Dear Healthy Friend,

Anxiety. Panic attacks. Depression. Sweating. Nausea. Generalised pain. Fatigue. Dizziness. Drug cravings.

When a cocaine addict quits, he's treated to a period of withdrawal symptoms that make it VERY hard to stop taking the drug. But why in the world am I talking about cocaine addiction in Health-Bytes?

Because Christine O'Brien reveals some scary information regarding similar side-effects of legal and illegal drugs.

In the name of good health,

Taryn Strugnell
Managing Editor of Nutrition & Healing

P.S. We've all heard the saying: 'If it isn't broken, why fix it', but one of our readers poses a very important question: 'Why do you need it, if you can live without it'? Keep reading as Dr wright explains the role of the gallbladder in our bodies...

Going off Parkinson's drugs is like quitting cocaine
Christine O'Brien
Contributor to Nutrition and Healing

Withdrawal symptoms (caused by stopping one of the most dangerous illegal drugs there is) are the very same as those for patients going off perfectly legal, mainstream-approved, doctor-encouraged drugs.

I'm talking about dopamine agonist (DA) drugs for Parkinson's - the go-to treatment for the disease. Oh, and symptoms like those mentioned above, don't just come from quitting. No, they'll hit you even if you and your doctor are just working to REDUCE your dosage.

Researchers report that these symptoms can be severe - and that taking other Parkinson's drugs won't alleviate them.

So maybe you're looking to try a natural treatment for Parkinson's - or even another mainstream approach if the numerous side effects of DA drugs are hitting you hard. (They've been increasingly linked to uncontrollable compulsive behaviours including gambling, hypersexuality and Internet addiction.)

Either way, there's a rough road ahead.

This is the first time researchers have defined this phenomenon (and these drugs have been around since the 1990s). They're calling it dopamine agonist withdrawal syndrome, or DAWS, and it's all detailed in a new study in the Archives of Neurology.

You see, DA drugs work on the reward pathways in your brain, just like cocaine - so, really, it makes sense that the withdrawal symptoms would be similar. I guess the drug companies churning out these DA drugs conveniently didn't make the connection during initial testing of the drugs.

Seems to me it's just another way mainstream is getting us all under their thumb. Now, I'm not necessarily saying they do this on purpose. But what better way to keep the money flowing than to create drugs that cause such severe withdrawal symptoms that people can't bear to quit?

The role of the gallbladder

Q: What's the harm in having your gallbladder removed if you can live without it?

Dr. Wright: While it's true that you can live without your gallbladder, having it removed sets your body up for all sorts of future problems. The gallbladder plays a critical role in generating the bile your body needs to break down and absorb many essential nutrients.

You might ask why this is, since bile is made in your liver and the liver is still completely intact after gallbladder removal. To understand the relationship between the two, you need to know a bit about how your gallbladder works.

When your liver secretes bile, a relatively large quantity is "captured" by your gallbladder and stored there for use. When you eat certain fatty or oily meals - a fish dinner, perhaps, with lots of heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids - and all the incompletely digested oils and fats are passed from your stomach into your duodenum (the uppermost portion of your small intestine), the fats and oils trigger the release of the hormone "cholecystokinin" (CCK).

CCK travels to your gallbladder, telling it "oil's coming, fat's coming!" In response to CCK, your gallbladder contracts, pushing out just the right quantity of stored bile. The bile arrives in your intestines at the exact time it's needed, in the exact quantity needed. Working with your pancreatic fat- and oil-digesting enzymes, the bile digests and emulsifies those oils, making them "just right" to be absorbed.

Marvellous how it all works together, isn't it?

But without your gallbladder, most of that marvellous coordination is lost. The small, steady trickle of bile from the liver is still there, but it's no longer "matched" to the amount of fat or oil you've eaten in either quantity or timing. The resulting "mismatch" inevitably affects your digestion and absorption and puts your fat-soluble nutrient status at risk.