Bile and Your Health
Understanding the Role of the Liver and Gallbladder in Your Overall Health
Did You Know Gallbladder Issues Can Manifest in Certain Types of Head, Shoulder and Outer Leg Aches and Pains?
Below is the chapter on the Magic Bile taken from Dr. Sean Woods’ book, “The Healing Vibe.”
There is not one organ of digestion which can be deemed more important than another because they all work harmoniously with each other. Yet there are digestive organs that we can live without. People have lived without their stomach, spleen, gallbladder, small intestine, and large intestine. The two digestive organs I have not seen people live without are the liver and the pancreas.
Correction and cleaning of the liver is vital because the liver is the foundation of your health. There are a few interesting facts about the liver that you should keep in mind as we build this picture of health because it is critical to your health. I tell patients all the time, “Do you know why they call it the liver? Because it makes you live.”
The first unique feature of the liver is that it can create just about anything the body needs to keep functioning. The liver is also our largest filter for collecting waste and safely packaging the waste in bile for removal through the intestines. Also, when the liver is diseased it can regenerate itself when cleaned properly and fed the right nutrients. When you heal the liver, you can get all the other organs back in line and doing their job.
Although the liver is always vital to healthy body function, most times another organ needs to be corrected and cleaned before the liver can revitalize and heal itself. This is an important concept to remember because it will help determine what kind of supplements you should start with to begin the cleaning of your digestive organs. For example, if a person is dealing with chronic constipation you can’t just start giving supplements to clean a liver because it will add to the congestion that already exists within the bowels. The priority in most cases is to ensure the bowels are cleaned up and moving well daily before any major liver or gallbladder cleaning can occur.
When the liver is congested it stops producing healthy bile and this breakdown is the first sign that the body is in trouble. Bile is the magic fluid made by the liver that keeps everything moving in the body and prevents the buildup of plaque throughout the systems. The liver will make up to a quart of vibrant green bile a day when healthy and make dark sludge when it is not. It uses extensive pathways called bile ducts to keep the gallbladder full of bile and ready to squeeze into the small intestine whenever needed.
There are salts that make up a large part of bile and are essential to the entire workings of the digestive tract, the lymph system, and the meridian channels. The salts are responsible for the movement of materials in and out of the cells and for the movement of fluids through our systems. A great example of salt creating movement is in the oceans, and just like the human body, it is the salt content that is partly responsible for the currents that keep the ocean alive.
Bile can get nasty fast when someone’s diet is filled with acidic foods created from both good and bad food choices. Foods that require large amounts of our digestive juices eventually dry these fluids up. Bile gets thick and can form all types of stones and sludge that cause blockage in the liver as well as the biliary ducts. In my opinion, the most critical junction of the body is where the stomach, pancreas, gallbladder, and small intestine meet. This junction is just past the pyloric valve at the Sphincter of Oddi. The body gives off many symptoms other than a direct gallbladder attack when this junction malfunctions. It is at this junction in which the body ‘knows’ what food is there and ‘knows’ the correct amount of digestive juices to secrete. When this junction gets congested, food never gets digested properly, and this leads to the malfunctioning of these organs and eventually the very problems you are having.
Bile has several distinct and important roles in digestion. One important job of bile is to raise the Ph of the stomach contents as they enter the small intestine. The contents of the stomach are a low Ph around 3 and would burn the small intestine without the high alkalinity of bile to help neutralize the food coming in through the pyloric valve.
This high alkalinity is a must for the small intestine because the enzymes needed for proper breakdown of food only work in Ph’s of 7 and low 8’s. If you are not familiar with the concept of Ph, we will be covering it soon.
Bile also acts as a major astringent to the breakdown of our foods, especially fats, and digestion does not happen naturally without it. Remember, undigested food that sits in the GI tract is nothing but trouble. This situation attracts disease causing bugs, leaky gut syndromes, irritable bowel, bloating, acid reflux, and diverticulitis, and this is just touching the surface of all the potential problems.
These bile acids have been studied to have lifesaving antimicrobial and antifungal properties. Without the bile acids to help create normal digestive Ph’s, the bugs we don’t want around can flourish, putting our immune system on constant alert. The establishment of a healthy gut microbiome is the cornerstone of the health of the human body and without healthy bile, it can never be achieved.
Emotionally the gallbladder is the seat of frustration, resentment, and indecisiveness when congested. When healthy, it expresses initiative, sound sleep, creativity, and planning. When looking at the meridian chart it makes a lot of sense as part of the gallbladder meridians cover both sides of the brain with dozens of acupuncture points.
Scientific research has shown that the right side of the brain creates, and the left side sees that it gets done. When these two processes get imbalanced, the human experience becomes frustrating. You can never stop creating; it is human nature, whether you are painting a picture, creating at work, or continuously creating a relationship with yourself or others. Learning to catch yourself in an emotional pattern of unwanted creations, and then working your way up the emotional scale is imperative to getting frustration, or any other negative emotion, under control. Long term frustration leads to resentment and anger when you keep looking for someone or something to make you happy and they don’t.
When frustration is being felt emotionally, the gallbladder must physically start acting like frustration also. This feels like gas, bloating, constipation, migraines, and nausea. Gallbladder congestion leads directly to liver congestion and explains how unchecked frustration eventually leads to anger, resentment, and depression. I can easily palpate gallbladder pressure in a patient and find corresponding physical manifestations in the head, shoulder, and outer leg that are tight, inflamed, and stuck. When we fix the gallbladder, the other physical and emotional fixations dramatically improve. The things necessary to improve gallbladder function by thinning bile and breaking down stone formation include the inorganic cell salts, the fat-soluble B vitamins, herbs, fruits, and vegetables.