CHOLESTYRAMINE

On July 20th I learned my liver does not break certain toxins down into water-soluble molecules but instead dumps them into my colon as fat-soluble molecules, where they are reabsorbed into my bloodstream. This created the toxic back-up that eventually lead to chronic insomnia for the past six months.

To treat this problem, Dr. Ross has put me on Cholestyramine. I drink it down before meals, and once it’s in my intestines it absorbs the fat-soluble toxins as they exit my liver.

After I first took Cholestyramine I felt a little drowsy, so I lay down on the futon and took a little nap! After months of insomnia, any sleep, even for a few minutes, is a godsend. I took this as a sign the stuff was doing what it was supposed to.

I am now at the end of week four on it, and here are some observations:

The regular Cholestyramine you’ll get at your drugstore tastes like Tang—one of my favorite drinks when I was eight years old. Yum! From the label, I saw what I was drinking was actually about 40% Cholestyramine and 60 % sugar, preservatives and flavoring. If, like me, you are taking Cholestyramine to support your liver, this is not a good thing. Probably, like me, you have chemical sensitivity and you can’t tolerate sugar or food additives.

(Under normal circumstances, I would not come near anything that tastes remotely like Tang. Anything that even smacks of a food additive—and that includes the “natural flavors” that are in the ingredients list of practically every packaged food, including organic foods—makes me feel ill. But for prescription medications, what can you do?)

After a week at a half dose of Cholestyramine, it was giving me a little headache each time I drank it. At three-quarters dose, the headache was intense and round-the-clock.

It turns out you can get Cholestyramine from Clark’s Pharmacy, in Redmond, WA, without all the sugar and additives, and thus without the accompanying headaches. I ordered mine as soon as my naturopath told me about it, and was never so happy to get a package in the mail.

In it’s pure form, Cholestyramine is a white powder that smells like fish. When you mix it in water, it’s the consistency of wet cement. In your bowels, it turns into dried cement. All around, it’s a very pleasant medication!

The best thing I’ve found to mix it with is tomato juice, or Knudson’s Organic Very Veggie Juice. It’s pretty pulpy, so it suspends the cholestyramine and ameliorates the sandy consistency. If you add some cumin and cayenne pepper, it’s a pretty tasty drink!

Once you have a few rounds of cholestyramin in your intestines, you can feel pretty uncomfortable. I’m already on Vitamin C, magnesium citrate and the coffee enema to prevent constipation, but there have been days when I still felt like I had my whole street’s worth of sidewalk paving squares in my bowels. I’m now taking fiber capsules with Very Veggie concoction, and that helps. My naturopath has also told me to take up to four capsules of magnesium citrate 30 minutes after swallowing the cholestyramine. I’m trying it today.