by Paul Fassa
Health Impact News
Surgically removing gallbladders has become big business for surgeons. There are around 750,000 surgeries for removing gall bladders in the USA each year. It’s estimated that 10 to 15 percent are emergency removals that are almost life or death necessities. The other 85 to 90 percent, are elective.
Those who complain about pains under the right side of the rib cage or are experiencing digestion and/or elimination issues can be diagnosed with gallstones after further examination. The diagnosis explains the pains and digestive issues, but mainstream medicine usually has one solution: have them surgically removed in order to no longer have gallstones or other gallbladder issues.
The medical advice given to those who undergo operations to have gallbladders removed is that the gallbladder is not a necessary organ. They say it’s not needed and it’s causing you problems so why not cut it out?
The gallbladder is not a bad tooth. Its contribution to digestion and ultimately to homeostatic metabolism is actually very significant.
Gallbladder Functions
The gallbladder is part of the liver and digestive operation. It is a small sack connected under the much larger liver. It shares a bile duct with the liver that injects bile into the duodenum [1], the gateway from the stomach to the small intestines. This shared bile duct is known as the common bile duct.
The duodenum is a short tube that connects from the stomach to the small intestines, after stomach acids break down food recently eaten into a mushy solution of small pieces called chyme. The other shared part of the common bile duct directs bile into the gallbladder, which stores and concentrates the bile as needed by the duodenum to inject into the small intestines.
The liver is credited with creating bile, but the process begins initially from a chemical adaptation of cholesterol that creates two primary bile acids, which the liver modifies further into some other acids that includes the creation of bile salts. The purpose of bile is to break down fats to enable digestion and metabolism of fatty acids.
This process is non-stop with the liver under normal circumstances. But it’s easy to see how bile shortages can occur with liver health issues. The potential for adverse health consequences that often occur after removing the gallbladder are even worse.
When there is no storage that can easily be tapped for bile, for what the gastrointestinal tract (GI tract) needs, bile distribution can run amuck and cause some rather nasty outcomes. Bile is needed to digest fats.
After reviewing a few educational sites on this topic where comment sections wound up being chat sites or bulletin boards, it seemed for every one successful post-gallbladder removal (cholecystectomy) commentary there were five complaints of varying intensity.
And even most of the successful ones were on some sort of medication or taking bile salts and avoiding certain foods. And it’s certain that among them, some had very little experience of good health to even know the difference.
External bile replacements don’t duplicate the mixture of enzymes involved with bile created from our livers. Enzymes are considered the most important nutrients behind water and oxygen. Without them very little will happen metabolically with minerals and vitamins and our digestive capacity is hampered.
Removing an organ that is vital for digesting fats and leaving the liver’s bile production to flow freely into the rest of the GI tract is a foolish solution to gallbladder stone complaints that can be remedied naturally in several ways.
How Gallstones are Formed
The most common type of gallstone is called a cholesterol gallstone. It has a yellow-green color. Some health writers and practitioners claim the greenish particles eliminated with a gallstone purge are caused by the agent used for the flush or are simply undigested fat globules not stones.
But the gallbladder is not where fat is digested. It’s where bile is concentrated and stored for distribution on demand into the small intestine through the duodenum.
Another perspective is that gallstones are clumps of cholesterol. Although the process of creating bile does involve cholesterol initially, this seems another effort at vilifying cholesterol, an easy scapegoat for medical and nutritional dogma.
Since bile is the result of several biochemical alterations, perhaps somewhere along the line of creating bile something didn’t go right. At any rate, those greenish-yellowish chunks of matter that can be eliminated with a gallstone purge are gallstones, not fats from the virgin cold pressed olive oil used for a purge that is explained in this earlier Health Impact News article [2].
Pigment gallstones are dark brown or black stones that form when your bile contains too much bilirubin [3] that comes from broken down red blood cells. These are much less common and are usually found among those with serious liver diseases like cirrhosis.
Mainstream Medical Treatments
Gallstones that get caught in the common bile duct are more dangerous and painful than gallstones in the gallbladder. They can be removed without cutting, (through the abdomen), and throwing out the gallbladder, by a skilled physician trained in endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP).
With ERCP, the doctor inserts an endoscope through your mouth down to the small intestine and through the duodenum to inject a dye, allowing the bile ducts to be seen. He can then often remove any gallstones that have moved into the ducts. Anesthesia is involved of course.
Since the gallbladder is considered unnecessary by mainstream medicine and not all MDs are trained to perform ERCP, the gallbladder is usually completely removed surgically. More advanced surgical procedures allow patients to leave after a one night stay, while the older methods will force one’s hospital stay to last a few days. (Source) [4]
Among post-gallbladder removal patients, many experience uncontrollable diarrhea that alternates with constipation, variations of IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), and food digestive issues. These challenges are often responded to medically with pharmaceutical bile acid sequestrants [5].
These drugs are actually cholesterol reducing, but some can be prescribed off label for absorbing excess bile in places where it shouldn’t be. One drug commonly prescribed for those now without gallbladders, Welchol, has side effects and runs around $600 for 180 tablets that are taken in various quantities ranging from two a day to six or eight.
Those whose overall health condition is enough to make surgery a definite personal hazard are prescribed various pharmaceuticals that are meant to dissolve the stones. These pharmaceutical drugs [6] are not very effective and carry their fair share of side effects.
Healing the Gallbladder Naturally Without Surgical Intervention
Unless there is a life or death emergency involving the gallbladder, it’s not necessary to go through any of these invasive procedures. A gallstone flush, often mistakenly called a liver cleanse, is something anyone can do. Details are explained in an earlier Health Impact News article. See:
Save Your Gallbladder! Natural Alternatives to Surgery [2]
Read it carefully and use the embedded links within the article that connect to other versions of the gallbladder flush. The lower half of that same article also describes herbal solutions to eliminate or help eliminate gallstones without using harsh pharmaceutical chemicals that have side effects. It’s all here. [2]
Dietary remedies include abstaining from processed foods, fast foods, and unhealthy trans fatty hydrogenated fats, while incorporating more healthy whole fats into the diet. Fatty acids from healthy fat sources, whether vegetable, fruit, or livestock, are needed by our bodies. (Sources) [7]