Re: Problem is I dont know what you can get over there.

I just got back from lunch.

I went into the GNC Vitamins store and they have Sasparilla (Smilax Officianalis).

I went into Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco and asked about Fumitory. Rainbow is a speciality supermarket dealing in Natural products, herbs, vitamins etc and neither of the two guys working in the herbal section had heard of it. So my guess is that Fumitory is not very well known about here. The folk at Rainbow are total eggheads when it comes to natural therapies.

The guys were very helpful though, and have just about everything available in terms of herbs and natural products. They went to a lot of trouble to look it up for me, and one of them phoned a herbalist friend of his to no avail. They started looking through a bunch of herbal references and found it. It's native to Europe and an introduced species in the United States (explains why nobody had heard of it). While they were doing this I found a book on their shelves called "Natural Therapy for your liver" by Christopher Hobbs (he has a website - christopherhobbs.com). Anyway, this book contains the following quote.
Fumitory - "moves bile, antispasmodic for the gallbladder, bile ducts for reducing pain, colic of gallbladder, gallstones"
Anyway, this book is very interesting. It says something similar to what we've been saying here about the Liver Flush. Quoting from page 32 "I have heard these called gallstones, but they are probably saponified oil," but he adds that he thinks the flush is beneficial and is a good purge for the liver, releasing old emotions and stored up anger.

This is interesting. This explains why I felt so good afterwards. So, in some ways, it's almost irrelevant what the stones are. Perhaps this flush is just a good general tonic for the liver and gallbladder. He also says that it shouldn't be done more than once per year. That concerns me. I was planning on doing them 2 weeks apart.

I noticed in the other part of this (getting quite long!) thread that Midlothiangirl says she got some hard stones out. This is a positive sign. It would be interesting to get these stones tested. Any plans of sending these out for testing Midlothiangirl? Tweet