Wonderfully Made

Medicinal Charcoal Pt.1

Three Angels Broadcasting Network

Program transcript

Participants: Christine Salter, John Dinsley

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Series Code: WM

Program Code: WM000370


00:35 Hello, and welcome to Wonderfully Made.
00:37 My name is Dr. Christine Salter,
00:39 I am Board Certified in Family Medicine
00:42 in a private practice in St. Louis, Missouri.
00:44 Today we are going to be discussing a simple home remedy
00:49 called activated charcoal.
00:51 Mr. John Dinsley was our guest, has written a book about this.
00:54 Welcome John!
00:56 It is a real pleasure to be here with you today Dr. Salter,
00:59 I'm going to enjoy this.
01:01 Tell me, why did you write a book about charcoal?
01:05 Well, it is a good question, a lot of people do ask me that
01:08 and it goes back a few years, thirty some years ago.
01:10 Well not quite thirty.
01:11 I decided to hike around the world and on my adventures I
01:16 wandered into a small medical clinic in Guatemala
01:20 and there was a physician and his family who were working
01:23 and living there.
01:24 The Dr. Graves was a Board Certified California physician,
01:28 he was a graduate of Loma Linda University.
01:31 They had an amazing lifestyle which fascinated me,
01:35 one of the things that really captivated my attention was
01:37 their use of natural medicine, Natural Remedies.
01:42 Simple Remedies! - Simple, very simple!
01:44 You see a lot of the patients that came to the clinic
01:47 lived back in the mountains and they really didn't have
01:50 good access to the clinic and so the doctor tried to equip them
01:53 with things that they could use when they went back
01:55 to their villages.
01:57 So what impressed you about this particular village,
02:01 and what this physician was doing?
02:03 Well, again the natural medicine,
02:07 in the University I had an interest in Science and Biology
02:11 and I had taken a break from that, and I wanted to
02:15 explore the world.
02:16 But here was such a new idea to think about using
02:19 simple natural remedies.
02:21 I was used to going to a hospital, to an Emergency Room
02:26 visiting my doctor in a nice office back in America,
02:31 and this was a completely different setting
02:33 and one day I remember clearly, we were right along the
02:37 the Pan American Highway, and a bus stopped and these parents
02:41 came in rushing with this young child in their arms
02:45 obviously unconscious and convulsing.
02:48 The doctor immediately assessed the situation,
02:51 decided it was some form of food poisoning,
02:54 had the parents remove the blouse and he mixed up this
02:58 black stuff, this paste, and he smeared it all over her
03:02 belly and within 15 minutes the girl was resting quietly
03:08 and I thought Black Magic.
03:12 What was that black stuff?
03:14 Well, believe it or not, it was charcoal.
03:17 Now a lot of people say, so you mean charcoal briquettes?
03:21 No, it's not charcoal briquettes!
03:23 In this particular instance it was just ground up charcoal.
03:27 But what we are going to be talking about today is
03:31 medicinal charcoal, or activated gray charcoal.
03:34 Please tell our audience what you mean by activated charcoal.
03:38 Well, we start off with the raw product charcoal,
03:43 the leftovers from your camp fire, from your wood stove,
03:48 it is basically just carbon.
03:51 Most of the other products have been burned off,
03:53 it's been basically dehydrated and you have this charcoal.
03:59 Now when you activate charcoal you actually take that
04:02 raw product again and you heat it back up to a high temperature
04:07 say 800 degrees Celsius, and then you subject it to air
04:12 or maybe steam under pressure, and this erodes the
04:16 internal structure, the fabric of this charcoal particle,
04:20 and it gives us this tremendous surface area.
04:23 So that is what activated charcoal means.
04:27 Ok, so I know that in the Emergency Room,
04:30 the standard dose of activated charcoal,
04:33 which is 50 grams, that is actually the equivalent to
04:36 the size of 10 football fields.
04:38 Well, it is, it is absolutely amazing, this internal network,
04:43 this lattice work if you want, of the charcoal,
04:47 and maybe we could throw up on our screen a picture of
04:51 charcoal powder and you can see how really fine it is.
04:55 Charcoal is actually made from a number of different products,
04:58 I should say activated charcoal.
05:00 It can come from hard woods, it can come from olive pits,
05:08 or bamboo, or coconut.
05:09 There are many different sources for the initial product,
05:12 and then the activated.
05:14 You can see on the screen here that it is very very fine.
05:17 If you want to take a look at the next one,
05:19 we have actually an electron micrographic picture
05:22 of a charcoal particle. - Ok!
05:24 On this one, even this very very minute particle you can
05:29 on this picture how much surface area there is there.
05:34 Now you can imagine taking 50 grams of that and
05:37 unfolding this and you can see the tremendous surface area
05:41 and it is that surface area that accounts for some of that
05:45 amazing qualities that charcoal has.
05:47 Well, actually the American Academy of Pediatrics
05:51 put out a physicians statement in 2003 that said
05:54 Activated Charcoal was the best intervention for reducing
05:59 the availability of ingested substances,
06:02 so we can see from that surface area why it does this.
06:06 Tell me, how far does charcoal go back?
06:09 Well, it has a long history, we can trace it back to
06:13 the 1500 years B.C. - OH!
06:15 Some interesting things back then, they were using it to
06:18 control odors from wounds.
06:20 Eventually they decided if it does so good with
06:25 controlling odors, they discovered lets bury our dead
06:28 in layers of sand and charcoal and was able to preserve
06:31 these dead bodies.
06:32 They had already experimented with posts along the
06:35 River Nile, preserve these dead posts.
06:37 So it preserved them, then moving up to 400 B.C.
06:44 Hippocrates... prescribed charcoal for anthrax,
06:49 and different things in his day, along with Plinni?
06:52 Then it starts moving into the 1700's and the sugar industry
07:01 started using charcoal to whiten sugar.
07:04 The activation process developed in the late 1800's
07:09 and then the use of charcoal literally exploded,
07:13 they were using it for all manner of things.
07:15 All kind of things.
07:16 Maybe we show up on our screen a graphic showing
07:21 some of these different uses of charcoal.
07:24 As I said it goes back to 1500 years B.C.,
07:27 you will see that they were using it for Flatulence
07:30 and Indigestion, that's gas.
07:31 In fact when Europeans came to North America
07:34 they found American Indians using charcoal to control
07:38 Indigestion, but since then of course we found that it
07:42 works very well for Nausea and Vomiting, Diarrhea,
07:45 we will talk about that a little bit later.
07:47 Poisoning, we will talk about that as well.
08:02 There is even literature now talking about charcoal's ability
08:05 to reduce cholesterol.
08:07 Oh, that's important!
08:08 Heart disease is the number one killer,
08:12 and so something as simple as cholesterol lowering
08:17 with charcoal would be extremely useful.
08:20 It sounds almost like Black Magic doesn't it?
08:22 It does sound like Black Magic.
08:23 But you know there is a lot of science behind it, and so
08:26 it is used in industry every single day.
08:30 Vegetable oils are cleaned with charcoal,
08:33 we drink water that is filtered with charcoal.
08:35 As you saw on that screen, Kidney Dialysis machines
08:39 actually filter blood through a bed of granular charcoal
08:43 to make it clean.
08:44 Hospitals are using this on a regular basis.
08:48 We want our viewing audience to know, they are not hospital
08:54 personnel, so should they feel comfortable
08:56 about using this remedy in the home.
08:59 They certainly can, not everybody has the privilege
09:03 of living next door to a hospital or an Emergency Ward,
09:05 and some of our viewers are probably living
09:08 in other countries where even their medical facilities
09:11 are even more remote than we see them here.
09:13 But even in our own communities here in North America
09:16 people in their homes are using it every single day.
09:20 My wife and I use it in our home,
09:22 have been using it for almost 30 years.
09:25 Our children use it and they taught their children to use it,
09:28 so our grandchildren are accustomed to use it.
09:31 But again, health care professionals use it
09:36 not only in the hospitals...
09:37 I have a very close friend, she is a head nurse
09:40 she has worked across North America, Hawaii, Alaska,
09:44 in Emergency Rooms, and you have worked in
09:47 Emergency Rooms as well.
09:48 She has used it there, but she uses it at home as well.
09:53 Absolutely!
09:55 I've used it in my home too.
09:57 I've seen it used in the Emergency Room for
10:00 toxic ingestions where somebody may die unless
10:05 they are given this, but something simply in the home
10:08 we are not suggesting that viewers use this in an
10:12 emergency situation while here in North America because
10:16 we know they can get to the Emergency Room.
10:17 But in other places where they may not have access
10:23 you would hope that they would use this,
10:24 but for something very simple like a sore throat.
10:27 or an insect bite...
10:30 Have you had any experiences with those?
10:32 Well yes, there are numbers of stories of insect bites,
10:36 I guess one that comes to my mind is Dr. Thrash
10:41 who is the Medical Director for the state of Georgia
10:44 has been for forty some years...
10:45 She tells the story of her granddaughter who was
10:49 outside playing and she found herself playing
10:52 on a hill of Fire Ants, and within seconds there were
10:57 literally hundreds of these insects biting her
11:00 and was screaming hysterically.
11:03 Dr. Thrash ran out, they grabbed the child,
11:07 ran for the house, filled a tub with warm water,
11:10 placed the child in the warm water,
11:13 they had already mixed in charcoal powder,
11:15 she said within two minutes this poor child
11:18 had stopped screaming.
11:20 That the charcoal had neutralized the poisons
11:23 and the child was basically pain free.
11:27 Now that is her experience, Dr. Agatha went so far as
11:32 to say if she was stranded on a desert island
11:34 and she could choose only one thing to take along
11:37 with her for infections, for emergency accidents,
11:42 she would choose charcoal.
11:44 Activated charcoal, Absolutely!
11:45 I do agree with her on that, I had an experience myself
11:51 when I was in Florida... I am highly reactive to
11:57 wasp stings or bee stings, and in fact I was actually
12:00 doing a demonstration about activated charcoal
12:03 and I really made up my poultice to be able to show
12:05 the audience and so that was all ready and waiting for me.
12:09 So in the interim we went outside and I was just out there
12:11 having a conversation and I felt something on my hand
12:14 and then the sting.
12:17 I knew that my hand would swell so immediately I grabbed that
12:21 poultice that was for the demonstration,
12:22 and I put that right on there and within 30 seconds
12:27 the stinging, the pain was gone and I had no reaction, and
12:32 usually I really would swell, and I had no reaction to that.
12:36 So when you think about the science of that,
12:37 you've already showed the graphic of the surface area,
12:43 there is something called van der Waal's forces where they
12:47 tracked different particles to them, so it makes sense.
12:53 I like to relate it to a black hole,
12:55 you know this phenomena up in space is able to pull things
12:59 to it and then it doesn't let go of them.
13:02 It sounds fantastic, but here we have charcoal,
13:04 you can't see black holes but you can see charcoal.
13:07 - Absolutely! If we had a quart jar here
13:10 of activated charcoal, we're told that that one quart jar
13:14 can hold up to 80 quarts of ammonia gas.
13:17 It's that tremendous surface area that binds these proteins
13:20 or gas molecules, or toxins, whatever they are
13:23 and holds them, and in the case of poisoning,
13:26 holds them until the charcoal and the poison is eliminated
13:28 from the body.
13:29 Now obviously we are not saying that people shouldn't
13:34 make use of Emergency Rooms... - Right, we are not saying that.
13:38 Some people may have gone into anaphylactic shock
13:41 because of a bee sting, but how much more sense
13:44 does it make to apply the charcoal while you are
13:47 heading towards an Emergency Room where you can get
13:50 professional help.
13:51 This is sort of like a fire extinguisher until the fireman
13:54 get to your help. Right!
13:57 Instead of the parents or family members feeling helpless
14:01 they will dial 911 and then they would put a poultice on
14:07 or they would have them drink some of that activated charcoal.
14:11 Exactly, in fact there is a number of the poison control
14:14 centers across North America do recommend in fact
14:16 that you have charcoal in the home.
14:18 I know there is some discussion whether parents are able to
14:22 properly administer it to their children but
14:25 whether that is true or not... It seems to me
14:28 that a parent who knows a child and the child who knows
14:31 the parent is going to have a lot easier time to apply
14:34 the charcoal in the home and then head off to the
14:37 Emergency Room.
14:38 What about something as simple as an ear infection?
14:41 I remember my son was just a toddler and woke up screaming
14:47 pulling at his ear, and I knew exactly what was going on.
14:49 I was a medical student at the time and I looked in his ear
14:52 and he had a bulging eardrum.
14:53 I quickly made up a charcoal poultice and applied it to the
14:58 external ear, and of course I had to find that information
15:01 from Dr. Agatha Thrash.
15:03 I applied that and within a few minutes he calmed down
15:09 and he was able to sleep through the night,
15:11 I still took him to the doctor the next morning
15:13 and she did determine that he did have an ear infection
15:16 but it was amazing to have him just settle down
15:20 and sleep through the night with a bulging eardrum.
15:23 Of course that let you relax a little be too.
15:26 Exactly!
15:27 Well, I use an acronym called S.A.F.E.
15:29 - Tell us what S.A.F.E. means.
15:30 S.A.F.E., as I travel in different countries
15:34 I've come back to North America with our amazing
15:37 health care system.
15:38 It is so readily available for most of us,
15:41 and then I compare them to countries like Nepal,
15:44 or working out in the Pacific where you may be hours
15:47 from the nearest road or you may be days
15:49 from the nearest clinic...
15:50 I came to ask myself the question,
15:53 "Do you have to be wealthy to be healthy"?
15:55 Or does God only love rich people?
15:57 - No! - Well, I don't think so either.
15:58 So I came up with this acronym, I looked at
16:02 If God really loves us wherever you are in the world,
16:05 whatever your social and economic status is
16:07 then is seems to me that remedies should be Simple,
16:10 they should be Affordable, they should be Accessible.
16:13 You are going to have to measure out a little bit of Faith,
16:17 when you take it with you, and lastly, they should be
16:21 Easy to apply...
16:23 Charcoal is easy, it's a little bit messy,
16:26 as you have used it over and over again it gets
16:30 easier and easier to use.
16:31 It does get easier to use, I have my fare share
16:34 of making a mess with charcoal,
16:35 I know how to do it quite expertly now but initially
16:39 we had charcoal powder everywhere.
16:42 That S.A.F.E. acronym is really important...
16:46 You said that maybe a place like Nepal would be a place
16:50 for it to be used, but even here in North America
16:52 there is a lot of people who do not have access to health care.
16:56 They cannot afford it, and they are out in the
17:00 rural areas, and in some counties the physicians are
17:04 moving away because of malpractice litigation
17:07 and so we do have a tremendous amount of people who do not
17:11 have access, and this is something that is fairly simple
17:14 that really could save someone's life.
17:18 In fact I was talking with one of the technicians
17:21 before we did our program today and he's training to be
17:26 an EMT, and he was saying that yea, on board
17:30 they carry charcoal.
17:32 - They carry activated charcoal. - So on the way to the hospital
17:33 if you haven't applied it, it's a good chance
17:35 they may apply it on the way to the hospital.
17:38 There are a number of different ways that we can use it
17:41 in the home, you mentioned the ears,
17:43 you can apply it as a poultice, or an eye wash
17:48 for the eye infections.
17:49 - Tell our viewing audience what a poultice is.
17:52 You make a paste with charcoal, you can make it just with water,
17:58 it tends to dry out more quickly but if you mixed it with
18:02 something like ground up flax seed
18:05 it makes a paste, a jell, and that moisture holds longer,
18:11 it's that moist contact with the skin that allows charcoal
18:15 to somehow mysteriously draw out toxins or poisons
18:19 through the skin into the charcoal poultice.
18:22 - And we want to make a point that if his is not
18:24 absorption, it is not sucking up, it is adsorbing,
18:30 A D onto the surface through all those little crevices
18:33 that are exposed to.
18:35 It has this electro static type of affinity for other molecules
18:42 some of them are... we might want to call them
18:44 loose cannons, they are in our body, maybe free radicals
18:48 or toxins or waste products and thee Lancet Magazine
18:52 which is a premier medical journal for England
18:54 has reported that when they applied charcoal poultices
18:57 superficially that somehow the mystery of charcoal
19:01 is actually able to pull these toxins from deep tissue
19:04 and as well deep organs.
19:06 Those van de Waal forces that are on the surfaces
19:10 of the charcoal really do pull and attract.
19:14 - Big Black Hole!
19:18 Recently a friend sent in a story of their daughter,
19:23 now this lady is a nurse, practices at a large hospital.
19:28 Her husband is an anesthesiologist,
19:31 and their daughter developed a urinary tract infection
19:36 at the age of two years I believe, and for the next
19:39 51/2 years she suffered with this problem chronically.
19:43 It got to the point where their physician decided that he would
19:48 have to go in and scrape the ureters, scrape the bladder,
19:52 dilate it and check out the kidney as well.
19:54 That is a major procedure and you can imagine the trauma
20:00 just for the child, but the parents, what it must put
20:03 them through, thinking oh, there has got to be
20:05 some other solution.
20:06 Well, after 51/2 years it was time to do another procedure
20:11 and the parents said no, there has got to be something else,
20:14 and they knew a chemist, and this chemist said
20:18 why don't you try charcoal?
20:20 Place it in water and have her drink this charcoal slurry.
20:23 Well they did and when the child took it,
20:26 the nurse friend told me that the child was symptomatic
20:29 at the time, she was in a great deal of discomfort and pain.
20:32 Within two hours she was pain free and the last report
20:39 was after a period of time, I am not sure the period of time
20:42 but the child was symptom free.
20:44 - Symptom free and no more urinary tract infection.
20:47 Can you imagine if they could have discovered this
20:49 5 years ago. - Five years and sooner.
20:51 You know I have used charcoal for food poisoning,
20:55 no one likes to be running to the bathroom with diarrhea
20:59 and that cramping that occurs.
21:01 Yes, you don't have to wait for a severe case of poisoning.
21:05 We may go out to eat at a restaurant or some friends
21:09 may invite us home, or we are traveling overseas for
21:12 whatever reason and we eat some strange food or drink
21:15 some strange water, and we suddenly find ourselves
21:18 with an upset floppy stomach.
21:20 It's not bad enough that we have to go to the Emergency
21:22 but we don't really want to lay there all night either.
21:25 Take a glass of water stir the charcoal into the water.
21:30 - Into the water, not the other way around.
21:31 Not the other way around and drink that down
21:34 and usually within a half an hour that upset stomach,
21:39 that indigestion, gas, or heartburn, or acid reflux,
21:41 is brought under control.
21:43 You know on Pubmed in the American Journal of
21:47 Gastroenterology, they did do a study, it was a double-blind
21:52 clinical trial that looked at activated charcoal in
21:56 decreased intestinal gas.
21:57 So those things that we were doing through faith there is
22:01 actually some clinical research to substantiate that.
22:06 There are lots of anecdotal stories out there,
22:09 but I found as I gathered some of the stories for the book
22:14 how many people who had good stories were actually
22:18 health care providers, whether doctors, physicians assistants,
22:23 nurses, chemists, lab techs, people who are really informed.
22:29 This is something unusual because back in 1908 the
22:33 Sears and Roebuck Catalog actually carried charcoal
22:36 in their catalog.
22:38 They said as everybody knows charcoal is so good for
22:42 indigestion, heartburn, and gas and so forth.
22:46 But that was 1908 and somehow charcoal disappeared off the
22:50 radar screen and it's only now people are becoming
22:54 more aware of it.
22:55 We attended a trade show and somebody picked up the
23:01 literature when I wasn't there and contacted me after the show
23:04 and he was a head nurse in an Emergency Room and he said
23:06 charcoal, it's absolutely amazing.
23:09 He says, I don't even wait to get sick, if I feel the symptoms
23:12 of a flu coming on or a bug or upset stomach,
23:15 I take the charcoal because I don't know how it works
23:18 but it seems to eliminate those symptoms,
23:22 and I don't have to go through the whole flu cycle.
23:26 That's a principal in simple home remedies that you
23:31 do start at the very first sign of symptoms,
23:34 don't wait until all the symptoms track in,
23:37 because by that time you will need to go to the
23:41 Emergency Room. So whatever it is
23:43 whether it is a cold, or an upset stomach,
23:45 right away we want people doing those simple home remedies.
23:49 Charcoal, drinking lots of water, we like to do that
23:53 water flush, we drink several glasses in just one hours time,
23:57 and that really flushes the virus... the virus likes
24:02 dry membranes, so if you flush those membranes
24:06 the virus is not able to attach as easily.
24:10 Then you couple that with activated charcoal
24:12 with those van De Waal forces pulling and sucking in
24:16 those toxins, then we've truly got a nice simple remedy.
24:21 Well, you mentioned water... charcoal as a simple home remedy
24:26 is only as effective as we use a holistic health program,
24:30 you mentioned water, of course we know about exercise,
24:32 and good nutrition and all these other preventives.
24:34 So charcoal is not a magic bullet, it's not a cure all,
24:39 sometimes it works. For many people it does work.
24:42 Sometimes it may not work and you are going to
24:44 have to look for some other safe remedy as an alternative
24:49 before you have to go to the hospital if need be.
24:51 Another thing that people sometimes say...
24:55 oh charcoal is burnt toast.
24:56 Now I am not saying that burnt toast might not be a
24:59 home remedy, but it is not charcoal.
25:01 It's not charcoal, in fact burnt toast is actually
25:03 carcinogenic. - Yes, it's super heated
25:06 carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, and these things
25:10 can be carcinogenic.
25:12 Carcinogenic meaning cancer forming.
25:14 Correct, and since you brought us carcinogenic
25:18 let's briefly talk about briquettes.
25:22 I know that there are natural briquettes,
25:26 but most people when they, go to the store to buy briquettes
25:29 it is impregnated with fossil fuels to help them ignite.
25:32 That is not something that you would want to apply...
25:34 take internally, or apply superficially.
25:37 Now it has also been... some people have said
25:40 charcoal is carcinogenic and the reason is
25:43 the connected to benzopyrenes.
25:44 A lot of people barbeque their food, braze their food,
25:48 and what happens is when they are cooking their food
25:51 and these fats, juices drip down into the hot coals they
25:55 vaporize, form these benzopyrenes and then embed
25:58 themselves against the bottom of the food that
26:00 they are barbequing.
26:02 But that's not charcoal, it's the heat from the charcoal
26:06 that produces these benzopyrenes.
26:08 So there we have the list, we have charcoal is not toast,
26:11 it's not briquettes, and it's not a cure all.
26:14 I would want to mention to you, charcoal has an
26:18 indefinite life span.
26:20 When you buy it at the store, it will come either as a powder,
26:26 as a tablet, as a capsule, and sometimes it will be
26:30 stamped with a shelf life.
26:31 It's only for marketing purposes,
26:34 actually if you keep the lid tight,
26:36 it will last indefinitely.
26:38 I've had charcoal for years, I've had it for 10 years.
26:43 - It's still very very active. - And it's very effective.
26:46 Right! In fact the W.H.O. World Health Organization
26:51 has passed a resolution encouraging other nations
26:54 to really study into using simple, natural, harmless,
26:59 scientifically proven remedies, and I can think of no
27:03 remedy that fits that description better
27:05 than charcoal.
27:07 In fact when you think of diarrhea, diarrhea according to
27:11 the W.H.O. kills around 5,000 people every single day
27:16 of the year. Cholera is a major killer
27:20 in some developing countries, we do not have it here.
27:23 But charcoal deals with severe diarrhea...
27:26 When I was working on a remote island out in the Pacific
27:29 the community nurse was dealing with a patient
27:31 who had severe Cholera she was not able to help him
27:35 with her standard medicines and she gave charcoal,
27:40 it stopped the diarrhea, she then gave the re-hydration salts
27:43 and she was able to save his life.
27:46 So for something as simple as a bee sting to something
27:50 as Cholera... activated charcoal is
27:54 simple and scientifically proven.
27:56 Yes!
27:57 John, I want to thank you for coming and sharing this
27:59 wonderful information with us and with our viewing audience
28:02 and those around the world.
28:04 Thank You!
28:05 We wish above all things that you will prosper and
28:08 be in health, even as your soul prospers.
28:11 May God Bless You!


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Revised 2014-12-17