Coffee Enemas Are Terrible For Your Health
Why you should never do a coffee enema
Coffee enemas are one of the strangest health fads of the last century. The idea of taking one of the best things humans have created, the delicious nectar of joy that is coffee, and squirting it up your butt is just a bizarre and unusual thing for humans to have come up with.
Nevertheless, there are increasingly people advertising coffee enemas as a treatment for every health condition imaginable. A quick search online shows people claiming that the introduction of some Joe into your rear end can help with everything from liver disease to chronic pain. If even half of these websites were right, coffee enemas would be one of the most impressive medical treatments ever devised.
Thankfully, there’s no need to ever put coffee in your anus. Coffee enemas are at best completely worthless for your health, and can be actively dangerous. Best to put the coffee in your mouth.
The Claim
The idea behind coffee enemas comes from a type of pseudoscientific medical treatment known as Gerson therapy. This is a schema of cancer treatment that was invented whole cloth by a man called Max Gerson in the mid-20th century. It basically involves extreme juicing and regular coffee enemas, which supposedly cleanse the body of toxins which can cure any ailment.
Of course, there has never been a shred of evidence that this treatment works. As with many complementary and alternative treatments for cancer, the main arguments are vague and nonspecific. For example, Gerson therapy is intended to remove ‘toxins’, but there are no actual toxic substances named as the target, which makes the entire premise largely nonsensical. The best evidence we have shows that people who opt for such alternative treatments for cancer die significantly more quickly and more often than people who use conventional medical interventions like surgery and chemo.
And from this pseudoscientific nonsense, the idea that coffee enemas could help with your body’s various issues was born. At this point, we have hundreds of influencers online pouring coffee into the wrong hole, simply because one dude in the mid-1900s thought it was a good idea.
Some of the arguments that coffee enemas are a good idea come from the belief that coffee itself has healing properties. The problem with this argument is that coffee is dramatically less bioavailable when you put it into your colon than when you put it into your mouth. If you’re looking for health benefits from coffee directly, then you’d be getting far fewer of them by using an enema - drinking the stuff would work much more effectively.
More worrying still, there are many risks to coffee enemas that people are often unaware of. The most common of these is burns, because people can underestimate how hot the coffee is before releasing it into their bowels like a stream of purging lava, but there are other risks as well. One review of the literature found cases where people had suffered from necrotic tissue and bowel perforation, rectal bleeding, and even septicemia and death after using coffee enemas.
Don’t Use Coffee Enemas
There are very sciency ways to put this, but the basic issue here is that the butt is not a place that liquids are meant to be poured into. We do use enemas for medical reasons - primarily for the relief of constipation and some imaging - but otherwise the arsehole is a place that things are meant to come out of*.
Coffee enemas have absolutely no proven benefits, and are objectively unsafe. Even if you don’t have an adverse event, the most likely thing that you’ve done is wasted a good coffee.
My advice is to never do a coffee enema. There are many less dangerous alternative things you could try, and there’s not a shred of evidence that a coffee enema will help with what’s ailing you.
*NOTE: Yes, I am aware that it’s sometimes fun to put things inside the butt. No, we obviously aren’t talking about that here. Yes, that can also be an issue. If you do get something stuck inside you, please go straight to the emergency room and tell them exactly what happened - I promise that they’ve seen it 1,000 times before and will not laugh or judge you until well after you have been discharged.