Interviewer:  I want to talk a little bit about that you talk about liver congestion.

Robert Scott Bell, D.A. Hom. Yes.

Interviewer:  Talk about what that is.  How does somebody know if they have it?  Then go into detoxification . . .

Robert Scott Bell, D.A. Hom. Yes.

Interviewer:  . . . what's a good way to do that?

Robert Scott Bell, D.A. Hom.: My simple diagnostic question for those that want to know if they have liver congestion is, are you ready? Are you breathing?  The answer is yes?

Interviewer:  Yes.

Robert Scott Bell, D.A. Hom.: Okay, we've got to work on your level. Now, the reason I say that is because we're living in a toxic world that is much radically different since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. We've added things to the environment from a petrochemical perspective and from a waste toxin perspective.  That, coupled with additives, preservatives, flavorings, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides that are injected, inhales or ingested . . .

Interviewer:  Eaten, yeah.

Robert Scott Bell, D.A. Hom.: . . . all of these things work to, and it's not one thing at parts per million.  If it were, we could deal with it.  In fact, we're dealing with parts per million of millions of things, and we're alive.  Now, we're not in great health because now it's normal for a kid to have a chronic disease, like I had.  It wasn't as normal then, and in my parent's generation it wasn't normal at all.  It was radically weird.  Now it's very typical for a kid to have asthma, attention deficit, and allergies are commonplace.  We can go on and on, even with arthritic conditions, like I had.  We are seeing rheumatoid arthritis in children, autoimmune conditions.

All of these things start, like Chinese medicine has been saying for about 5,000 years.  That's all.  They've been saying for 5,000 years the liver is the key to everything; the key to all healing.  Now if the liver is supposed to work here, and it's working here, that's not off a lot, but all disease, any disease, becomes possible, even at that level. The fact is most Americans may be even much lower than that, and it becomes more severe.  Yet, everything we do to address disease in a Western allopathic set up or system, is to put poisons into the body to suppress the symptoms.  They're telling us our liver is not working. Of course, by doing that, we increase the burden on the liver, and it functions even less and less. We overwhelm it even more and more. The whole concept of shooting out the warning light, right, they talk about, "Well, you engine light goes on and says check the engine!"  A doctor would be the equivalent to saying, "Let's just unplug it or just shoot it out" with a drug.  Of course, now you're fine and go on your merry way.  The light is gone, and that's the whole idea of suppressing symptoms. We don't do that as homeopaths, or anybody in a natural realm.  It isn't that we can't relieve your suffering, we can along the way, but not in the same way.

With liver congestion, how do you know besides the question, are you breathing?

Interviewer:  Yeah.

Robert Scott Bell, D.A. Hom.: Do you have headaches?  Do you have digestive problems?  Do you have congestion?  Do you have sinus issues?  Do you have allergies?  Do you have fatigue?  Are you fatigued?  It's not just a lack of caffeine.

Interviewer:  Right.

Robert Scott Bell, D.A. Hom.: These are all signs of liver congestion, but you don't get that from the doctor because by the time they recognize there's a liver problem, you probably have hepatitis or cirrhosis.  They don't recognize congestion, mild congestion.  They don't have a tool for it, and they don't promote detoxification.  They think it's crazy when I talk in terms of detoxification.  "Oh that's only for old people who are drug addicts."  What?  You know, our liver, is it just the spring, you know right, we do our spring cleanses. The liver doesn't work the rest of the year.  We just do a spring clean.  It's all the time, and yet everything we do everyday seems to abuse it.

From a homeopathic perspective, I utilize drainage remedies, which is the French word for drainage, which sounds really great.  If you're a plumber in France you work with drainage, right?  It's really exotic. It's drainage here if you're a plumber.  Here we're talking about working with accelerating or restoring, not hyper-stimulating, right? We want to get it back to where it is.  I'll work with remedies like brionia, alba, nux vomica, cheledonium, and there are many others, like taraxacum which is the dandelion.  There are equivalents in the herbal plant kingdom as well.  There are also supplemental remedies. When we talk about the most important trace mineral for the liver, we talk about selenium which is important for many things.

Again, I come back to whole food forms of these supplements as opposed to what are called this USP isolates.  That was the big thing, and I recognize that you can use them to some benefit, but to some degree, if you use too much of the wrong kind of even a supplement it can be harmful.  The whole food form is not so.  I typically will advise 200 micrograms of a whole food form of selenium every day as a preventive maintenance, and I've seen using more of it safely without getting seleno-toxic via the right form in cases of severe immune compromise, severe liver dysfunction.  Upwards of levels that I won't say here, but suffice it to say it's a very good medicine, but Jonathan Emord, my friend who has beaten the FDA seven times now, over selenium.  The Fear and Death Administration is what I call them.  They don't want you to know that selenium counteracts, prevents and reverses cancer, for instance, but selenium is important.

I mention the GTF chromium plays a role in liver function as well. Here's one thing, we love to drink coffee.  How about putting it in the other end?  The use of coffee enemas or green tea enemas is something that is the most powerful medicine on the planet.  My dear friend, Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez, one of the top medical doctors for cancer therapy, pancreatic cancer, advises his patients that the first thing he's doing is these coffee enemas because it's delivering caffeine not to the adrenals but to the liver to stimulate the bile ducts to open and dump the toxins right back out into the colon for immediate elimination.

We're dealing with diseases of toxicity, deficiency and inflammation, all related to the same thing.  If we don't correct the liver first and foremost, along with congested intestines, we're putting the cart before the horse as far as healing is concerned, and we don't recognize that all of those disparate symptoms come back to that liver that we abuse so readily here in the West.