Dr. Agatha Trash Charcoal #health

I'm constantly amazed as I go from place to place to find the number of remedies that people tell me about. Remedies that are sometimes rather strange, but sometimes they are very interesting, very common, using something that's inexpensive and very easy to obtain. Charcoal is one of those remedies, and while I've known about charcoal for several decades, I constantly find people who are using it in different ways. So we'd like to tell you some of these ways that we have found to use charcoal, and we hope this will be of help to you. We hope you'll stay with us during this program. The following program presents principles designed to promote good health and is not intended to take the place of personalized professional care. The opinions and ideas expressed are those of the speaker. Viewers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions about the information presented. Welcome to Help Yourself to Health, with Dr. Agatha Thrash of Uchee Pines Institute. And now, here's your host, Dr. Thrash. Charcoal is not only inexpensive, it just lasts forever. You can put it in storage, and it just never goes bad. In fact, if you keep it nice and dry, you keep it away from various things that it might absorb, it should be an heirloom, and you can pass it down to your children. But there are some things that make charcoal not a very good thing for us, and the fact that it is messy and black is one of those things. And Dr. Don Miller is going to talk with us a little bit about some of the things having to do with the acquisition of charcoal. What can you tell us about this thing of charcoal? Did you just suddenly find out about it on your own one day? No, I heard it from a pharmaceutical company. I'm sure. Although they're starting to use it. No, it wasn't from a pharmaceutical company. I believe that the great pharmacist, the great doctor, the great physician, the great creator, put something in nature knowing the condition we would be in towards the end of the days. And not just the end of the days, we've been using this treatment for hundreds and thousands of years. I believe that God has placed something special in charcoal that we can use for many, many different things. It's extremely available. I heat my home with wood. I've got a stand-alone fireplace. I put my wood in. I damp it down. At nighttime, in the morning, I open it up. And if I leave it down, like before I left on this trip, I had a nice fire going, damped it down. When I go back and open it up, I'm going to have charcoal, nice pieces of charcoal in my fireplace. I can do it in other ways, and I'll tell you how to make charcoal a little bit later. But it's also readily available in other places. No matter where I go in the world, I find there's charcoal there, especially in developing countries. In Africa, in India, that's how they cook. You'll find people selling charcoal for the very purpose of cooking, but this is good charcoal. Now, in America, you wouldn't want to go to the store and buy some charcoal briquettes because they've got fillers and things to help them burn better. But you just buy this charcoal. I was treating a man in India one time with it, and it worked very, very nicely. You know, when we have all these forest fires in different parts of the world, we've had many here in the United States, that charcoal can be very helpful in other things. I heard of a case not long ago of them taking the trees that had been charred by the fires and a lot of charcoal laying around, and started piling it at the base of other trees in other areas that were dying from some unknown reason, acid rain, some type of a blight. And they find that the charcoal piled around the base of the tree is restoring them to health. So God gave us charcoal, not just for the benefit of man, but for all of his nature. It is a very, very nice treatment. And whereas we're not going to talk about 101 treatments today, because there's a whole lot more than that, there are many, many more. And we're going to talk about some of these. Dr. Thrash, do you have some more? Well, I have one thing that I'd like to say about the drawbacks of charcoal. When I talk about drugs, I have some drawbacks that are sometimes even life-threatening. But apart from an accident when you might fall face down in charcoal powder, there aren't a lot of drawbacks that are threatening to your health. But there are some drawbacks in the use of charcoal. One is that of mixing it with water. When you try to mix charcoal with water, you find it's an extremely light powder. Even getting it from the canister into a glass of water sometimes gives you a lot of problems. You may spill a little bit on the way, or you may have some problem in stirring it up as you begin to stir. If you stir too fast, it's going to be all over because it's such a light powder. It just becomes airborne immediately. So in order to make it more easily miscible with water, just mix something like flaxseed with it, or some sorbitol with it. It's sometimes mixed with sorbitol in emergency rooms to make patients who are poisoned find it more acceptable. But if you mix it with that, then you can much more easily stir it up. But one of the best ways to mix it is to put it with the water in a little jar with a screw cap, put it on quite tightly, and then just shake it back and forth this way, and it will much more easily get wet. It's the getting of it wet that's the thing. It's certainly not a good wetting agent. Now another of its drawbacks is that children don't tend to like it. They don't like the fact that it's black. They don't like the fact that it has a consistency in the mouth that they don't like. But for small children, we're trying to get one to take the charcoal. They simply look at it and decide that's not for me. So then ensues a struggle with the mother. But if you'll just call grandmother, grandmothers know how to get children to take charcoal or any other kind of thing they don't want to take down. It generally means that you need to hold the head still, and that can be done by putting both arms right up by the ears and making the fixing the head with that. In fact, with a child you can bring their forearms over the head, and that fixes the head so that they can't move. One person can usually do that with the head fixed in that way. Then another person holds the body down, and grandmother stirs the charcoal and puts it by the spoonful into the child's mouth. Now for a little older child, if they are accustomed to drinking things from a straw, if you've got an opaque container of some kind, and you put a straw in it and put a cover on it so that they can't see that it's black and unpleasant looking, then hand it to them and tell them to drink this down. Now if you've got a little fruit juice mixed with it, that will often make it much more acceptable to the child. So these are some things that will help to to relieve these not very good ways of handling charcoal, but so far as any drawbacks in the body, the only one that we have really is that it does slow down the bowels a little so that a bowel movement is a little more sluggish than is normal. Some people will try to get over that drawback by mixing a little magnesium sulfate or epsom salts with it, and in this way make it so that the person can get get it through the intestinal tract a little quicker. Unfortunately with the epsom salts, you mix it with water and then it doesn't taste good. So you've got two things that are unpleasant, the charcoal and the epsom salts. You can just mix the, just put the epsom salts on the back of the tongue, swallow that down with a little water, and then drink the charcoal in the water. Don't let it enter your mind that you can take that charcoal powder just dry. That, well it can be done, but it requires a determination to do it, and you can only take it in very small quantities. But one time I was in Mexico and needed to take some charcoal for a little food poisoning that I had gotten, and I was, I managed to get some down dry by taking very small quantities and mixing it with saliva and then swallowing it down. But most of the time, remember that charcoal needs to be mixed with a goodly quantity of water. The more water you have, the easier it is to pass through the intestinal tract. Now, Don Miller is going to talk with you about another of the wonderful properties of charcoal, just wonderful properties, and that's its deodorizing properties. Thank you. You know, we were going to Ukraine, I think it was 1995, Dr. Thrash and a small team from Yuchi Pines. We left one morning in a van and we had our food with us. We drove all the way up to Washington area. We spent the night and left the next day, and what we're going to do is leave the van there and then I would come back a couple of months later and drive the van back. They would have come back a month and a half earlier than I did. Made a mistake. When I took the van, someone else drove us to the airport so they could take the van back to an area. I still had my cooler in the van with food in it. Now, we left for Ukraine, as I remember, around the 14th of June. I got back the very end of August. I get into the van, I open up my cooler, and you can imagine what it was like for a cooler to be sitting through the summer, hot summer months in Washington area, the Maryland, Northern Virginia area for that period of time. It was putrid inside that cooler. Had to dump it and put the lid right back on. It smelled so bad. I took it home, I scrubbed it, I used all kinds of cleaners. Nothing I could do would get that smell. That smell had permeated the plastic, completely filling this cooler with the smell. And finally, I got the idea, and I got a container and I dumped some charcoal in it. I set it down in the bottom of the cooler, put the lid on, and left it there for quite some time. After that was done, took the lid off, took the charcoal out, and the cooler smelled perfectly normal again. I do this every once in a while, and now when I travel with my cooler, I will take a salt shaker, I will put some charcoal in the salt shaker, put the lid on, and I will place this in the cooler just to take up any smells that might be emanating from the foods so that I don't have anything that cross-contaminates as far as smells. It's a very nice idea. I meant to mention earlier, when I was talking about the divine properties of charcoal, God has made it in such a way that it takes up just the bad guys. Now, in saying that, one of the other drawbacks that Dr. Thrash did not mention in charcoal is that it will take up medications, because it recognizes these things as foreign poisons in the body. So if you're taking blood pressure medications, which are synthetic somehow, rather than taking a natural product, the charcoal will take up that medication. The same thing for heart medication, the same thing for medicine for epilepsy. So if you're going to be taking medications, and you receive a time it takes for the drug that you're taking to be absorbed by your body, and then you want to take the charcoal so that it can absorb the properties of whatever's giving you your stomach upset, your food poisoning, whatever. So very nice. I know one time, I was in Dr. Thrash's office there at Uchee Pines, and I had been working underneath the office, shoring up part of the floor that for some reason was starting to sag. I came back out and left it open. Well, some days later, I came by and said, oh, I left the door open. And so I put a piece of something in front of that and put some weight up against it to keep animals from going in there. Trouble was, I did not check underneath there to make sure that an animal had not already gone underneath there. Well, about two weeks later, Dr. Thrash's son, whose office also was in this building, started complaining about a pretty bad smell. And I knew what had happened. And so I says, Cal, I says, don't you worry about it. It's my fault. I'll do it. Went underneath there, and a wild animal had been underneath there. It had expired. Thankfully, on top of a piece of roofing. So I was able to drag it out, but it still smelled absolutely horrible. Just to get underneath there, I didn't want to smell it. And so I took a piece of cloth, I sprinkled charcoal on it, I rolled it up, and I placed that as a mask over my nose. So I really couldn't smell when I was under there. Then I went back under after I had the animal out, took a jar of charcoal, and just sort of threw it, just sort of pushed this big black cloud over the area where the animal was. And the next day, you could not smell it. It's a great absorptive of odors that are in the air. And so if you have any smelly areas, I suggest you take a salt shaker with charcoal and keep it in your refrigerator. If you have a child that just always keeps his smelly sneakers in the closet, put a container of charcoal in there. It will take up these odors. Any place you have an odor problem, it'll take up the odors. How about bad breath? Take a toothbrush, get it wet, dip it in some charcoal, brush your teeth. Again, it will take up the odors that are in your mouth. And then rather than spinning it out, swallow it. If you have any other problems going down the line, it will help take up things that are causing bad odors. And so I think one of the great properties, Dr. Thrasse, of charcoal is the fact that it absorbs odors. Yes, and I was just looking at the great list of things that are already known that charcoal takes up. We have this little book called Rx Charcoal, which is the clinical uses of charcoal. And on certain occasions, it's necessary to find out just what can be absorbed by charcoal. So I was just looking here and I found two columns here of chemicals that can be taken up by charcoal. The very first one on the list is acetaminophen or Tylenol. People often take Tylenol enough to become intoxicated with it. And when they do, the treatment of choice probably is that of charcoal because it so readily takes up Tylenol. But then a lot of other things, narcotics and arsenic, aspirin, barbiturates, just a host of things can be taken up by charcoal. Even after, even a while after you have taken a poisonous substance, charcoal can still take it up from the intestinal tract in some instances. And I'd like to draw on the board for you a little diagram that will help you to see how it is that charcoal helps with the taking up of things that are already in your bloodstream. Let's just say that this represents an intestinal villus for you. Here it is, like this. It's in your intestinal tract. And on the inside, there are all manner of little blood vessels that supply blood to the area to take up anything that's inside the intestinal tract. And this is a normal pattern for the way that the intestinal tract looks. Now if you have charcoal, and I will just put it, I will just represent it as this blue line here. Charcoal is, you have taken it and the granules are passing by in the intestinal tract. This is where the food is going by and here is the wall of the intestinal tract here. As the charcoal goes by, of course things that are in the blood, not only is the blood taking up things that are going this way, but the blood is also oozing out in this way. So it usually comes out from the bloodstream, makes a circle around and comes back in having picked up something that was in the intestinal tract, nutrients or drugs or whatever. So if you have charcoal here and when this transit is made from the bloodstream to the outside to go back in again, whatever is in the blood can then be taken up by the charcoal. Essentially you could call this a mini-dialysis. So a person who has taken some kind of poison or drug even hours ago, when the person takes the charcoal it will still remove from the blood a lot of the poisonous substance. So this is the kind of thing that we find in what we call the micro-dialysis function of charcoal. Now you might wonder, is it possible for me to make charcoal myself in my own home? Dr. Miller mentioned the fact that it could be that it could be made in a forest or that it could be made in his wood stove, but is there another way that you can make charcoal? Well I'm going to say yes and I'm going to say about two ways. A good way and a bad way. One, you can sit there and put your toast in your toaster, turn it all the way up until it becomes black and you've made what you think is charcoal. Don't eat it, don't eat scorched food. That is carcinogenic because it produces properties when you scorch proteins and carbohydrates and minerals which are not healthy. But you can very easily make charcoal. So we're going to go back over to the board. I've erased the intestinal tract here and we're going to do a very simple illustration. What you do is you go out in your backyard and you dig a hole. How big of a hole? How much charcoal do you want? I like to dig a rather large hole and then inside the hole I will stick some wood. You want to get some fresh wood. You don't want to get wood that has been treated, you know, green wood, treated green wood, painted wood, shellacked wood. You want to get wild wood and you want to get it rather dry. You don't want to get wood you just broke off a tree because it's going to have a hard time burning. And you fill this hole up with the wood and then you set it on fire. Get a good fire burning. I mean a really good fire burning until you have a good layer of hot coals at the bottom, still fire going, and you build the fire up until you have a blazing fire going, well consuming the wood. Now if you keep it going it will completely consume or almost completely consume the wood. But when you know you have this wood extremely well ignited, not just burning a little bit but really going well, what you want to do is find some type of a covering to cover this hole with. You can use a piece of tin, the hood of an old car, something that will cover the hole completely to block off the air. And then what I will normally do is I will pile the dirt that I took out of the hole on top of this thing. It will sort of insulate it, keep all the heat inside. You need three things to have a fire. One, you need fuel. You've got your fuel in your wood. You also need oxygen and you had that in there when you started the fire. And you also need heat which you got when you started the fire. Now as your wood is in there it will start to consume the oxygen, quite frankly do it quite quickly, but the heat is so high it will still continue to eat away at the wood. I would leave it here for at least a day if not two days depending on how big your fire was. At the end of this time you come out and you lift up this piece of metal and just throw everything aside and inside you should have some very nice charcoal. It should be very light. The lighter the better because that means it's more fully consumed. Often you will find pieces in there that have still white wood inside. Just take the outside but you don't want to get down there where it's sort of hard to have to dig it off. You want stuff that's just pure light charcoal. You take this, you put it in a jar. It's important that you put it in a jar because of the fact that charcoal is so absorptive that it will start taking up odors and you'll start taking up things as soon as you take the lid off. You want to put it inside a jar, put a lid on tightly, and save all of its surface area for the time when you're going to need it for some other event like a gastrointestinal event, like a mouth, whatever you want to use it for. And you can powder it at the first or you can sit there and powder it later on. Whatever you want to do, powder it when you need it. Powder it right away. I would powder it right away because you might need something when it's time for charcoal you need it right away. And so Dr. Thrash, I know you've had times you need a charcoal right now and it's good to have it ready to go. I always have charcoal on hand. Charcoal is so needed when and you need it right now. Poison control centers are listed in the book that we wrote on the clinical uses of charcoal and all the poison, all the regional poison control centers in the United States are listed here in this little book. There are seven of those, seven states that have regional poison control centers. And when I need to talk with poison control, I usually call the regional center rather than some of the local centers because they're often better manned and you can get better information from that. I mentioned that acetaminophen, the treatment of choice for that was charcoal. But if you call a local poison control center, they may tell you that there is a drug that's better for it and that's mucormyst. So I don't usually call the local ones but call the regional ones. I don't want my patient to have to buy a drug if I can get by with it. If charcoal is just as good, it's so inexpensive that we should go that route if we can. Now for other things, it's the treatment of choice like nausea and vomiting and diarrhea. The treatment of choice is always charcoal as a first aid measure. Then later you may have to go to something else. There are also odors that develop in the mouth because of one reason or other and Dr. Miller is going to mention some of these now. Okay, very easy to take care of those too. Again, you take some charcoal and you can do it two ways. You can just take charcoal, wet your toothbrush, put it in the powder, and brush your teeth. Now you go to a store nowadays and you've got a whole new panorama of tooth whitening agents. You can make these different things, put it in your teeth and put it in there and leave it there for so long, put strips on your teeth. Why don't you just brush your teeth with charcoal? Now quite frankly, while you're doing it, it doesn't look like you're doing much for whitening your teeth, but it is a tooth whitener. It is very mildly abrasive. It can clean your teeth quite nicely. But another way you can do it is take some charcoal, mix it with some water to make a little paste, and you can put that on there just like toothpaste and you can brush your teeth. Now besides the whitening effect, because the charcoal is absorbing odors, it can do very nicely in taking up any odors that are in your mouth, any pockets of infection. Matter of fact, you would want to do this if you have an infection in your mouth, brush your teeth at night with this charcoal and then don't spit it out. Leave it in your mouth. As a matter of fact, leave a large amount of the paste down between your cheeks and your gums, up and above, up and below, and during the night that will be pulling out. And if you have any types of problems like this, an infection in your jaws, it's going to cause some odor. Smelling between the teeth, if you have any decomposing things between your teeth, is a good way to find out pretty much what your breath smells like. You know, you can't sit there, some people breathe into their hand, all you're smelling is your hand. Get yourself a pine needle, a toothpick, a brush pick, something that will, or even a piece of your dental floss, floss between the tooth, bring it out, and then smell it. That's what your breath smells like. And if it smells bad, charcoal outside will help take up that odor. It will also help you with any types of throat infections and any types of problems back in your throat that could also be causing some disorder, and so, odor. And so put this in your mouth, it will help clean up the infections, it will help clear out the problems, whiten your teeth, and then swallow the whole thing in the morning. You have a good transit time marker, clean out your system, see if you have any problems down there. Some nice things to do with charcoal, there's probably a whole lot more you can do in the mouth, but that should be enough for right, that's a mouthful right now. Those are very good tips on what to do with charcoal in the mouth. You can also swallow it as a detoxifying agent if you think that you might have encountered some kind of toxin, and it will take up most kinds of toxins, just adsorbs it, takes it out of the body in a harmless way. We learned one time a use for charcoal in a very accidental way. We had a baby born at Uchee Pines with, that developed very shortly, the jaundice of the newborn. The little family were very poor, they didn't have the money for all the exchange transfusions and the testing that needed to be done, but I felt like I could not handle the case unless I could get a lab test every six hours. So we were going in every six hours, finally the mother said, don't you have anything here at this place that has natural remedies that can help my baby? She wept when she said it, so I said, well honey the only thing that I can think of to try is charcoal, and that day we learned something because the moment that she started giving the baby the charcoal, that very moment the lab test starting, started correcting, and we didn't have to do the exchange transfusion on the baby. It was later that we learned that standard medicine had also learned that little trick. Wonderful medicine, charcoal.