Ring around Uranus: My Colonic, part 2

Mark Honeychurch - 6 January 2025

In part 1 of this article, I explained how I ended up being compelled to book myself a totally unnecessary colonic irrigation a few weeks ago, just before Christmas. After years of procrastinating, I finally managed to book an appointment after a new clinic opened up in central Wellington in October. In the lead-up to my appointment, the day before I had swallowed a teaspoon of green food-dye in the morning, and a teaspoon of yellow food dye in the evening.

On the morning of my totally unnecessary medical procedure, I opened the baking cupboard in my kitchen and looked for a third colour of food dye. The general idea here was that I might be able to see some colour in the output from my colonic, if the machine had some kind of window that allowed me to see what was coming out of me. The first dye I found was red, but I figured that if I drank that I may end up being rushed to the hospital half-way through my procedure. After a little rummaging I found blue dye, and had a teaspoon - with a gold food glitter chaser, for good measure.

At the office I had a coffee, and then almost immediately needed to go to the bathroom. One of my work colleagues pointed out that it’s probably a lot cheaper to just drink a couple of coffees in the morning than pay $150 for a colonic! Then at 2pm I headed to the pub for my work Christmas party, and ended up feeling a little like a party pooper (no pun intended) when I had to leave early at 4pm to walk 15 minutes to the Pure Colonics clinic at the other end of the city - I love how compact Wellington is!

The clinic was pretty compact as well - the front door opened into a small consultation room with a couch and a single chair, and behind that was the treatment room with a bathroom attached. As longtime skeptical collaborators Bronwyn and Tim had both joined me for this experience, the three of us squeezed together on the couch when we arrived.

The first order of business was my pre-treatment consultation. Jess looked over the form I’d filled in, and pointed out that I suffered from headaches. I told her that I wasn’t able to submit the form unless I ticked at least one ailment, and suggested that she might want to fix the form by adding a None option. Both my vegetarianism and the fact that I don’t drink alcohol came up as positives, and there was a lot of talk about the toxins in my body. Apparently the treatment was going to help drain the toxins from me, some of which may have been stuck in my gut for 5 years or more. Although I was told I may end up needing more than one treatment - maybe one every 3 months - I was reassured that, unlike other treatments, colonics aren’t addictive and so I wouldn’t be jonesing to come back every week.

After the consultation, we went into the treatment room. The first thing that hit me was the smell. The dominant odour was understandably that of disinfectant, but underneath that I’m pretty sure I could smell a faint odour of faeces - although I accept that it’s quite possible I was imagining this, given the circumstances of what I was about to do.

Jess walked all three of us through a blow-by-blow of what I was about to go through, as I stared wide-eyed around the room. In the centre of the room was a large and cream-coloured bed in a shallow V shape, with a padded cushion at one end for my back, and a channel at the other to catch everything that was going to come out of me, with foot rests on either side. Sadly I wasn’t able to take pictures of everything, but here’s a stock image of what the machine looked like:

Inside the channel was a gravity-fed water pipe, and attached to the end of it was a disposable single use “rectal nozzle” - a blue tube that was eventually going to have to go inside me (the left end in the image below):

On a table next to the machine was a towel, a massage gun, some personal lubricant and a disposable glove. I was told that I would need to go into the ensuite bathroom, strip off my shoes, trousers and underpants (although I could keep my socks on - thank goodness I could keep my dignity!), wrap a disposable towel around my front and then sit on the bed. I would then put the glove on, be given a squirt of lube, apply it to my anus, and then insert the blue tube as far as it would reasonably go - which would be up to approximately the bend in the tube. I was assured that once the tube was inside me it should stay there, and that as I was being treated with the more modern “open system”, a constant stream of water would be slowly injected into my colon - 40 litres in 40 minutes, to be precise.

So, a little background of colonics. Until fairly recently, a closed system was the main technique in use. In the closed system, a relatively large girthed tube was inserted by a practitioner into the patient’s rectum, and then, under the control of the practitioner, water was alternately pumped in and then extracted through that same tube. So a treatment consisted of multiple cycles of filling and emptying the colon. These days the open system seems to be more popular, where water is constantly pumped inside you via a thin tube, and then the patient can expel this water when it feels natural to do so via relaxing their anal sphincter. The water comes out from around the outside of the tube and then flows down into the open channel and is washed away.

Once I had stripped and climbed aboard the machine, sitting upright for now, I donned the glove and was given some lube. I applied the lube as liberally as I could, and then duly inserted the nozzle where the sun doesn’t shine. It inserted quite far, which was fairly easy to be honest, and the tube sat comfortably inside me. Then I had to adjust to a lying position, moving my butt further towards the bottom half of the machine and lying back on the padded cushion. From my new perspective, the TV screen mounted to the large water tank in front of me was at eye level. The screen had been displaying slides about the benefits of colon therapy, but now had a section on the left side that showed a camera image of a piece of clear tubing. My practitioner, Jess, flicked a switch somewhere and the water started pumping into me.

At first I couldn’t really feel much, but after a while I could feel that there was mounting pressure, and the beginnings of the desire to poop. While this was happening, Jess pointed out the live camera feed of the tube that I’d spotted, telling me that this was the waste tube at the bottom of the channel where all my poo and water would be flowing. She reminded me of a button on the side of the machine that I could use to flush this pipe if it ever became too clogged and I couldn’t see what was moving through it.

Although Jess said that it may take up to 10 minutes before I would first start to expel from my bowel, it wasn’t long before I really needed to let nature take its course. Thankfully by this time Jess had left the room, as she had explained to me that she would come in every 10 minutes or so, but would spend most of her time out in the consultation room. This was a welcome relief, as the idea of me having to repeatedly “go to the loo” in front of her wasn’t a welcome one. Soon after she left, with maybe 3 or 4 litres of water inside me, I relaxed like the sign under the TV said and just let it happen.

Despite the concerns in my head, everything seemed to make its way to the channel in front of me just fine, and I started to see the first signs of activity in the camera feed.

I picked up my phone and started checking my messages. I had a message from Paul, our ex Treasurer, letting me know our website was down. So I messaged him back, telling him that as I was in the middle of a colonic I wasn’t in a position to be able to sort out the issue immediately. Despite the odd circumstance, I was feeling fairly comfortable - kind of like being on your phone while on the loo at home. As I messaged friends and work colleagues, took some photos, and tried to get a “decent” audio clip of the machine whirring and my bowels emptying for the podcast, I started to see some solid matter flowing through the tube. Understandably it was mostly water, but there were small bits of what looked like stringy pieces of faecal matter in there. Occasionally when I expelled some water I could see small splashes of droplets flying through the air, but I guessed this wasn’t abnormal - and may go some way to explain the weird smell the room had.

Over time, something weird started happening. The water coming out of me started to change colour - becoming slightly green-tinged.

Now, I’m guessing that you, dear reader, have put two and two together and figured out that this was because of the food dye I’d been consuming over the previous day and a half. But, with everything going on around me, and it all being so new, I had not figured this out, and for the life of me couldn’t work out why my poop looked like this. As time went on, the green colour started getting a little more vibrant, and I started to worry. What was in my diet that could have caused this? Was it normal? Maybe the camera was having issues?

It was then that I received a couple of messages from Bronwyn: “How’s it actually going… Any glitter or strange colours”. For a couple of seconds I was confused by the mention of colours, and then I remembered the food dye, and felt instant relief. It wasn’t a problem with my digestive system after all, it was just my silly experiment.

At some point I started getting severe cramps in my gut. I hadn’t expelled any water in a while, and presumed I had enough water inside me that the pressure of it was causing the pain. Thankfully Jess entered the room just as it was getting really bad and asked how things were going. I answered with my best understated English response of “it’s a little bit sore”, in between bouts of severe pain. Jess gave me the massage gun, telling me that this was likely just some stubborn toxins that were stuck inside me and that I should be able to help things along by massaging my stomach. Although I doubted her explanation, the massager did help a little. However I eventually figured out that, rather than following the advice I’d been given of just expelling water when it felt natural to do so, if I actively engaged my muscles and pushed as if I was going to the toilet, the water would flow just fine and the pain quickly subsided.

The last 20 minutes or so, once the pain had gone and I knew why everything was green, were relatively plain sailing. I generally just let things happen, but made sure to actively push if I felt it had been too long since water had come out. Now that I’d realised that the water was green because of my actions, I really didn’t want to have to explain to the practitioner, Jess, what I had done. So, whenever I heard her coming into the room, I quickly reached for the flush button and tried to clear out the greenness as much as I could. At some points it was bright green, and at others really dark, so it took a while to flush away.

It’s weird to expel water from your colon while someone’s in the room with you - it’s like going for a poo with someone else in the bathroom. And so, towards the end of the session, I was thankful that Bronwyn and Tim kept Jess talking in the consultation room, asking her about how/why she became a “colonic irrigator” (if that’s a thing). Maybe it’s “colon hydrator”? Anyway, I was left in peace for a while to just do my thing. Here’s me “relaxing” with a litre of water per minute being pumped into me:

Before I knew it there was a brief alarm and my time was up. Removing the tube was pretty straightforward, and I was told to head straight to the bathroom to try to push out any remaining water.

There was a lot of water still in there! It sounded like I was peeing from my butthole for a good 30-40 seconds, long enough that I was able to get an audio recording of it for our podcast. Yeah, it’s gross. But hopefully also entertaining.

When I had dressed and came out of the toilet, Jess quizzed me on what had just come out of me. She asked if it was brown, and I responded with an unconvincing “yeah… brown”. However I knew full well that what I’d seen in the toilet bowl was dark green. I think I may have overdone the food dye!

This whole story might seem frivolous and stupid, but I think I learned a valuable lesson by going through the experience of a colonic irrigation. The promises that are made by practitioners feel deceptive and manipulative - maybe not deliberately so, but they will have that effect on customers. I was told in the consultation that there’s something wrong inside of me that needed fixing - that my colon had years worth of toxins that were poisoning me, making me less than I could be. And, of course, a $150 colonic irrigation will fix me. Just $150 to reach my full potential, surely that’s a bargain.

Then, when I was in the treatment, watching the faecal matter come out of me, I could see this process would feel like a massive relief for the average customer. I’m guessing that the visual window into what’s coming out of you (whether it be a direct view of the outflow tube, or a camera feed like I had) is likely an essential part of the colonic experience. Poop is icky, and seeing little bits of poop flowing through a tube is doubly icky. Knowing that the icky stuff has just come out of you, and being reassured that it’s not inside you any more, is likely to make you feel good.

Also, given the priming you’ve just been through in the consultation, you don’t just see the waste coming out of you as poop. You’ve just been told that your body is full of toxins, and now you get to see proof, right in front of your eyes, of what you were told - these little pieces of stuff are now coming out of you. In your head these little pieces of waste toxins were, until a few minutes ago, “stuck” inside your colon - and now the colonic has washed them out.

Of course, the reality is that this procedure is just prematurely flushing out little bits of waste that your body would have compacted and then expelled in the next 24 hours or so anyway, as part of its normal function. But, to a believer, I think this stuck toxins story would be a compelling narrative.

It seems conceivable that the mental relief of “knowing” that the icky stuff is no longer stuck inside you would explain why people report such a wide range of positive results from a colonic. Of course, when put to the test, in a rigorous scientific manner, these benefits just aren’t shown to be true. But

I’ll wrap up with a quote from the Systematic Review titled “Clinical effects of colonic cleansing for general health promotion” from 2009, which says:

There are no methodologically rigorous controlled trials of colonic cleansing to support the practice for general health promotion. Conversely, there are multiple case reports and case series that describe the adverse effects of colonic cleansing. The practice of colonic cleansing to improve or promote general health is not supported in the published literature and cannot be recommended at this time.