40 Minutes of Your Time

Colon hydrotherapy is a complete colon and rectum cleaning method, which is effective in removing toxin, improving constipation, remedying diarrhea, enteritis and intestinal dysbacteriosis disorders, preventing intestine cancers and chronic colonitis, and decreasing blood lipid levels.

Regular cleaning can have additional benefits, such as beautifying your appearance, slowing your aging process and reducing your weight. It possesses the reputation of "The most popular intra-body regulatory naturopath in the 21st century".

"Give me 40 minutes of your time" said a poster at the spa in my luxury Beijing hotel.

It was advertising colon hydrotherapy, so I decided to do my large intestine a favour and brave the unknown.

Enemas have been used for centuries to treat all kinds of problems - from infections and migraines to allergies and digestive difficulties. A healthy body, it is said, depends on a healthy intestine.

But there is absolutely no polite way to talk about this because we are dealing with excrement and putrefying matter trapped in fleshy crevices where it shouldn't be.

I saw a good example of this recently on Channel 4's 'You Are What You Eat' programme when the colon hydro therapist said to her client: "I see you had sweet corn recently" and he said: "No, not for a couple of months."

Anyway, back in Beijing a little Chinese girl gives me a gown and takes my clothes. She promises to clean my shoes because, she says, "You can't have a clean body and dirty shoes."

Then a medic checks my blood pressure and asks me a list of questions I am handed a pair of paper shorts with no bottom.

The Chinese hydro therapist is very pretty, guides me to a couch with a hole in it and shows me the pipe. It looks like a small vacuum cleaner, but with a sterilised lubricant on the end.

She passes it to me to insert into my anus and turns on the machine.

Being filled up with a lovely warm solution is very strange - particularly as she is massaging my tummy and exhorting me to "Come on! Come on! Go for it!"

Every shred of dignity vanishes, of course, as you do in public what you usually do in private. Only you do it again and again and again, until the water runs clear.

Half way through this expulsion, she brings a magazine and leaves me for a while to read about the benefits of this back-to-basics procedure.

I learn that even in Egyptian times, 'keeper of the Pharaoh's intestine' was a senior government post, and that the Biblical Essenes recommended a similar clear-out using a hollow tendril and a pumpkin full of water up the posterior "to remove the stinking matter which fouls the temple of your body."

Nowadays, colon hydrotherapy has been refined in the USA and is regarded as a natural way of regulating internal health.

It is used medically to treat constipation and diarrhea, enteritis and colonitis as well as being a detox which improves the metabolism and in turn skin, hair and general wellbeing.

How did I feel? Wonderful, light, unbloated and unbelievably clean. In fact, I'm exploring the possibility of adding colon hydrotherapy to the range of treatments on offer at Hair and Beauty World Drive In in Halifax West Yorkshire. So watch that space...