Jarrow FormulasMilk Thistle 150 mg With 30:1 Standardized Silymarin Extract, Dietary Supplement for Liver Function Support, 200 Veggie Capsules, 66-200 Day Supply

DetoxificationWhy detoxification?There were many clues but the one I picked up on was the peculiar greyish-green color under my skin. I call them “liver spots” (they aren't)The clue I wish I pursued came almost five years ago. I could no long detox alcohol very well. I'd drink ½ a glass, stay drunk for 2 hours then fall asleep and wake up hung over out the yin-yang. Everybody rejoiced because I gave up alcohol. Big problem solved eh? No one, not even the doctors stop to ask, what happened to all that alcohol dehydrogenase in the liver? When a doctor fails to take any action when you shows signs of impaired liver function, FIRE THEM!More clues. Suddenly my allergy medication Claritin started to work really really well for the first time in 20 years– 24 hours long as promised on the label. Cyp3A4 is the liver enzyme that metabolizes Claritin. In addition, I'm a fast metabolizer. Claritin hits fast and hard and wears off fast. So that 24 hour pill wears off after about 16-18 hours for me. Something is slowing down my production of another liver enzyme.Side note: Cyp3A4 and Cyp2D6 both metabolize Claritin but I don't have any Cyp 2D6 because I don't metabolize narcotic medications.Luckily for me, the liver regenerates.How do you track progress as you detox?It helps if one of your toxic (?) compounds has a gray-green tint and collects under your skin. How do I know it's not a normal pigment ? Well if I rub my skin for about 5 minutes, I can get the pigment to move away leaving a pink spot on my skin.I'm pretty sure I had a Candida infection. One of the products to eradicate the Candida - a bunch of enzymes that attack it, left a growing gray-green tint under my skin. I've had this stuff under my skin for most of my life but faintly. It was most pronounced as a "moustache" on my upper lip. But now, the stain was growing until I only had two pinkish patches on my cheeks.... right above my lymph nodes.Aside from the visual are there other symptoms? Listless/low energy, burning sensation under the skin and in the muscle, patches of skin tender to the touch, irritability, shortness of breath without causeWell, the stain could be something from the Candida or it could be a by product of the enzymes. But I'm betting on the Candida because...Every time, I read about Candida, people recommend a detox program especially for the liver. Candida by-products and wastes are particularly rough on the liver. Additionally, my gut was down. Constant diarrhea means your body isn't eliminating waste products efficiently. Or at all. But the gut recovered recently. I'm certified Candida-free. Now is the time to support the liver. And milk thistle is almost universally recommended. The silymarin in milk thistle helps 1) protect the liver (antioxidants protect the liver from free radical damage), 2) assists in liver function (stabilizes liver membranes, increases ability to filter toxins from blood), and 3) may regenerate the liver helping with recovery from cirrhosis and other types of liver disease/damage. The therapeutic dose varies - but 100 - 200 mg of silymarin is pretty standardDoes the milk thistle/silymarin work? Based on the color changes in my skin: the more silymarin I take, the cleaner my skin looks. I've tried anything from 500 to 1500 mg of this powder. I've tried to cook up a tincture (too much work, didn't like the alcohol). If I stop taking the milk thistle for a week, the stain just starts piling up again. Whatever this stuff is, it's been accumulating for months. I suspect a steady, rational approach with milk thistle would have this cleaned up in about six months.But let's be systematic. It's not just the liver. It's all of the detoxification mechanisms in the body that are overwhelmed: Liver, lymph, skin & sweat glands, the gut, kidneys, bile and probably more that I don't understand. It's rather lengthy, if bored skip to the bottom under Results and then read the detox procedure below.1) Drink pure water. At least 1/2 gallon is the minimum. A gallon would be better. Supports all the organs. I do this normally so this ends up at the bottom here1a) Add juice from 1-4 lemons/8oz of cranberry juice/1 oz apple cider vinegar (not all at once!) to a gallon of water. The juice helps drain the lymph nodes and helps kidney function. Adding any one of these juices created a synergistic effect and the stain under the skin started to clear out faster.1b) Skin and sweat: heat therapy - hot (Epsom salt, baking soda or Toors mud) baths or showers, sauna's. Foot baths are recommended for those who cannot take a bath. The key is to raise your core body temperature and sweat. For some toxins, this is the easiest way to expel it. Unfortunately for me, bathing & sweating does remove some of it and clear the skin fast but the heat just seems to draw out the internal mother lode and bring fresh stuff to the surface. It's a bit discouraging to see more of this stuff after a particularly hot bath. Hot baths and cold showers (keep cold therapy short. It's beneficial if it feels refreshing, if you're shivering, you've gone too far) also trigger production of heat shock proteins. Toor's mud is particularly good for a detox because it's high in magnesium, calcium and sulfur. All three are beneficial if the body is toxic or stressed. You may wish to consider using a biomat (far infrared sauna) as well.2) Basic gut support (for the gut cleanse)a) use a quality fiber. I use WellbetX PGX because I'm diabetic but if you can't afford it, glucomannan is very good.b) use a probiotic. Probiotics can be super specialized. Pick a formulation that is designed to address your issuesc) Use a resistant starch. Resistant starches resist digestion (by you), it is your helpful probiotics that digest this stuff. If you don't want to use a lot of products, then pick this one. Bob's Red Mill unmodified potato starch is the most concentrated form of resistant starch that is also readily available. Start SLOWLY, try 1/2 or 1 tsp and work your way up to 1 tbsp 3x per day. I'm a BIG fan of resistant starch. This stuff has got legs. It helps you at lower levels and it just keeps going.d) if you experience diarrhea, a tablespoon of arrowroot powder per day for a few days maybe helpful. Very few people have trouble digesting arrowroot powder, very low allergen potential, it works as a demulcent soothing the gut. It has also been shown in the laboratory and in real life to neutralize insect, toad, frog and plant poisons AND it was used as a early antiseptic/antibiotic – they packed poison wounds with this powder. But apparently no one has done clinical trials and therefore can't even speculate on what's happening in the gut. So I will – it's a war in your gut. Bad and good bacteria alike put out toxins in an effort to prove Darwin right. Ya think something like arrowroot with it's ability to neutralize all those other toxins might be up to it's usual tricks in your gut? That's the reason why it's soothing? Plus it's an antiseptic. Do you think a millennium of munching on arrowroot tubers might have... you know... done something to our gut microbiome? Therefore, our probiotics might be arrowroot resistant and those bad bugs unused to a diet of arrowroot get clobbered? At any rate, one tbsp of arrowroot seem to prevent diarrhea for me. For about 3 hours it felt like nothing much. Then from the 3-24th hours, there was a nice soothing sensation and little pops of gas that tootled on. From the timing, the action is all in the large intestine. It works on my present mild diarrhea.3) Liver support - milk thistle – highly recommended. Progress using any of these methods is accelerated with the milk thistle.4) Kidney support - the acid in the lemon/cranberry juice helps the kidneys function better. A gallon of water is serious kidney support5) Lymphatic support - the increased water & lemon juice helps drain the lymph nodes faster6) Bile – milk thistle support bile production by supporting the liver.7) Support glutathione production. Glutathione is the master enzyme that regenerates ALL your antioxidant enzymes. Glutathione is made up of N-acetyl-L-cysteine (NAC). You can purchase this. Glutamate, I purchase this as a powder. Glutamate can only be absorbed on an empty stomach. So I dissolve in water and drink when I wake up in the middle of the night. Finally, glycine. I don't worry about this too much but it is readily found in collagen (buy as a powder or drink bone broth). You can also buy glutathione but it's not very bioavailable There are special methods to create bioavailable forms but it's technical and you need special equipment.Why glutathione? Most toxic chemicals generate free radicals; your antioxidant enzymes mop them up. But if your glutathione is stripped then the war is over and you just lost.8) Alpha lipoic acid (ALA) - this is an antioxidant that is normally produced by the body and is found in the mitochondria. It is soluble in water AND fat. It can cross the brain-blood barrier. Normal therapeutic doses of ALA range from about 1200 mg to 1500 mg. Because it has a sulfur group, it is one of the few antioxidants that can bind mercury and stay bound. ALA is used to treat mercury poisoning (there is a special protocol). The levels suggested here are too low to treat mercury poisoning but they are sufficient to prevent mercury poisoning from regular everyday exposure.9) Other antioxidants - melatonin, Vitamin C (7-8 gms for optimal function), A, D and E, lycopene, lutein, ALA- detoxification can sometimes draw out stores of toxins from the fat and other organs especially heavy metals. Neutralize them with antioxidants. Choose a mix of antioxidants. Also make sure you have some that are fat soluble and others that are water soluble.10)vitamins in general: to restore normal function11) Focus on sulfur, magnesium, calcium and zinc. These are required for normal function and they are protective. Some will compete with toxins forcing the toxin out into the blood / other organ to be flushed. Unfortunately, they aren't very bioavailable. For example, the zinc will block the absorption of magnesium. The easiest way to take them is separately. Or you can go very high end and get Hardy's Essential Nutrients (it's over $100 per month, you need to take 12 capsules daily but Hardy's has the clinical trial data to back up their claims about bioavailable).12) Exercise. This item only just made it back to my list in the last six months. Before, I was so loaded up with toxins, that exercise made things worse. Two months ago, I would go for a 45 min walk and then be utterly listless for a week. Now, I can take a walk every day and it doesn't affect me noticeably. That's still not good. You're supposed to feel good after a walk, not grateful that you made it back without danger of collapse.13)Food: The one food that I avoided religiously, yup, organ meats. I settled on chicken livers. Because liver has everything you need to support your liver. Old Chinese adage.RESULTSI started off the detox as simple liver support using milk thistle and lemon juiced in a gallon of water. I noticed the effect of the thistle/lemon addition within a few days. The stain under the skin was moving out faster but it was begin replaced almost as quickly.Separately, I'd been advised to try 1200 mg alpha lipoic acid a powerful antioxidant for my abnormally low energy. This led off into a entirely new line of inquiry about mitochondrial biogenesis. Suffice it to say there are many reasons to take ALA and I had all of them. And if I had to pick only a handful of antioxidants it would be CoQ10, ALA, resveratrol, melatonin, vitamin C, D. CoQ10, ALA and resveratrol for their versatility and power and the rest because they are cheap, powerful and versatile. And you're gonna need to think about this because during a detox, there is no telling what you'll stir up. Therefore every antioxidant becomes recommended to neutralize it. If you force me to trim this list down further, then I will recommend CoQ10 and ALA. CoQ10 because it's so all purpose and ALA because it can detox some heavy metals (mercury and lead). But at this point, I will also recommend you avoid detox altogether.I noticed ALA had the peculiar effect of driving my energy up, way up and then I crashed around 4PM and felt like I couldn't move again. I learned later that's a common effect with ALA, it cleans up everything in sight, you feel great, then you feel lousy because it can also extract toxins from fat cells (a common place to stash your body's trash). I found out I could mellow out the crash if I used more milk thistle than recommended – about 15 times more. Luckily I ran across another brand of milk thistle which was 30 times more concentrated. Their recommendations were exactly in tune with my needs, so I switched over to Jarrow. I ended up taking a capsule of milk thistle for every capsule of ALA (I take in 300 mg doses 4x per day).Smoothing out the ALA and beefing up the milk thistle had the effect of leaving me agitated, in mild pain, listless and irritable. But I was able to tolerate 45 minute walks, hot baths and other activities like building defenses to protect myself from my stalker (another story) without becoming limp from stirring up all that toxicity.So the protocol is able to keep up with the toxic sludge but why not increase the ALA and everything else too? It's the rate of detoxification in the liver. The liver can handle only so much. If you start pulling stuff out of the fat too fast then it just has to go back in but not before it's caused all sorts of trouble. Mercury is a great example. It gets stored away in fat and brain. ALA is one of the few antioxidants that does a good job with mercury but slowly.Finally, after about four months plus a bit, the first break came. I'd done my usual exfoliation and discovered long scratches in my skin that showed pink instead of more greyish-green. So something was killing the stuff from the inside.Update Nov. 3 - I seem to be cycling around to a higher energy again. The gray-green tint is definitely receding. I asked my doctors about this stuff and they both got so technical they started to mumble. I still don't know what this is but both my docs said my detox protocol was the right way to go. There is no harm in it as long as I stay within recommended doses for the antioxidants. And yes, it's a long, slow grind waiting for the situation to correct itself.Conclusion: something is working! But there's more months of this still.

Hi, this is a true story - my own - about how well Milk Thistle (MT) works, and this brand in particular. I have a very severe form of Myofascial Pain Syndrome (MPS) which causes painful contraction knots in the muscles called trigger points. In my case, virtually every muscle contains virtually every possible trigger point and there are over 620 possible. These knots are very painful and that pain can be eased somewhat by routine trigger point injections, where a needle is inserted into the knot and it is broken up and perforated to some extent to get it to release a little and relax.Here's the problem: These trigger points are often filled with toxic metabolic byproducts from staying in a contracted state with subsequent constricted blood flow. When needled, this toxic sludge then gets into the bloodstream. In my case, needling just a few bad trigger points would release so much 'yukky business' into my body that I would have severe vertigo for 4 - 5 days, with the first couple being so bad that I would literally crawl around my house (live alone) to keep from falling over. Oh, I'm not the frail, sickly type either...I'm an ex-powerlifter and retired big city street cop...hardly the weak, excuse making type. But this poison would take me down fast and take almost a week to clear.Since the toxins had a predictable lessening, I knew my liver was clearing it, just REALLY slowly, so I sought ways to speed that up, either by helping my liver or deactivating the toxin. Since I really didn't know what the poisons were, it was the liver route...or get used to seeing my house from my Corgi's perspective.I found out that MT has been known for the bulk of human history as a liver remedy, but I thought that was just so much 'folklore' to be kind. Then I started discovering that MT has been tested in a variety of empirical settings and some rather unbelievable anecdotal ones as one of the better liver drugs out there...when balanced against its huge safety margin and therapeutic value, probably the best. In fact some of the pharmas use silymarin as the active agent in their liver drugs, which is simply refined MT. Good enough for me.Cut to the chase: I started taking 3 caps of MT, 3x a day and immediately all symptoms of vertigo and toxicity were gone. Yes, I said IMMEDIATELY...as in hours, not days. Once this efficacy was confirmed, I was able to have my clinician radically increase the number of trigger point injections. When I say radically, I went from about 4 or 5 injections knocking me out for a week, to tolerating 180 per session, 2x a week for four months. Thousands of injections that did immense good at actually taking the fight to the trigger points the way only a sharp needle can. I was able to eventually taper down to the recommended dosage of just 3 caps a day when the toxic load was much decreased.So here's my take on Milk Thistle: This stuff works like I wish most things did...very, very well. I have had no side effects, in fact, it has prevented disabling side effects from another very effective treatment. Win - win.If your liver needs help, you could do a lot worse than MT. If you get nauseous from a massage, flushing yukky business out of your muscles, then start taking MT before, during, and after. Before I get too carried away, let me say that I'm not a doctor, but this stuff is amazing medicine for the right problems. Do your own research and you decide...it worked for me under conditions that you would have had to see to believe.I chose this brand because it had the most and best reviews...remembering what my doctor told me: "If you want to know if a medicine is any good or not, see if they reorder it." Makes sense to me.UPDATE 05-04-13: Since I see that 21 people (at the time of this update) found this review hard to believe, let me add a few more pieces of information:1. Drinking alcohol now is kind of expensive...actually it's largely a waste of time. Why? Whatever the MT does to the liver makes it clear ethanol VERY quickly...at least in my case. So a strong Belgian ale that would've been good for an hours buzz, now might give about 10 - 15 minutes. I'm not saying that I'm recommending drinking more if you use MT, just that it did something to my liver that is hard to explain medically, so I will just report what I observe.2. Anyone wondering about the actual dosages, frequency, locations, techniques, etc...in the admittedly rather extreme trigger point injection protocol should contact me directly. I will provide you with more than enough information to convince anyone including physicians. Let me state that Aetna Specialty Pharmacy told me that I received more injectable supplies BY FAR than the next closest patient in the entire network. The reason one can only get 4 injections (in my case) at the doctor's office is that is all the insurance will reimburse for in the billing codes. Get a script for the injectable supplies and a lot of education and help and much more is possible.3. If you want to vote that the review didn't help, let me know why and I will be happy to share as much as necessary to satisfy your interest. I don't make a cent from Jarrow, they make money off of me, and I'm glad to give it to them based on all you've read so far.Thanks for taking your time to read all this. I'm sold and convinced that there is something potent in milk thistle and I'm better for it. YMMV. Good luck whatever you decide.