Updated: Haunted by Waters

Or, “Your Bladder Isn’t The Real Problem”

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.“–Norman Maclean

Today I lolled beside a river all afternoon, lying in the shade with my hat pulled comfortably over my eyes. I was listening to my children play a little ways upstream while keeping one eye open and fixed on the “Thou shalt not pass” line I’d fixed in my mind (because no mother ever completely relaxes while her children are playing in a river, though the water be shallow and her husband present), and I thought about what a long and clunky sentence it would take to describe the scene.
I was right.

I also thought about how the urinary tract is like a waterway, because you can’t listen to water run for hours on end without thinking about peeing, even if you’re not obsessed with the subject, like I am. It’s an excellent analogy I’ve used a number of times when explaining how these protocols work and why antibiotics are a temporary patch instead of a permanent solution.

People are always asking me how they could have gotten an infection, when they were so careful. One lady cleaned herself with rubbing alcohol every day, in her desperation to avoid a new infection. She’d been told her hygiene must be at fault, so she basically took a blowtorch to the area.

Doctors treat the bladder like a stand-alone issue, and we tend to think of it that way too, because that’s the part that hurts. And when something hurts, it will get allllll your attention. If your system were a dysfunctional family, your bladder would be the Scapegoat.

The Scapegoat is the “problem child” or the “trouble maker”. This family member always seems defiant, hostile and angry.  The Scapegoat is the truth teller of the family and will often verbalize or act out the “problem” which the family is attempting to cover up or deny. This individual’s behavior warrants negative attention and is a great distraction for everyone from the real issues at hand.

You’ve got to change the whole way you look at this issue in order to fix it for good. A sick bladder isn’t just a sick bladder: it’s a symptom of a larger problem. All the antibiotics in the world aren’t going to fix that problem, because they actually contribute to it.

Let’s go back to that ‘your urinary system is a river’ analogy. The headwaters lie at the beginning of your digestive system, your stomach, and the bladder is a catchment pond at the very end. Your blood and organs lie in between. Everything that your body uses for fuel moves into your blood as a fluid, and then into your organs, and then wastes get filtered out into your bladder.
Just as with any waterway, all the pollution/trash dumped into it at any point is going to end up in the pond, which catches the accumulated poisons of the entire system. Every piece of junk, every ounce of poison that was dropped into that river ends up in the pond.

When you have low stomach acid, your gut is full of Candida, and your blood and organs are full of its 79 different toxins. Add in a diet of processed foods with their assorted chemicals, antibiotics, and hormones, and you’ve got a steady stream of toxic tributaries poisoning the entire river. When you factor in that you’re also probably somewhat dehydrated, meaning the toxins are more concentrated when they reach the bladder, is it any wonder that it’s inflamed and prone to infection?

If you want to clean a pond, you have to clean its water source, and the filters (kidneys). Once trash is no longer being dumped into it upstream, the pond stays clean and the filters perform properly.

To clean all this up and get your river sparkling and your pond healthy, you’ve got to DO these things I talk about all over the blog. All of them. Each is critical. If you’re tinkering around with any of the protocols on the blog and you’ve plateaued and you’re scratching your head, it’s probably because you’re skipping one or more of these things, somehow thinking they don’t apply in your case.
Yer wrong.

Don’t make me pull this car over and force you to do the right thing for your body. My 5 kids have been eating raw garlic for every ailment since they were old enough to chew and swallow. I’ve got a stink-eye that don’t quit, y’all.

1. You need to be sure to drink enough water: Drink 16 oz water with a big squeeze of lemon juice in it (or 16 oz of celery/lemon/ginger root juice) as soon as you wake up in the morning, and then drink 6-8 oz water every time you pee after that. (But no water within 30 minutes of a meal) Your river just became less polluted simply by increasing its volume of water. Drain your pond religiously. Capisce?
2. Check your stomach acid, and supplement with acid every time you eat, if necessary. And it’s very likely necessary. If you have low acid and you aren’t treating it every time you eat, you will not get better.
3. Eat a mostly alkaline-forming and B Vitamin-rich diet. Those foods are anti-inflammatory and bladder-friendly, meaning they won’t burden your system with more irritants/toxins. You’ve just cleaned a major tributary of pollution. Check out “alkaline-forming recipes“, and “B Vitamin-rich foods“. You’ll feel incredible.
4. Cleanse your gut with activated charcoal. This may take you one day of doing a big sweep, or it may take you several weeks of patient erosion with a smaller daily dose, but it’s the best thing you’ll ever do for your body. This one thing not only cleans up about 90% of the poison being dumped into your river every day, it makes it possible to clean up the rest.
   Until you’ve done some major gut cleansing, you won’t be able to clean your blood and organs, because they’re downstream from the gut. First stomach/gut, then blood, then organs, then bladder. You can maintain your clean river by doing one full cleanse 3x a year in the future. Take L-glutamine, DGL, and digestive enzymes if you need them, and probiotics. Links in the Supplies post.
5. Do the full OLE/garlic/cayenne protocol. You can combine the one daily dose of charcoal described in the Q and D Cleanse post with the med schedule in the Phase II post instead of taking charcoal in between meals. (If garlic or cayenne are contraindicated for the particular bacterial strain you have, kill it the other ways listed in the various posts, and then come back and take them when you’re infection-free.)
   The OLE does your body good in so many ways, it would take too long to list them. In addition to killing every bacterial/fungal/viral pathogen known to man, it benefits your blood, your brain, your BP, your cholesterol, your organs…just take it.
   Raw garlic purifies your blood and cleanses your liver: expect dark, sticky stools for the first few days of taking it.
   Cayenne pepper increases the circulation, meaning everything you’re taking is more effective, and all your tissues are receiving more blood flow, meaning more nutrients and oxygen to every cell. It also kills many kinds of noxious bacteria. Bonus!
   Your river just began flowing more swiftly, flushing all the accumulated crud of the decades out of every nook and cranny of your body.

Finally, stop being afraid of your bladder. It’s not a bullying problem child: it’s essentially an abuse victim alerting you to a serious problem that’s been poisoning your life without you even realizing it. It did you a favor, getting infected.

If I hadn’t had this problem, I’d have spent my whole life putting up with chronic headaches, just to name one way Candida was ruining my life. That bladder infection will end up being the best thing that ever happened to you, health-wise, because healing your bladder will restore the health of your whole body.

I’ve put all this information out there to equip you to take charge of your health and kick some serious Engl–er, pathogen tail.

Now GO TO IT!