Studies Into The Benefits Of Liver Detox Diets

April 29th, 2009

Detox diets aren’t the only subject medical science has failed to test. Did you realise that there are no double-blind studies on whether aspirin relieves headache? People simply started using it before the authorities ever required testing. It seemed to work, so they kept using it. But there’s no evidence that they should.

Likewise, there are no double-blind studies on coronary artery surgery. How could there be? A double-blind study requires that no one – neither doctor nor patient – know which group got the real treatment and which got the placebo. Doctors could hardly give coronary patients placebo surgery, so they simply use a treatment they know and trust. In fact, only 30 per cent of medical procedures are supported by double-blind studies, but we’d never expect our doctors to stop using the other 70 per cent.

Fortunately, a few studies into the detox diet have been conducted, primarily by scientists committed to alternative medicine. A study reported in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine tested twenty five otherwise healthy people before and then seven days after they’d undergone a liver detox program. Participants filled out questionnaires and underwent drug challenge tests, procedures whereby they were given small amounts of drugs, including caffeine, to see how quickly the liver could perform its detoxifying function of clearing the foreign substance from the bloodstream.