Mike Dilger ☑️ on Nostr: 15-20% of people in the Western world suffer from IBS. The good news is, just like ...

15-20% of people in the Western world suffer from IBS.

The good news is, just like hot chilli peppers don't actually cause any damage in your mouth, IBS doesn't actually cause any damage in your gut. It has been studied for hundreds of years and there is zero association with increasing the risk of any other disease.

Your gut is not roughed-up or damaged and does not need to "heal", nor is it leaking. Leaky gut is 100% hypothesis and not recognized by healthcare professionals.

It is primarily a gut-brain miscommunication. The pain is unreasonable for the situation (a tennis-ball sized balloon inflated in the gut of normal people causes only a mild sensation of pressure, but in IBS sufferers inflating that same balloon causes intolerable pain.. and BTW your gut can stretch quite a lot without rupturing) and they understand some of the mechanisms causing it (histamine and tryptase produced by mast cells adjacent to nerves sending an exaggerated pain signal when your gut stretches). The brain then reacts to the distress causing, for example, rapid transit and diarrhea which isn't actually useful but doesn't hurt anything either, as long as you are not suffering from malabsorbtion. And IBS is not associated with weight loss, so you aren't.

But there are multiple causes meaning the solution isn't the same for everybody. Perhaps your bile acids are not being reabsorbed before they hit the colon. Perhaps you have a food sensitivity. Perhaps the microbiome is out of whack from antibiotics. Perhaps your stomach is producing too much acid.

Lowering stress and eliminating FODMAP foods can lessen the symptoms (without FODMAPs you get less gas, therefore less stretching), but those are not the primary causes, which are complex and still not well understood.

Also, interestingly, while SIBO is an actual medical condition, it is not associated with IBS, there has been no evidence establishing this. The health supplement industry has jumped on this and come up with products to sell you for a problem you don't have. This is according to Dr Steve Manor, director of gastrointestinal disease research unit and professor of medicine at Queen's University.

I KNOW many of you subscribe to the functional medicine / alternative medicine stuff. You can shout at me now if you want, I don't care. As long as my signal is getting through to the few people who still trust the science and want to know what the researchers say, it doesn't matter that you personally don't believe any of it anymore. But let me say that I think many of you are over-reacting to the COVID deceptions. That COVID shit (which I admit was bad) does not IMHO implicate the entire medical field.