Back in the 70's, we tried a treatment to reduce withdrawal symptoms in heroin addicts that used sodium bicarf, calcium carbonate and some magnesium salt, and it did a very good job of reducing the physical symptoms of withdrawal. I know there are other versions of this idea for both opiate and nicotine withdrawal out there. Interesting to find that baking soda works not through biochemistry but through a signaling mechanism that alters the body's ongoing response to inflammation....
That little box you put in the refrigerator and freezer to prevent odoriferous gases from tainting your food may hold the key to reducing the destructive inflammation of autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. New evidence from investigators at the Medical College of Georgia (MCG) shows how a cheap, over-the-counter antacid solution of sodium bicarbonate (commonly referred to as baking soda) can encourage the spleen to promote an anti-inflammatory environment that could be therapeutic in the face of inflammatory disease. Findings from the new study were published recently in the Journal of Immunology, in an article entitled “Oral NaHCO3 Activates a Splenic Anti-Inflammatory Pathway: Evidence That Cholinergic Signals Are Transmitted via Mesothelial Cells.”
Previous studies have shown that when rats or healthy people drink a solution of sodium bicarbonate, it becomes a trigger for the stomach to make more acid to digest the next meal and for little-studied mesothelial cells sitting on the spleen to tell the fist-sized organ that there's no need to mount a protective immune response.
The splenic response to pH shift is that “it's most likely a hamburger, not a bacterial infection," noted senior study investigator Paul O'Connor, Ph.D., a renal physiologist in the MCG department of physiology.
Mesothelial cells line body cavities, like the digestive tract, and they also cover the exterior of organs to quite literally keep them from rubbing together. About a decade ago, it was found that these cells also provide another level of protection—microvilli that sense the environment and warn the organs they cover that there is an invader and an immune response is needed.
The MCG researchers believe that drinking baking soda tells the spleen—which is part of the immune system where some white blood cells, like macrophages, are stored—to go easy on the immune response. "Certainly, drinking bicarbonate affects the spleen, and we think it's through the mesothelial cells," Dr. O'Connor noted.
Interestingly, the research team found that after drinking water with baking soda for two weeks, the population of macrophages in the spleen, kidneys, and blood shifted from primarily those that promote inflammation, called M1, to those that reduce it, called M2. Macrophages, perhaps best known for their ability to consume garbage in the body, like debris from injured or dead cells, are often the immune systems first responders to a call for assistance.