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Northern Nevada's only Open Gravity Colonic Therapy Retreat.

History: Colonic Hydrotherapy

Enemas were recorded as early as 1500 B.C. in the Eber Papyrus, an Egyptian medical document. Hippocrates, Galen and Paré — founding fathers of modern medicine — all employed enemas in their own work and teachings. In fact, Hippocrates reminded physicians that in every patient complaint, they should look not only to the spine but also to the bowel.

There is further evidence of enema use among American Indians, as a detoxifying ritual closely tied to sweat huts. It seems nearly every culture has a history of cleansing the colon in order to promote good health. Jesus spoke in the Bible of cleaning the “abominations of the inner vessel,” and in a book from the Vatican archives he details an open gravity colonic. Even in the animal kingdom we see the use of this natural cleansing technique.

“I have seen herons and other similar birds in Florida stand by a river or a pool of water, fill their long beaks, and inject water into the rectum in order to give themselves an enema or colon irrigation,” said Dr. Norman Walker, author of Colon Health: The Key to a Vibrant Life. “I never asked these birds what school, college or university they attended or who taught them this principle of internal lavage.”

Enemas were once a commonly used procedure to help maintain health and stave off disease. For example, before the departure of the Lewis and Clarke expedition, a physician instructed the explorers to perform enemas in cases of fever and illness.

In the early 1900s in Battle Creek, Michigan, Dr. John H. Kellogg used colon therapy extensively with about 40,000 patients. In 1917 he reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that in all but 20 cases he used no surgery for the treatment of gastrointestinal disease in his patients

“Somehow bowel wisdom got lost, and it became something no one wanted to talk about anymore,” said Dr. Bernard Jensen, author of more than 50 health publications, a physician to more than 300,000 patients and a proponent of open gravity colonics.

As time wore on, the public’s use of and access to colonic irrigation decreased, and modern medicine as a whole seemed to form the belief that this age-old treatment was no longer of use. The advent of symptom-soothing drugs no doubt played a role in this belief-system shift.
According to Jensen, the decline in the awareness and use of colonic hydrotherapy may be the single most important factor in the current ill-health of our population.