Nutritional Cleansing and
Whole Body Detoxification

by Peter Hanfileti, MD & Lisa Hanfileti, LAc

Nutritional cleansing and detoxification methods have been practiced regularly throughout history as a means to eliminate disease and restore health.

Various religious, cultural, and medical traditions prescribe fasting for a numerous conditions.

However, fasting is an extreme form of metabolic transformation and should not be done without medical supervision and monitoring.

In our clinical practice we have developed a detoxification program that is gentle, effective, and does not put the body through extreme withdrawal (the way fasting does).

Whole body nutritional cleansing combines eating nutritional foods that are natural detoxifiers and supplementing with herbal preparations that support all systems of the body.

This strategy differs from many of the programs that try to detoxify one organ. For instance you probably have heard of and perhaps even tried:

• Liver detoxification
  
• Gall bladder flushing
  
• Colon cleansing

All of these programs utilize herbs, supplements and techniques that attempt to focus solely on the liver, gall bladder or large intestine organs.

We know from holistic medicine that it is impossible to separate a single organ's function from the other systems of the body.

All the organs in the body communicate with and depend on the proper functioning of all the other organs systems. Chinese medicine describes the order in which energy flows through these systems and western medicine describes the direction and order of blood circulation through these different organ systems.

By understanding these organ relationships, we can use their connections to cleanse the body of unwanted toxins while at the same time provide nutrition and "fuel" for these organs to get stronger.