Cleaning the pipes

Have trouble letting things go? Perhaps you should talk to Dawn Throne, a certified colon hydrotherapist and life coach at Fountain of Health Wellness Center and Spa, located at 2820 T Street. For more than 16 years, Throne has made a career of helping people get rid of their crap—be it mental or physical. Throne has produced her own informational CD called That’s Disgusting!, available at www.fountainofhealth.com, and is committed to reassuring the colonic-shy. “I have my own technique,” she said. “It does not hurt. The colon is the mirror of the mind, so if you’re relaxed mentally, the colon will relax.”

Colonic, colon hydrotherapy—what’s the right term for what you do?

“Colonic” is for short. It would be colon irrigation. Colon hydrotherapy is using hot and cold water. You can also use that in a treatment, but I don’t always do that. I prefer the term colon irrigation.

What happens during a colon-irrigation treatment?

I’d have you empty your bladder, and then you’d undress from the waist down and put on these roomy little shorts that are open in the back. You’re totally covered up, and you lie on a table on your side. Then I open up a sealed plastic bag with the tubing—it’s brand-new every time, and I always open it up in front of you. There’s a release tube; fecal matter will come out of there and go through the cleaning machine and into the sewer. Then there’s the fill tube that brings in filtered water.

So, I put on my gloves, open the speculum [which is attached to the tubes] and lube it. That goes in the rectum. Then we start filling the descending colon. You lie on your side, and I rub your lower back. A lot of times there’s tension there, because when you’re getting rid of garbage, there can be fear of letting go. We fill for about five to eight minutes, and you’ll have a feeling of fullness. Then you lie on your back, and I massage your face, your arms, your scalp, and it’s kind of this flow of fill and release, fill and release, for 30 to 40 minutes. Our job is to get you totally hydrated. Then you go to the bathroom, release and change. That’s it. The whole appointment’s an hour.

What drew you to this line of work?

Vanity. I was always interested in health, and I remember reading that all disease begins in the colon and—

Wait, really?

Correct. Anything going on in the digestive system is going to back up into the liver. If you have a car, and you give it fuel, well, that fuel comes as crude oil. We have to refine it into gasoline and feed it to the car so it will run. Our body’s fuel comes as raw, crude food—fruits, vegetables, whole grains—and our whole digestive system is about breaking it down to a cell level. It’s 27 feet from mouth to elimination, so it takes up pretty much our whole body to feed our muscles and our brain.

So, if our colon, the elimination part, is toxic, it’s feeding the liver, which affects our digestion and everything else. People go, “If I have acne, how could that have to do with my colon?” Well, if your liver is toxic, how else are toxins supposed to get out? They’ll go out in the skin, the breath, the lungs.

So, that goes back to your first question, how did I get into this? Well, I remember reading in Cosmopolitan that all the models were doing it to have beautiful skin. So, I didn’t have a colon problem when I got interested in colonics; it was just that you have beautiful glowing skin, and you’re healthy.

So, you started as a patient?

I’d done all the things I’d wanted to do in my life. I’d wanted to be a model, an actress, a bank teller, work in a clothing store. The clothing store was my last job, and it went belly up, and I was back living with my dad, with three children. I thought, “I don’t know what I want to do.” And I heard a voice say, “Go have a colonic.” And I did, actually right next-door. That’s a crazy story. This block is the colonic vortex of Sacramento.

How long have you been here?

Fifteen years. And I absolutely love it. You get to know people on a really intimate level, and they trust you. You change people’s lives. People come in and go, “Oh my God! That’s all I had to do was clean my colon?” It changes everything because, if your colon’s clean, it starts affecting your digestive system, and it starts affecting your thinking.

We have our spiritual, mental, emotional and physical bodies, and whatever you do to one affects all the others. So, if you’re cleaning your colon physically, it affects everything else, because you’re literally cleaning out your shit—mentally, emotionally and spiritually. So, when people do it regularly, they just don’t put up with shit anymore.