Fad diets, cleanses, and health solutions can promise amazing results. Sometimes these trendy ideas can cause more damage than positive results, though. While you may be tempted to try a liver cleanse, there are many dangers of an at-home liver detox.
Alcohol and Liver Functions
You may be feeling the effects of excessive drinking on your liver. The liver processes every alcoholic beverage you consume, including liquor, beer, and wine. The more you drink, the hard the liver works. If you have an addiction to alcohol, you may have already damaged your liver.
Excessive drinking takes a toll on the liver, destroying cells. A condition known as alcohol-related liver disease includes several conditions. You could be suffering from alcoholic cirrhosis, acute alcoholic hepatitis, or alcoholic fatty liver disease as a result of heavy or long-term drinking. When you know more about alcohol’s impact on your liver function, you may be tempted to try an at-home liver detox.
What is a Liver Detox?
Your liver helps remove wastes and toxins from your body. It also helps you digest medicine and various nutrients. The good news about your liver is that has a huge potential for self-recovery. However, there are many people who promote the false notion that a liver detox can prove beneficial to your health, claiming that you can remove or cleanse the toxins from your body in the process.
These liver detox programs may tout the benefits of fasting, drinking certain juices, going on a restricted diet, or taking herbs and supplements to flush out your liver. They may even promote the use of diuretics or laxatives. In reality, a liver detox can be dangerous and can actually cause liver damage in an otherwise healthy organ.
Dangers of an At-Home Liver Detox
A liver detox can cause serious side effects, including inflammation, a weakened immune system, and kidney damage. Due to the nature of most at-home detox programs, you could also suffer from irritability, weakness or fainting, and the onset of migraine headaches. These dangers could become even more serious if you have diabetes, hepatitis B, kidney disease, or pre-existing liver damage.
Other dangers of an at-home liver detox can result from the restricted diet or unproven herbal supplements typically included as part of the process. Many cleansing diets do not provide balanced nutrition, as they do not contain the nutrients that an individual needs for continued good health. Deficiencies or malnutrition are real concerns, especially for people with diabetes or other medical conditions.
An at-home liver detox may involve the use of an enema, which can cause life-threatening damage to the intestines when not used appropriately. In addition, many liver detox products promote their use in weight loss, and include dietary supplements, but these can actually harm the liver and result in drug-induced injury. Most importantly, there is no clinical data to support the effectiveness of a liver detox for weight loss or any other health benefit.
One of the more serious dangers for the individual who is addicted to alcohol and who has decided to try a liver detox is that other medical issues may go untreated, including the addiction itself.
Supervised Detox
For a healthier liver, and a healthier body and mind overall, a professionally supervised detoxification can help remove alcohol from the individual’s system and start the process toward a healthy recovery. Medical complications can arise from extended use of alcohol, including liver damage, and the sooner supervised detox begins, the greater the opportunity to avoid these health issues.
Medically supervised detox is effective in cleansing the physical body and preparing the individual mentally for addiction treatment. The process of detox and alcohol withdrawal can last a few days or a week or more, depending on the individual’s situation and history, and, most importantly, will be monitored in a safe environment.
Gender-Specific Alcohol Addiction Treatment
When you have developed an alcohol addiction and want to stop drinking, we are here for you. Detox and supervised withdrawal will help you safely process the mental and physical symptoms so you can move forward with a healthy recovery. If you are struggling with substance abuse or mental illness, please contact PACE Recovery Center to learn more about our programs and services. We offer gender-specific treatment for men who have a desire to turn their life around. Recovery is possible, and we can help.
