6: What to do After Being Diagnosed with IBD (Crohn's or Colitis)

Getting a new diagnosis can be scary, but that doesn't mean you're doomed!

In fact, you may not be stuck with the only 2 options of medication or surgery - (IBD Crohn's and Colitis) can be reversed!

TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• What is IBD and it's root causes
• What your doctor will say (which is wrong)
• What other options you ACTUALLY have
• How we really get IBD  (hint: it's not always autoimmune)
• Understanding this disease process
• 5 steps to help reverse it

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Transcript

Contrary to what your doctors told you, Crohn's and colitis are reversible.

Now, I've helped hundreds of people reverse their bowel disease, and I'm here to help you do it too—because inflammation always has a root cause. We just have to find it.

This is the Reversing Crohn and Colitis Naturally podcast.

Now I do these live trainings in my Facebook group every single week and put the audios here for you to listen to. If you want to watch the video versions of these episodes, just click the link in the show notes to get access to our Facebook group and YouTube channel. And for weekly updates, information, tips and tricks, you can sign up for our email list by clicking the link in the show notes below.

Hey guys, welcome back to tonight's live. We're here talking about a new diagnosis.

So getting diagnosed with IBD can be very scary, right? Your doctor tells you you have this incurable, lifelong disease that nobody can do anything about—and that's wrong. Being told you have an incurable lifelong disease that came out of nowhere doesn't make any sense. Your doctors are wrong about this.

So if you've got a new diagnosis or had one for a while and maybe haven't been told that you have other options, or you aren't sure what to do next, then this is important that you guys hear this.

I want to go over what options are available to you. And you're going to want to know—I mean, if you guys are interested in actually reversing this thing.

So in this training, we're going to be talking about what IBD actually is—a whole different lens from outside of what your doctor’s been telling you. We're going to talk about what you can do after you've been diagnosed outside of just meds and surgery. We'll be showing you that you have more options besides just that your doctor’s telling you. And of course, we'll talk about some steps you can start taking to actually reverse this.

Now if you guys are new here, my name is Josh Deck. If you don't know me by now, I'm a holistic nutritionist, IBD specialist, medical lecturer, and I'm a physicians’ consultant for IBD and other complex digestive diseases like severe IBS and others. And I've helped hundreds of people to date now reverse their IBD—about 300 cases now just in the last two years alone.

And so these people are finding relief and coming off their medication, and I'm on a mission to help the world see that IBD is reversible—because if we leave it up to the medical system, who frankly profits about $700 billion a year from your sickness, you'll be on a lifetime subscription of medication. And we don't want that.

It is my mission to bankrupt Big Pharma.

So let's get started here. We're going to be talking about what IBD actually is, what you can do after you're diagnosed, we're going to show you that there are more options besides meds and surgery, and what steps you can start taking to reverse this.

Again, my lifelong mission here is just to bankrupt Big Pharma, because they suck and they're the worst.

In fact, I met with Dr. Paul Merrick late last year—very famous doctor. He's written basically every paper and everything and he's been published hundreds of times in hundreds of journals, and he's actually been quoted over 46,000 times in medical literature because this stuff is so rock solid. And he says Big Pharma is evil.

There is an antiparasitic medication called mebendazole that some people have taken—some higher-level celebrities will say that actually cured their cancer. Now, it used to be 15 cents a pill. They bumped it to $555 per pill. And that's Big Pharma for you.

So these are the guys who could care less about your wellness. They just care about the bottom line. And so our job is to help you guys escape that trap. And that’s what we’re here for.

So first I want to talk about: What is IBD?

Now, we know on a surface level, IBD is inflammatory bowel disease. Inflammatory bowel disease is exactly what it sounds like: it's inflammation of the bowel. But I want to split this into two different things.

Now what your doctor says coming in here is that it is autoimmune, has no known cause, and it’s permanent. I'm just going to write "perm"—that's a cool word. So it's permanent, it's autoimmune, there's no known cause.

But we know inflammation is always your body responding to something.

Now for those of you who have been around a little while and have heard my talks before, some of this might sound a little familiar—we're hitting it from a different lens today, okay?

So autoimmune, no known cause, maybe environmental, permanent, nothing we can do—and even just genetic. We've proven long, long since that that's just not true. If you guys want more information on that, ask me for it later.

Okay, so your doctors are telling you this. What we're going to tell you now is that IBD might be autoimmune. Most of the time, the vast majority of the time, it is not actually autoimmune.

In fact, how many of you have actually had your antibodies tested? That’s something you have to ask. Because if your doctor isn’t actually testing antibodies, how do they know it's autoimmune?

A very small percentage of these cases are truly autoimmune. And so we have to look at: What is it?

Well, if it is autoimmune, is it actually your body attacking your own tissue, your own organ? Or is it your body attacking something else?

And that’s the debate now.

I met with Dr. Will Bulsiewicz—you might know him as Dr. B on social media. He works with the company Zoe, one of the world’s leading gastroenterologists and top researchers right now in the world, managing these massive databases of gut microbiomes. We were just talking last week and his hypothesis—which I obviously agree with—is that this autoimmune condition, if it is truly autoimmune, is actually your body developing an autoimmunity to your own microbiome.

Your microbiome.

Now we talk about this—it's this ecosystem. Micro is small, biome is ecosystem. This itty-bitty ecosystem living inside of our guts with about 100 trillion bacteria that outnumber us 10 to 1.

There’s 10 times more fungi and viruses and protozoa and archaea inside of our guts than there are actual cells in our human body—which is just mind-blowing to recognize.

And so when this becomes imbalanced, we start to have a problem.

So inflammatory bowel disease is one of two things, really. It's either an acute inflammatory condition—like getting an infection on your hand. It comes and it goes, your body can fight it off. Or it’s a long-term acute condition, where it started acute and your body couldn’t get rid of the thing and it progressed long-term. Or it is an autoimmunity—your body attacking either an autoimmune response or just an immune response to your microbiome.

See, here's the thing about our microbiomes.

We have had this agreement with them since the beginning of time. Whether you believe in evolution or creation—it doesn't matter. We all work in harmony and come from the same place.

And so we have to understand that the microbiome, this little community, we have had an agreement: you live inside of us, and we help you grow or survive and thrive—and we will also be taken care of by you.

They will create short-chain fatty acids and vitamins and break down things and detoxify and balance hormones and balance your immune system and nurture your body.

And so we've had this agreement. In the last hundred years or so, we've completely broken that agreement with our microbiomes. And now our bodies are in revolt.

So we see your doctor saying: unknown, unquestionably autoimmune, permanent, environmental, genetic, God only knows—which leaves it, frankly, hopeless, empty, meaningless, and forever in dire straits where you’re stuck in this big pharma cycle of medication subscriptions forever.

But we say: wrong. Some cases—very few—might be autoimmune. Your microbiomes are all messed up. Most of us are living in modern day now, and it’s either an acute inflammatory condition—something that came in quickly—because many of you here listening to this right now were perfectly healthy, and then one day, suddenly you were not.

You cannot go from healthy to sick and there not be something causing the problem. Your body just doesn’t one day wake up allergic to itself. That’s nonsense.

And so it’s an acute thing. But there are opportunities—or situations rather—where your body can’t get rid of this. It can’t remove the thing causing the problem. And so it’s chronically trying to heal you. This is what inflammation is—a healing response. Chronic.

Okay, so this is what this is.

We have to understand it’s not random, autoimmune, permanent, genetic, unknown, environmental, blah blah blah. If it is autoimmune, it’s typically your body fighting your microbiome—not your actual colon or your organs or other inflamed conditions.

And it is either acute—something came in—or your body can’t get rid of it.

That’s what IBD is.

And it's going to present us two different ways. I just want to break these down very simply for you guys. There's two umbrellas, right? Of course, we have our Crohn’s umbrella and we have our colitis umbrella.

So Crohn’s and colitis are slightly different, but they’re under the same thing. I actually look at colitis as a less severe form of IBD, whereas Crohn’s is more severe.

I’ll explain.

Colitis, of course, is just inflammation of the large bowel. So that's going to be very surface-level. Think if you tripped and scraped your knee—it’s a little scuff, takes out the surface level. And they go in these long strips. So you might have what we call proctitis, where the lower rectum—maybe 8 or 10 or 20 cm, whatever—is inflamed. You might have it in different areas. You might even have pancolitis, where the entire colon is inflamed. But it’s typically one long stretch, and it’s a very surface-level.

On the other hand, we have Crohn’s disease, which is basically anywhere from mouth to anus—because your mouth is actually the start of your GI tract. And this is why I say it’s worse. Not only is colitis just in the colon, right? Colon-itis. Inflammation. That’s colitis. Crohn’s disease is mouth to anus. So it’s any organ, and it’s not just superficial.

If you actually look at the layers of tissue, it gets very deep. You’re more prone to fissures and other infections and cancers. And it’s the entire GI—mouth to anus. It is the entire everything system.

So: colitis = surface, one organ. Crohn’s = deep, every organ.

And it often goes what we call "patches"—you get these patches of inflammation spotted, kind of like a Dalmatian. These are really the differences.

But they are all inflammation of the GI tract.

So when we deal with Crohn’s or colitis, it’s going to be very much a lot of the same approach—just depending on what your body is doing and what parts of your body are damaged.

But all in all, they’re relatively the same thing.

I just look at them as a sliding scale spectrum, where colitis is the low end of the spectrum, Crohn’s disease is the far end—and that’s where things get really severe.

Okay, so that’s your IBD. But keep in mind—it’s all inflammation.

Inflammation is just your body trying to heal you.

So what is it trying to heal you from?

It’s not trying to heal you from your own colon randomly one day. It doesn’t work that way. It’s the stupidest, most nonsensical thing Western medicine can spit.

Who knows what it is? Take the medications.

We’ve had so many people come to see us of all ages. There was a 5-year-old boy who came to see us just earlier this year—late last year—and randomly started getting a little bit of bowel issues. Started getting worse and worse. From perfectly healthy, now at 5 years old to developing diarrhea, blood and mucus in the stool, started getting gray and pale and losing weight. And his doctor said, “Yep. It’s genetic. It’s autoimmune. It’s random. It’s environmental. We don’t know. But he’ll be on drugs for the rest of his life.”

They wanted to give him immunosuppressive drugs.

His mom came to see me and said, “This doesn’t make sense. Please explain it.”

We walked through it—and guess what? He had a mold infection. There were 15 or 16 different strains of mold inside this little boy’s gut.

So his body was in an acute reaction—it acutely, or shortly, became reactive or inflamed to try to get rid of the mold. It couldn’t get rid of it, so the inflammation ramped up and got more severe until it started bleeding. But it wasn’t just random. His body was reacting to something that wasn’t supposed to be there.

And even if it became autoimmune—which it hasn’t yet, at this stage, thank God—but mold does live in our microbiome. Fungus lives in our microbiome. Mold is a fungus.

But when it becomes out of balance, or it gets really severe, this is where we start to develop issues and the body can attack the microbiome. So we have to balance the biome.

This is where we have to get deeper and deeper—we have to understand what it is.

So as a quick recap here:

Doctor says it’s autoimmune, environmental, no known cause.

I respectfully disagree.

And we’ve been so blessed now to work with the doctors we’re working with. We’re actually now teaching at Priority Health Academy and working with these doctors to teach them what we know and how we’re reversing IBD to try to get it into the system.

But there are millions of doctors out there, and we’ve got a couple dozen we’re working with right now—and that’s it. So it’s going to be a slow process.

But IBD is actually an acute inflammatory response. Autoimmune maybe—to the microbiome. But not your tissues.

Because we broke the agreement with our microbiome. And this is where things get tricky.

So here’s what happens:

If you go to the Western system, you go to your doctor—your options basically are really one thing.

And my marker is not working very well. That’s my fault—if I don’t use it like every 12 seconds, it just dries out immediately.

So the first thing is going to be: meds. Prescription—possibly life.

And the second thing is going to be: surgery.

Now they have many different medications they might give you. They have a bunch of different options, right? They might start you on a taper of maybe prednisone or something very similar. They might use budesonide or another steroid. And then they might move you on to something a little bit more severe.

They might go on to infusions and injections and all kinds of stuff. And they’ll keep dropping through. And they say, “Well hey, here’s your medication. It didn’t work. You failed the Entyvio. You failed Humira. You failed Stelara. You failed Zeljanz. You failed. You failed. You failed.”

But the reality is these medications are merely masking the symptoms. They are not fixing the problem.

They are stopping the signal. Your body says, “Hey, bring in the cavalry to heal me.” They just shut off the radio signal—and nothing shows up.

So even though you’re still sick and still damaged, you don’t have the same healing response. So you feel better, but there’s still an infection causing issues on other levels.

And this is why so many people dealing with inflammatory bowel disease develop other illnesses outside of the gut.

You develop pancreatitis, gallbladder issues, liver issues. You can develop hormone issues, hair loss, mood swings, skin issues, joint pain, brain fog.

All these things can happen because the problem never got removed.

If you walked around with a nail in your foot, at first yeah—it’s going to be a small issue depending on what’s going on with the nail. But if you just put numbing cream on it and keep walking—it’s going to be a big, big problem down the road.

And that’s what happens.

So here are your medications. If you fail them—snip, snip—out comes the colon. That’s your surgery.

That’s all we have.

Medications in this order. If they don’t do the job and suppress the inflammation—your body’s natural, God-given response to heal you from something—we go to surgery. Snip, snip.

Now to me, I think that is a terrible response to an inflammatory condition.

What we need to do instead is look at why your body is inflamed.

So the first thing we want to do—obviously, you guys are going to go “duh”—is:

Find the root.

We have to find the root cause. Your body is inflamed for a reason.

The number one question I get asked is: how do I find the root cause if symptoms are being suppressed?

Symptoms. Symptoms. Symptoms.

Even with testing, I see a lot of the same stuff. And I’m not going to go into this one too much because we have other videos on this one. If you guys are listening to the podcast version of this—which we have, by the way, if you’re watching the video—we talk about the root causes.

Now again, it’s all going to come down effectively to microbes and microbiome.

And then we have to look at imbalances in the system. I’m just going to call them imbalances—that could be food, nutrition, etc.

So there’s a lot of different branches here.

But microbes and microbiome—the top things that we tend to see—we look at things like:

• Parasites
• We see clostridia, which is a bacterial overgrowth (a very specific type of gram-positive bacteria that causes a lot of problems)
• Fungal issues, including candida and mold
• We see diet issues
• Nutrient deficiencies
• Neurological stuff—your CNS, your central nervous system, high levels of stress

But we have to look at the body. Also—

The gut is kind of like a waterfall.

We actually talk about it as sort of... the inside of the gut is actually the outside of the body.

If we think about it, it is one tube from mouth to anus. And so technically, if you took a human being and stretched them out and blew some air through it, you could literally see right from mouth through to anus in one straight shot—because it’s a hole. It’s a big tube, like the inside of a donut.

So we say it’s kind of inside and outside. But if there are issues in the gut—in the digestive system—it causes some issues on the inside of the body elsewhere.

So it’s like a— I look at this tube as like a waterfall. If you have problems in the mouth, for example, if there’s oral health issues, you are guaranteed to have GI issues somewhere.

If you have bad breath, if you have a lot of cavities, if you have yellowing teeth, if you have bleeding gums—any of that stuff can be a huge indicator of issues going on down the line.

Now, did the gut issues cause the health issues or vice versa?

It’s a chicken and egg.

We always have to go back through—what caused it?

Now if you’re somebody who woke up randomly one day out of the blue and suddenly had inflammation—well, that’s what we call an acute inflammatory response.

Acute meaning short term or instant. And this is what we have to dive into.

So I want to go into roughly what the five steps look like for you guys here.

We’re not going to dive into detail, because we just did this sort of overview fairly recently on the Five Rs. But the Five Rs is actually a very common approach. It’s getting more common as time goes on here.

1. Remove

The first thing we have to look at, obviously, is the first R—which is Remove.

Remove the problem.

That little boy I was telling you about—he had a mold infection. It was a mold issue. We had to remove the mold.

Now removal can look like a few things. Some people can’t actually just go and remove things. I know so many people who go, “Well I’ve tried antifungals, I’ve tried parasite cleanses, I’ve tried this and that.”

But they’re missing crucial steps.

There is a pecking order or an order to things to properly get these things removed from the system and from the body.

We have to work on drainage and all kinds of support mechanisms.

Right—your body, it’s like a big city. And all your organs are factories.

The factory is maybe your liver. Well the factory workers are the cells in your liver. And the tools they need are vitamins and minerals and amino acids and all the nutrients, right?

You have a tool and die shop as well—your body creates a lot of these nutrients or breaks down, digests, and absorbs to turn them into usable forms for your cells or your factory workers.

So if your organs are having issues—your liver maybe is having a problem because the factory workers don’t have the tools they need—you’re not going to be able to remove the problem.

Because your drainage pathways—any orifice or any detox organ—is drainage.

This is where we’re going to look at things like:

• Liver
• Kidneys
• Sinuses (big one—surprisingly a lot of people with GI issues have sinus issues)
• Skin
• Lymph
• Gut

These are the major drainage pathways, or detox pathways. Your body’s trying to clear stuff out.

So if you have blockages, if you have nutrient deficiencies, or physical blockages like parasites—you’re not going to remove. That’s the first thing we have to look at.

2. Replenish

Now oddly enough, we just talked about this one—Replenish.

Your factory workers need tools. We need vitamins, minerals, and amino acids.

If you have gut issues, you don’t break down, digest, or absorb. You lack the tools they need—or your body needs—to do its job properly.

You have to replenish those tools. Of course.

3. Rebuild and Repair

The next one—I’m going to put these on the same line—but this is Rebuild and Repair.

Now why do we have this?

Well—we rebuild and repair.

Your gut microbiome does not like inflammation. And so when there’s inflammation in the area, the opportunistic microbes that shouldn’t be there take over. The good ones tend to die off. They get crowded out.

So we have to rebuild the microbiome while repairing the inflamed tissues.

4. Rejuvenate the Immune System

And this also means we have to do what’s called Rejuvenate the immune system.

Now—why rejuvenate instead of boost?

Because if you’re imbalanced and you boost, oh boy. You boost an imbalance contributing to the problem.

I had a conversation with someone on Facebook the other day—briefly in the comments—and she had taken monolaurin and taken this boost and tried these mushrooms and different things. And she was like, “It made me worse. You should never take those.”

I said, “Nope. You should never take those.”

Because that monolaurin drove one of your already dominant immune pathways. So you overclocked the wrong part of your immune system. You didn’t rejuvenate or rebalance—you just boosted an imbalance, caused more problems.

And this is the problem—we say, “Well this hurt me, therefore it’s going to hurt you and nobody should do it.” Or, “It worked for me, therefore you should do it and everybody should take these things.”

This is where the internet information kind of gets really messy—because people are giving advice, though in good well-meaning hearts, they don’t realize there’s a lot of nuance to all these pieces of information.

Let me know if you want the final part next—where Josh shares the most powerful stories, dives into PTSD, slow onset vs rapid onset, and explains what keeps people stuck even after trying everything. I can format the ending into a strong closing section.

Everyone is different. Your circumstances are different.

But everyone can get better. Everybody can be fixed. Everyone can be reversed.

There is no reason IBD cannot be fixed.

We’ve had people come in with 50 bowel movements—five-zero—per day, and in three weeks we’re down to five to eight. We’ve had people passing one bowel movement—I kid you not—every two to four weeks, who within a couple of weeks were having one a day, on regular. And they’d been like this for decades—10, 15+ years.

So everyone can get better. It’s just a matter of time.

We just have to look in the right place.

Unfortunately, your doctors aren’t even looking for the root cause. They’re going: “It’s autoimmune. It’s environmental.” Slap it with this label, brush it over top, and say you have no options except medication and surgery.

And we wonder why gut disease is ramping up.

We wonder why, in 1990, there were maybe 1 to 3 million global cases. Now it’s estimated at 8 million. In 30 years.

Genetics don’t change that much. But what happens to our microbiomes does.

The things we take in and ingest. The chemicals and toxins and damage done. The import/export trade—which brings more parasites.

Because most doctors think parasites are a third-world country problem.

We have photos—guys, compendiums. And I mean worms. A mom recently sent me a worm she got out of her 15-year-old. A 38-inch worm. She picked it up with chopsticks.

This big worm.

We’ve got people dropping these things almost daily.

So they are still in there.

There are a lot of layers to this process. Everyone can get better. We just have to look in the places your doctor doesn’t know to look, doesn’t want to look, isn’t willing to look—or whatever reason it might be.

Unfortunately, a lot of doctors in the medical system do want to help.

They got into medicine because they want to help. But they’re stuck in a system where they have six minutes. They get reimbursed, say, 20 bucks from the insurance company—or 25 dollars. They can’t spend an hour with you for $25. Not when they have nurses and overhead and clinic costs and stuff to pay.

So they make recommendations which are financially motivated. “Hey, just take this medication—I get a $500/month kickback from your usage. And I’m in and out in seven minutes. I’ve made $525 for seven minutes of my time. Bing bang boom. Done.”

It’s a pretty good deal.

A lot of them are stuck in this model. A lot of them are incentivized. And if you leave and pursue holistic or functional medicine, you have no support. You’re fully on your own. There’s no safety net.

There are some amazing doctors who have done this—but it’s very few and far between.

Some don’t want to know.

I’ve worked with hundreds of people over the years.

And I have had one doctor—one—in my entire career, now with hundreds of cases reversed, with hundreds of different doctors. Some of these people are seeing two, three, four different doctors.

Karen—she’s got a testimonial on the website—she saw eight different doctors or something. She went to the Mayo Clinic. They said food doesn’t matter. All of it was nonsense.

And so we hear this and see this. They say, “Do whatever you want.”

And out of these hundreds of doctors we’ve tried to connect with—one has actually reached out. But I can attribute him to where our career is today and where we’re going with this and helping so many people—because he actually reached out.

It literally took one.

And now we’re working with some of the top doctors in the world. We work with them on the podcast and through referral and all kinds of stuff—to help you guys.

That’s all I’ve got for you for tonight.

I’m going to see if there’s any questions here now, because this is a great time.

Now here’s the thing—if you guys need help with questions, drop them in the chat. Because this is my favorite part of the lives.

Questions are the way that we work with you guys here on these lives, rather than me just telling you stuff that I think you want to hear or things that I’ve been asked. I want to make sure you get your questions answered.

Shayene had asked: How do you find the root if a biologic is quieting symptoms?

Two ways.

If you're on immunosuppressive drugs or biologics, the question is: How do we find the root cause if your symptoms are quieted?

There’s two ways we can do it.

Number one: some people still have symptoms.

I’m going to say there are three ways.

A lot of people are taking drugs and are still symptomatic. That tells us a whack of things.

Now again, symptoms are in two places: we have inside the gut and outside of the gut.

Your intestines—your GI tract—can really only communicate, think of it as vocabulary, in maybe 10 different words: gas, bloat, pain, diarrhea, constipation, cramping, nausea, vomiting, mucus, blood. Doesn’t really get much more versatile than that.

So your gut can only use about 10 different words to talk to us. And unfortunately, most GI conditions can present exactly the same.

So a diagnosis doesn’t matter. It’s just a word describing your symptoms. It doesn’t tell us why.

It tells us where it is and how bad—doesn’t tell us why it is or what’s happening.

Right? So it’s actually a useless word. A diagnosis is a joke of a word.

So the symptoms inside the gut—we can also look at outside: your joints, your moods, your hormones. We can look at your brain activity and how that’s functioning. Are you brain-fogged? Are you forgetful? Moody? Irritable? Any skin issues? Joint issues? Oral health issues? Liver? Blood work?

We can see so much outside of what your gut is telling us.

That’s number one.

Number two: we can look at testing.

Now, testing is something that we don’t do with everyone—because the symptoms are so clear even for those on medication. But testing can be very useful.

Our go-to used to be a GI MAP. But as the science develops, we now use what’s called an OAT—Organic Acid Test.

And that, as clinicians, can help us pinpoint what’s going on.

But again—it’s all contextual. You can’t just go get an OAT and go, “Here’s my thing!” and take a $12 bottle of supplement pills. It doesn’t work that way.

But as clinicians, this is a tool we use. It’s like you going and getting blood work done. We know how to use these.

So symptoms and testing, Shayene, tell us a lot of what’s going on—even if you’re being suppressed by biologics or immunosuppressive drugs.

But there’s still a lot we can do.

You guys are never going to be up sh*t’s creek.

We have people in the program working with us at every level—some who come in and drop their medication before starting, some who started medication right when they started the program, some who are weaning off or get on medication even during the program.

They’re here for a week or two and they just happen to have infusions scheduled and they get them going—and that’s fine.

Everybody can get help. There’s no barrier to you getting the help you need.

Next question: What about combat PTSD?

I’ve been dealing with it, I’ve done everything—both holistic and medication—but unfortunately it won’t go away. And this led to IBD.

So this is the two ways we see IBD come on, right?

There’s acute, which is very quickly. And then there’s chronic.

Now, acute is somebody who, over a few short days, weeks, and months, developed IBD. This can be PTSD.

There’s chronic, where it’s kind of ongoing—and chronic, the definition isn’t exact here—but you get the idea. Long-term or slow onset is maybe a better term than chronic. But it lasts a long time and doesn’t go away.

In the case of PTSD, you might have one of two things.

Whether you have PTSD or mold infection or a fungal issue or heavy metals or toxicity—you had your gallbladder removed—it does not matter.

They both kind of operate the same way.

It transfers like this... and it can end up like this. From acute to chronic.

In this situation—let’s talk about PTSD. What does PTSD do?

The first thing it does is it rattles your nervous system. Pushing you extremely far into the fight or flight space. So your body, instead of being in rest and digest, is in fight or flight.

So your stress responses are up all the time.

While your central nervous system stress response is being up—it does a lot of different things to the body. It downgrades and downregulates your immune system, so it actually compromises that.

It compromises nutrient uptake and absorption. It slows the motility of your GI tract—the movement of food through your system. It shuts down or inhibits stomach acid production. So you’re not going to break down, digest, and absorb your nutrients.

It inhibits detoxification. It does all kinds of nasty stuff.

Well—this wear and tear spectrum over time…

The analogy I like to use: it’s like wearing a pair of shoes without socks.

The heel rubs and rubs and rubs... until it gets red, then raw, then blisters, then bleeds—and now we have symptoms.

We go to the doctor with blood and mucus in the stool, and they go, “Yep, you have IBD.”

But it started back here—with stress responses.

So this is where things get really tricky.

There’s lots we can do to help balance out the adrenals.

Obviously PTSD therapy—going through whether it’s EMDR or ketamine therapy, or... there’s been lots of really great studies on psilocybin, or mushrooms—either microdosed for a long period of time or megadosed (5 to 8 grams in a single dose), which lasts and has self-reported benefits for months and months at a time.

So there’s lots of psychoactive drug therapy that can help, depending on where the tissues are stored. If there’s gunshot wounds, that scar tissue can actually hold emotion—the body keeps the score. We know this.

I’ve actually got Dr. Bruce Lipton coming on the podcast this summer—I think in July. We’re very excited about that one. So we’ll be talking about The Biology of Belief and how our brain and minds affect our bodies.

But that’s effectively what it is. PTSD ramps up the nervous system, shutting down the digestive tract, inhibiting the immune system, allowing inflammation and inflammatory processes or breakdown processes to slowly develop.

So the root of this one would be the PTSD.

Now picture this: if it was someone with a mold infection—

Well, the mold got in. What did it do?

It started causing inflammation, which led to changes in the microbiome, which led to the immune system overreacting, which led to inflammation and wear and tear and blah blah blah overdraws the immune system—until you end up in the same place.

With inflammation. Blood in the stool. Mucus. Cramping.

You go to the doctor. “You have IBD.”

But they stop here. They stop at the end of this line and go, “Well, it’s IBD. Here’s your thing.” Back to: diagnosis, autoimmune, genetic, unknown, random, forever.

They never go back to the PTSD. Or the mold. Or the whatever started the problem.

And this is my issue with Western medicine.

This is why we say: guys, just ask for help. Comment “solution.” We’ll get you the help you need and do everything we can in our much more robust toolkit than the doctors have, unfortunately.

We’re happy to help you guys get fixed up.

Amarie asks: When on biologics, with most symptoms helped—is damage still progressing, or is the current damage on hold?

Both.

So damage is still progressing—but it’s progressing a lot slower than it could be.

Inflammation happens on many different levels. This is why some biologics or different drugs work better—or differently—for certain people.

What happens is: they shut down the signals.

So think of it like—there’s a traffic accident on the highway. You have three emergency services, right? Ambulance, fire, and police.

Well, if one medication shuts down two of the three, and they never come—there’s a lot less traffic on the highway. You’re not getting as much wear and tear on the pavement. You’re not getting so much backup.

So what ends up happening when we stop the signal—the emergency services don’t get there. They don’t put the wear and tear on the system.

It’s when certain inflammatory cells—elevation of prostaglandins, cytokines, certain white blood cells—when they linger in the area for long periods, they break down the tissues.

If we stop the particular signal, which signals that immune cell, it can slow that down.

But... you still have an infection. You still have the cause.

Even though your immune system is not reacting to it—it’s still a problem.

So let’s use an example: a flood.

There was a really major flood in Calgary, Alberta in 2014. Took down half the city. Flooded up to bridges, all kinds of stuff.

Now imagine that bridge.

The water is still wearing and tearing on the bridge, causing a problem.

Even though you shut down traffic and you’re not causing more wear and tear—you still have structural problems.

If you have a mold infection in the gut—it’s still altering your microbiome. Still producing endotoxins. Still stressing the liver. Still junking up the gallbladder.

People go, “Well I had my gallbladder removed.”

Is it any wonder that 85%—give or take, 85 or 87%—of all cases of PSC (primary sclerosing cholangitis—that’s your gallbladder), 85% of all cases are in those with IBD?

Because it junks up the liver and gallbladder. The toxins are still being produced by the foreign body and getting into the body.

Just that your immune system isn’t trying to heal you from it in the same degree or same way. And that’s why you feel better—but there are still issues being caused in the background.

Amarie asks: What timeframe is considered acute onset versus long-term?

Very different for everyone. It’s really hard to say.

Technically, the word “chronic” is defined as one year or more ongoing without alteration or change, even with medical intervention.

So it’s a chronic condition at that stage.

But acute—I’ve had people come in dealing with an acute issue where they were perfectly healthy.

Let me redefine this: instead of acute and chronic, let’s go with:

• Rapid onset
• Slow onset

Rapid onset is someone who is perfectly healthy and within a few short days, weeks, or months—boom, very sick. Disease process kicks in.

Slow onset might be a year or more.

Everyone’s timeline will be different.

I talk about him all the time—David, 22-year-old male, started a new job. Two months in—got IBS. Six months later—diagnosed with IBD.

Doctor says, “It’s genetic. It’s your heritage. Nothing we can do.”

We said, “What job did you start?”

Turns out he was in HVAC. Didn’t wear his PPE. Developed a mold infection. And it rapidly developed into IBD.

Then there’s someone like Louis.

We just talked about him on international TV this year in February.

Had the great pleasure of meeting him in Dallas, Texas.

He had his gallbladder removed 20 years ago, which slowly onset over a decade into severe ulcerative colitis.

So that’s the difference—rapid vs. slow.

I’ve had people literally go from healthy to blood in stool in 24 hours and be told they have colitis.

Carrie asks: Is a lot of the solution a change of diet?

No. Yes and no.

If you’re eating like a raccoon—trash, garbage, junk food, fried foods, sugar, processed foods, foods that never existed 200 years ago—yes, you are contributing to the problem.

Absolutely.

But rarely is food the only answer.

Is it a piece of the pie? Yes.

But even if food started the problem—it’s just one slice.

What else happened? Your microbiome changed. Fungal overgrowth. Toxicity. Parasites.

You fixed the food, but you’ve still got residual damage. Like putting out a fire in the kitchen—sure, problem solved. But the walls are burnt, the floor is smoky, the appliances are ruined.

Back to PTSD: “I’ve done all that since 2010. Nothing’s working. It sucks. I hate it.”

This is where it gets really tricky.

There’s always more that can be done.

Maybe you did fix a lot of the PTSD and nervous system responses—but there’s still smoke in the house. It stained the carpets.

Residual damage still driving the disease.

Feeding back into anxiety.

Which exacerbates the PTSD.

Because your brain isn’t healthy anymore—because of what was caused by the original problem—and now it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There are always more layers.

Shayene asks: Connection with scar tissue?

Yes.

Scar tissue and inflammation can inhibit movement.

If you had a C-section, they sliced you right open. If you have scar tissue there, the abdominal muscles will be inhibited. Maybe even nerves got sliced.

Now other muscles are doing jobs they shouldn’t—which get tight—which pull on tissue.

Your intestines are suspended by connective tissue. Everything’s connected.

So yes, a scar in one place can cause tension elsewhere—even lead to physical drivers of bowel issues.

Last one: “Can minor symptoms begin slowly over a year and be slow onset?”

Sure. Absolutely.

By the time you develop diagnosable symptoms, things have often been there a long time.

Disease doesn’t pop up out of the blue. It’s been in the works for years.

That’s all we’ve got for you tonight.

Thanks so much for coming by and tuning in.

We will see you guys next time.

Thanks for listening.

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