few hours by the fact that parents can actually give them that while they're on their way to the hospital to get the proper care. That is proper care, but to just. SPEAKER D To be very sure, start to care early. SPEAKER B Yes. Now, I think you had a story about some mercury in teeth that you're going to talk about. SPEAKER D Right. Charcoal has been found to take heavy metals out of your body. And since it removes heavy metals, environmental dentists who remove mercury out of people's teeth have gone to having people swish and swallow or swish and spit out charcoal water during the procedures to help remove the heavy metals. And then you can follow up by taking charcoal tablets or charcoal capsules, which you can find in most any chemistry. SPEAKER B Yes. They're easily available and get rid of the heavy metals. Okay, so the dentist will actually use that while they're doing the procedure? SPEAKER D Yes. SPEAKER B Good to know. Very good to know. You talk about taking it internally. Now, are there any times when it might not be a good idea to actually take charcoal internally? SPEAKER D Yes. Since charcoal is able to take overdoses out of people, it'll also take normal doses out of people. So you wouldn't want to take charcoal at the same time you're taking your necessary pills, tablets, and you want to separate the ingestion of charcoal by at least 2 hours from the ingestion of some important pill. That way your charcoal won't just carry the pill out of your body, too. SPEAKER B Okay, well, that could be quite serious, too. So thank you for that. It's good to know that it just holds hands with anyone that's next door, doesn't it? It's not actually selective, so that's a good precaution to take. What about colds? Can it help with sort of we've talked about some pretty serious things there, but what about everyday things or very common kinds of illnesses? Can it be used in that setting? SPEAKER D I like to use it if I get a sore throat. If I feel myself coming down with something and I know it's not going to be good, then I will take charcoal in water. I'll maybe gargle it, I might swish it. I'll drink some of it. What it does is it picks up viruses, takes them and binds them to the charcoal that's been demonstrated in laboratory studies, carries it out of your body. It also takes the inflammation out of the tissues surrounding the throat, the pharynx, all those sore areas that we call a sore throat. And the other thing it helps with is when you have a flu or a cold, the virus will often put off toxins that have a tendency to shut your immune system down, whereas taking charcoal will absorb those toxins so that virus won't cause that bad outcome. SPEAKER B Very good. Well, you've covered a lot of stuff there. Is there anything else that it might be useful for or we pretty much covered the spectrum, I guess. SPEAKER D Well, one of the things that it's been very helpful for is inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, collagenous colitis, these different irritable bowels. And I had a patient who called me up. She was a runner. Now, at the time she called, she was running to the bathroom, but that's not the type of runner she aspired to be. She was actually a marathoner, ran a long distance, and she had gotten to where she could not be 18 minutes away from a facility or she'd be in trouble. SPEAKER B Oh, that's bad. SPEAKER D And she had to time her trip to work, use the restroom, use the toilet, get in the car, go to work and use it again. And this was a dramatic problem. She was taking all kinds of different pills to treat this problem. And as it went, she wasn't doing her running for her marathons. Well, we started her on a plan to fix it. We changed her diet, adjusted her diet. So she didn't have any fermented foods, especially vinegar, things like nutritional yeast that are known to cause these problems. And we started her taking oral charcoal. I recommended she take charcoal and water, but she didn't like the idea of powder and water, so she took the tablets, and so she took tablets every day. And she improved her diet, she improved her lifestyle. And within a month, she was totally over it. She was no longer on her pills. She was no longer having to run to the bathroom, and she came down not too long after that to a set of meetings I was doing and gave her testimony right in the middle of my talk on autoimmune diseases and shared that she had overcome this. And we found charcoal to be very effective for the intestinal problems. SPEAKER B Look, that's an amazing thing. And although that's probably not up there with heart disease and all the big ones, it's one that affects your life quite significantly. And so I think if anyone out there has got those sorts of problems, they'd be very happy to know that such a simple thing without bad side effects that some things do. They'd be very, very happy to know that such a simple thing as activated charcoal can do that. How long was that about, did you say? A month or so? SPEAKER D Yeah, less than a month. SPEAKER B Less than a month. That's really, really good. And wouldn't you feel like a new person? Oh, yeah, because that would just change life. You'd be just governed by the nearest bathroom. SPEAKER D I might add to that. We sort of are careful how much charcoal we give somebody. SPEAKER B Yes. SPEAKER D The outcome is different for different folks. Some people get constipated on charcoal. So oftentimes if I find a person is getting constipated on charcoal, I'll have them add psyllium to it. A typical recipe for a drink of charcoal would be to take a liter of water, put in a tablespoon of the charcoal powder and a teaspoon of the psyllium powder. And with that, I've been able to give almost as much charcoal as anybody would want to have in treating different diseases. SPEAKER B So that liter, how long would they take to drink that? SPEAKER D Depending on what they're treating. In this case, if they're treating an ulcerative colitis, I would have them drink that twice a day. SPEAKER B Twice a day? All right. And that's just like two tablespoons in the day. And they'd keep it away from their meals? SPEAKER D Well, it doesn't matter if you take it with the meals, other than the fact you wouldn't want that much liquid with the meals. People ask the question, well, this charcoal takes out all kinds of poisons out of my body. Won't it take out the good nutrients? And, in fact, that hasn't been proven to be so in animal industry. They've gone to adding charcoal to the feed. It improves milk production, improves weight gain for beef cattle, it improves egg laying for chickens. Constant charcoal, we're not talking lots. They're putting, like 1% charcoal in their feed, but it makes a difference for them, and they don't end up with some glaring nutritional deficiency. SPEAKER B Well, that's been fantastic. Would you just like to recap on all of those amazing benefits of charcoal so that we can just try to remember some of them and certainly keep it in the first aid kit. So what did we cover there? SPEAKER D Yes, and if we have an upset stomach, charcoal should be one of the first things to reach for. If you're having a wound that's having trouble healing or it's a new wound and you just want to get it on its way to healing, you can put it on the wound as a poultice. Beware that if you have an open wound and you put charcoal in it, it can sometimes end up being a tattoo in the wound. So you don't necessarily want to do that. You can put a paper towel between the wound and the charcoal and it's just as effective, and yet it doesn't tattoo the wound. If you're bitten or stung by some nasty creature, it's good to use charcoal. And then if you have pain, like as in arthritis, charcoal is very good at taking the pain away. SPEAKER B Well, that's just fantastic. Thank you so much. And I'm sure that's going to be very helpful to our viewers. Viewers, if you'd like to watch our programs on demand, just go to our website. That's 3abnaustralia.org.au and click on the watch button. We hope to see you next time. God bless. SPEAKER C You’ve been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia Television.