40: Why Your Doctor's Advice Might Be Making Your Crohn's and Colitis Worse

Did you know that medical error is the 3rd leading cause of death in the USA? This is just one of the reasons you need to take charge of your health, but there are many reasons why your doctor's advice may be making your Crohn's and Colitis worse...


TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• The bad advice and treatments your doctor gives you
• The bad rhetoric they learn about IBD 
• Bad or dangerous treatments doctors recommend
• Obvious things they miss with your disease
• And of course, I'm going to give you good advice, treatments and rhetoric 
• Vital things you need to know about your IBD that your doctor won't tell you
  
  

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Transcript

Josh Dech:

Medical errors that are made by your doctor are the third leading cause of death in the USA just after heart disease and cancers, totaling over a quarter million deaths per year. This is according to a 2016 study in the British Medical Journal.

So today we're going to be talking about why your doctor's advice might actually be making you worse. We're going to talk about the common bad advice that they offer for things like Crohn's and colitis. We'll go over the incorrect information that they tell you about these diseases. We're going to talk about what's wrong with the approach entirely that they take to this disease. And of course, we're going through the obvious and most vital things that they miss or frankly ignore. And lastly, we're talking about the treatments that they give and how they are — they have so many more risks in these treatment protocols than going something more natural. It's much safer as an alternative route.

Now if you don't know me, my name is Josh Dech. I'm an IBD specialist, medical lecturer, and physicians consultant, and the scientific strategist and education director for the Root Cause for Crohn's Colitis organization. And today I'm showing you why your doctor's advice might be making you worse.

If you hear some rustling in the background or the occasional squeak, that is the musical accompaniment of our new puppy squeaking her squeaker toy down below. No song and dance — just the song today for you guys.

So here's the thing. I want to start by prefacing this entire conversation in my humble opinion, which is sometimes very forward — all of the advice, every piece of advice or rhetoric or information that western-trained medical doctors give about bowel disease is wrong. The education leads to bad ideologies. It's bad education. The methodology that they teach leads to bad treatments. It just overall is bad. I think it's terrible. I think it's a shame that they're doing it and I think they're harming millions of people with this disease. Just my opinion. But here's what I'm going to tell — I'm going to break this down and show you why I believe this is.

So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go through a couple of categories with you.

First we're going to talk about the bad advice that I see doctors giving.

What is the bad advice I believe that they give?

Well number one, we talk about diets. Well, the white diet. White diet is atrocious advice. The white diet is some of the worst advice you can ever give. What does that mean? It's white breads, white rice, white cereals, white pasta — white foods. Now in their defense, these are easy to digest and they commonly don't hurt a whole lot because they can break down in your mouth and take the load off your guts. That's why they do it. But it's nutritionally void. It can be highly inflammatory and it's just overall a really bad idea on a micro level.

On a macro level, your symptoms are reduced, but as far as getting you actually better — there's no hope on a white diet. Even though your symptoms might feel fine, the long-term outcome is not going to be there.

The second thing they'll often say is "avoid red meat." Well it's inflammatory or it causes disease. It doesn't. There is zero evidence. All the studies are completely butchered. They'll go through and say "Well red meat's bad or causes diabetes." Well in the study they use lasagna or a hamburger with a Coke, and then they blame the red meat. So they're completely botched. Anyways, so many people try the carnivore diet for example and get great results. Other people eat red meat and do feel worse. So you have to go by tolerability, not rhetoric.

Another thing they'll also say is they'll say "Eat whatever you want — just white or whatever. Eat whatever you want." This is nonsense. Obviously the food you eat impacts your gut. This is third grade biology. Like it's like saying "Put whatever you want in your gas tank and drive your car." It's going to die, man. It doesn't work that way. Your food really does matter and it dramatically impacts your gut.

We're going to talk about some good advice on these things in a moment here.

But the next thing I want to go with you guys here to talk about — let's talk about the bad rhetoric. This is going to be the things they tell you, the ideology behind what they do, which is just frankly embarrassing.

Let me tell you a story...

Got a 19-year-old kid over in the UK I’m working with right now. We're over here in Canada so we work all over the world. Working over in the UK and his doctor told him, “If you go more than six bowel movements a day, we're going to have to cut out your colon.” They tell him, “You're not going to get better. Surgery is inevitable. There's nothing we can do. More than six bowel movements a day — we have to do surgery.” And it's this very paternal, really dark and kind of dismal sort of approach that they take to this thing. And it's wrong.

His doctor was wrong. He got three different opinions from three different GIs who all told him different things and different outcomes, which is kind of crazy. And so I’ve got clients with 50 bowel movements a day when they come to see us, and they don’t have their colon removed. So to tell you to go after six? Always get a second opinion. It’s nonsense.

Doctors can be almost forceful with medication and surgery. Very paternal — “Well, you have to do this thing. If you don’t do it, I’m not going to see you anymore. You’re non-compliant.” Rather than working with you as a human being with opinions of your own, they can be overbearing and paternal. And then they also say that medication is — or surgeries are inevitable and medication is forever. This is not true.

If you take a different approach and come from another angle — hundreds of people. We got 400 people now we’ve taken off medications the last three years or so. Gone. They’re no longer in pain. No more inflammation. Colonoscopies look good. Medications are gone. Because we address the root of disease.

If you're hearing those little tippy-taps, it's again — that’s a four-month-old puppy running around. So maybe you get to meet her if you guys ask really nice.

Here’s the next bit — bad treatments. Now you can probably imagine where we’re going with this one. What are the bad treatments I think doctors are giving right now? And this is based on my experience.

First thing they do — PPIs. That’s proton pump inhibitors. Very dangerous. In fact, PPIs are linked to all kinds of diseases like SIBO — that’s small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. They’re linked to osteoporosis, kidney disease, dementia, heart disease, strokes. They’re nasty. They mess up the assembly line.

Your stomach has acid in it for a reason. And I have never in my entire career — have I ever seen anybody who has acid reflux and has too much stomach acid. Every — 100% of the time I’ve seen it, it’s been low. So what that’s telling me is what you’re getting, it’s actually a sphincter issue. So the sphincter above and below your stomach — entry and exit — they’re controlled by pressure and pH. So you need fluid volume and you need acid to get them to close. When you have low acid, inflammation, stomach issues, dietary stress, sleep — whatever it is — guess what? Your sphincters aren’t going to close. So the little you do have, when you lay down, when you eat, when you bend over, it comes up because it’s not closing. What do they do? They suppress it even further, and they put you at risk for worsened bowel issues, other chronic diseases down the road. PPIs are abysmal.

Another thing we see of course — antibiotics. Now here’s the thing. When you need them, you need them. Antibiotics can be life-saving. Nothing wrong with that. But antibiotics — I forget the exact stats, I recently did a talk on this one. I believe it’s 15%. I’m going to run with that one. Fifteen percent of anybody who takes antibiotics is prone to getting something called AAD — or antibiotic associated diarrhea. Now this — up to — I think it’s 15%. Maybe it’s 25%. Anyways, we’ll call it 15 to 25% because I forget my exact numbers. But it can be fatal in something like up to 15% of cases. Death by diarrhea sounds like a terrible way to go.

They can cause all kinds of issues, make you prone to C. diff, fungal overgrowth, and worsening your dysbiosis within your gut. Now if you need them, you need them. But according to the CDC — the Center for Disease Control in the USA — 30% of all antibiotic prescriptions are unnecessary. They’re just preventative. They’re just, “Well, we’ll try and see.” They’re given for viruses, all kinds of crap. So we don’t actually need them most of the time.

If it’s a life-saving situation like C. diff, yeah go get it. You got a nasty infection that’s going to blow your eardrums — I did that a couple weeks back. Had a nasty chest cold. I started pus leaking out of my ears and my eardrum almost blew out. So I got antibiotics. It’s fine. But frequency matters. And to just throw them at you for no reason or to get your gut in so bad of a state where you chronically need them — it’s only making you much much worse.

That is a bad treatment.

I’ve also seen doctors, oddly enough, give NSAIDs — like Advil — non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Those are really extremely toxic for IBD and for anybody’s gut in total.

And another one I commonly see as well is just putting you on immunosuppressives. You are inflamed because your body is protecting you from something. Instead of asking, “What is my body protecting me from?” we say, “Stop the reaction.” It’ll make you feel better. We suppress your immune response through immunosuppressive drugs. Now in the short term to give you your quality of life back, there’s nothing wrong with that. But that is an acute treatment.

Using it for long-term reasons — we stop the active inflammation for a long-term or I guess a length of time. This is a problem. Because instead of addressing the reason why you’re inflamed, we just suppress it. Because the rhetoric we have, the education we have around it is bad. So our only solution is giving you immunosuppressive drugs.

We’re going to talk about that here coming up.

The next thing I see — I guess I did just talk about it, I have it on my list — is overprescriptions. I might have mixed those up a little bit here, but that’s fine. We overprescribe these bad treatments as well. Bad antibiotic use. PPIs. NSAIDs. They’re bad prescriptions. They’re overdone and they’re not necessary most of the time.

And I want to talk about some of the other things that they miss. Let’s talk about the obvious and the vital things that doctors are missing...

Let’s talk about the obvious and the vital things that doctors are missing. Couple of big ones here. I have had senior GI doctors — senior, like 20, 30 years — and maybe they’re just not up to date on the science anymore, literally say, “There’s no proof on the gut microbiome. It’s just a theory.”

This goes back 2,500 years to Hippocrates. They didn’t know it at the time, but they knew bacteria and everything came from the gut. Back in the 1800s, we had Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis back in the 1845 or so who suspected bacteria — proven around the 1860s by Louis Pasteur in France, who actually discovered bacteria in a microscope for the first time. Then we have all the way through the 80s and 90s, the microbiome research coming up. And then 2007 — the Human Microbiome Project, which proved the microbiome in the gut exists.

So we’re already — we’re anywhere from 2,000 to 20 years old. We still have doctors saying the microbiome doesn’t matter. It’s crazy to me. Especially GI doctors — this lives in your house, man. You’re a doctor — well it’s your gut. Yeah, this microbiome lives in your house. You do this. You. You do the gut. Learn the stuff.

So we have a lot of really bad, obvious things being missed. They’ll say diet doesn’t matter — coming back to bad advice — “eat whatever you want.” As if food doesn’t impact your gut. They don’t even bother looking for root causes. This is really obvious stuff. You cannot go from healthy to sick and there not be a reason why. Doesn’t happen. You can’t get the flu and there not be a virus. You can’t break your leg and there not be a trauma.

Imagine waking up one day, having laid perfectly still, and your leg’s bent in half. You go to the doctor, he goes, “Yep, just happens sometimes. It’s genetic.” No. Nonsense.

So you have to understand — there are root causes. They don’t even bother to look. Because the rhetoric and the education they have goes: it’s autoimmune, it’s genetic, and it’s random. None of those are true.

And I’ll prove it for you guys here in a moment. The last thing we want to talk about — and this is tied into the vital information — is root causes. They don’t address them. There are so many root causes to IBD. We break it down to three basic categories. I’m going to get to those with you here in a moment. But they don’t investigate. They don’t ask why. They go, “It’s genetic. It’s autoimmune. It’s random. It’s bad luck. It’s whatever.”

And that is not an answer. Anybody who’s sick ever, who gets an answer of “it’s random and bad luck” — we don’t know what we’re talking about. You just don’t have an answer now. Doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist — which means you need to keep looking. And they don’t. So that’s what we’re going to do right now together. We’re going to go through this.

So here’s what I’m going to do for you. We’re going to talk about the same things that your doctor’s talking about — but instead of going through all the bad stuff, we’re going to go through the good stuff.

Let’s talk about good advice to start. I want to give you guys some good advice right now. First — food matters. But how we’re eating our food or what we’re consuming, it’s going to matter.

So you get people coming in, literally being told, “Eat fast food. It’s in the cafeteria downstairs in the hospital — must be fine.” You get diabetics being fed sugar and Jell-O. They’re clueless.

Here are three simple rules to follow for your food. Three very easy rules, okay? We’re going to go:

Number one: low histamine. And you can look these up on Google, ChatGPT — canned foods, fermented foods, cured meats, anything with vinegar in it, your kimchis and sauerkraut, those probiotic foods — all these things, yogurts — they’re high in histamine. We’re going to drop them, because histamines can aggravate IBD quite tremendously.

The next of course: is going to be whole foods and tolerable foods. So whole foods are real foods. I’m not talking about Whole Foods the store — talking about real food. Grows on a tree, swims, walks, flies, grows in a bush, grows in the ground. That’s a whole food. That’s food we want to eat. Food that your great-great-great-great-grandmother would know is food. That’s what we’re going to consume. And they have to agree with you.

If you can meet these three criteria, you’re doing as good as you can be on diet. That’s all I care about.

Good advice: sleep. Get a sleep schedule. Set your alarms. “I’m an insomniac, I can’t sleep.” Cool. Turn off your Wi-Fi. Put your phone on airplane mode. I actually — I don’t have it with me — I have a Faraday pouch. Got it on Amazon. Two for 15 bucks. Put my phone inside of it. Put it on airplane mode — that’s what I use when I go to sleep. Your alarm still works fine, but you’re not going to get that EMF and that radiation, that frequency bouncing off.

Turn your Wi-Fi router off — it’ll help you sleep. Turn your phone off. Get your blue light out. After about 5, 6 p.m. as the sun is dimming, I wear these orange blue light blocking glasses. Then after about 8 p.m. or whenever the sun is set, I’m wearing red. They’re even darker. So I’m not getting these blue lights from around my house bouncing into my face — or street lights. That’s going to help your circadian rhythm. You will sleep better. And your immune system depends on it. Low stress, low sleep — that is good advice.

The next thing we’re going to talk about is good rhetoric. Right now, I’ll tell you — it is not genetic. It is not autoimmune. In the vast majority — if not arguably all cases — some probably could be, but vast majority are not autoimmune. It is not genetic. And it is not an unknown problem.

If you have not heard this before, I’m going to break it down for you quickly. Genetics do not cause bowel disease. Doesn’t work that way. They do not work in a vacuum. Your genes don’t switch on one day like a light switch and go, “We’re going to be inflamed now.” No. There are regulatory processes that get disrupted by external factors.

So for example, you have genes that regulate your immune responses inside of your gut. You have genes that help balance your bacteria inside of your gut. You have genes that take care of the mucosal lining — or that membrane layer inside of your gut. If there are external factors influencing your genes to express poorly — toxins, stress, poor sleep, poor nutrients, all these different things — then you’re going to have issues on a genetic level.

On top of that, there’s only a family history 24 to 28% of the time. So to call it genetic is asinine. And it’s frankly scientifically inaccurate. It’s not genetic. Genes play a role — but they don’t operate in a vacuum.

Next: autoimmune. Only up to 70% of cases on average have any antibodies at all. But there are two kinds of antibodies. There are what we call autoantibodies, and there are antibodies.

Best analogy I can give you: if you got a castle and you’re standing on top, and you got a bad guy coming up to your castle — foot soldiers constantly — what do you do? You create archers. You peg them off from a distance. That is an antibody — a specific soldier designed for a specific problem. Then there are autoantibodies — when that archer turns around and it shoots your own people. It starts attacking your own body.

Seventy percent have antibodies. Most of those are not strictly autoantibodies. Some are not autoantibodies at all. So to call it autoimmune — when there’s clearly no data saying your body’s attacking yourself in these cases — and 30% of those with IBD have no antibodies — but to just treat it like it’s autoimmune anyway, is medically wrong. That should be malpractice.

On top of that — to say there’s no known cause?

Here’s what I’ll tell you. We have seen cases climb like crazy. In the 1950s, there was 15 per 100,000 people had Crohn’s or colitis. Today it’s 463. That is a 3,000% increase in cases.

On top of that — the USA. It’s an industrial problem. We see most bowel disease in the USA, the UK. We see them in Australia, New Zealand. That’s the vast majority of it — industrialized. Pesticides, chemicals.

The USA is less than 5% of the global population. They have up to 50% of the world’s cases. If 5% has 50%, and it’s gone up 3,000%, doubling in the last 30 years — it’s not a genetic issue. And there is a cause.

So we’re going to break that down already.

Let’s talk about the next bit. Let’s talk about good treatments.

Number one — your immune system. It’s all jacked up. I agree. So instead of just suppressing your immune system and getting it to shut the signals off that are inflaming you — how about we work to balance it? How about we go after the root causes, address why your immune system is wacky, start to rebalance by calming what’s overactive and increasing what’s underactive so your immune system can begin to regulate itself after we remove all the junk?

Have to deal with those root causes, okay? Support and rebalance and root causes.

What are the root causes? We’re going to talk about that in a minute. But long and short — three reasons you get sick. There are toxins, we have nutrient deficiencies, and we also of course correct that — microbes.

What does that mean? Well I’m going to get to the roots again in a minute here — but toxins can be anything. Anything that’s foreign, anything that’s poisonous to you. Nutrient deficiencies can cause genetic issues, all kinds of illnesses. And microbes — parasites, fungi, etc.

We’re going to expand on that in a minute here.

But good treatment means going after the root cause, not just suppressing the reaction. It’s that simple.

It’s as if you’re walking around the house and you step on a nail, and you go to your doctor and he’s like, “It’s just part of your body. Nothing we can do. I’m going to give you numbing cream for the rest of your life. Nail’s just going to be there.” Now that’s bad treatment.

Good treatment means pulling out the nail, cleaning the wound, and getting your body to heal itself. It’s that simple.

Let’s talk about prescription recommendations. Doctors overprescribe. And medical errors — we talked about this right at the beginning of this episode. The third leading cause of death, per the British Medical Journal in 2016 study — killing over 250,000 people a year — is medical error: misdiagnosis, overprescription, surgical issues, the works. Mixing medications — we call it polypharm — we have too many medications that end up killing you. Happens all the time.

We overprescribe drugs unnecessarily. We’re proactive, which is very rare in medicine. We just give them just to try it.

Here’s what we need to do instead — if I’m giving you a supplement as a recommendation — for example this happens in the natural world too — we overprescribe or overconsume. So what we end up doing is we take all these supplements in and we go, “Well, I’m just on it because it’s anti-inflammatory.” Yeah man, that’s plant-based medication. That’s what it is. It’s plant-based medicine.

You are taking natural supplements to suppress inflammation. That’s what drugs do.

So what we want to do is identify — here’s the thing we’re going after. Here’s how long I expect you to be on the supplement for. And here’s the result I expect it to produce for you. And then we can phase it out per layer of your issues and your disease.

That is a solution-seeking. You’re not on plant-based medication — it actually has a result. It has timelines and expectations in phases. That’s what’s important when it comes down to other things.

Now I want to talk about the vital and obvious stuff.

Your microbiome matters.

There are — I kid you not — there are GI doctors who go to school for 11, 12, 13 years — who knows — plus practice — who don’t believe the gut microbiome exists still to this day, which is crazy.

There is a root cause. Something causes it.

You can’t wake up one day — the amount of people I have who come in to see me who are not kids (that’s a whole different ballgame but it still has root causes) — but you get somebody who’s 20, 30, 40 years old who one day wakes up — boom, “I got blood.” The doctor goes, “Yeah it’s genetic.” No — there’s a root cause. Something drove this. It can’t just switch on and off. And genes don’t cause IBD.

They do not work that way.

You name one gene that causes IBD — I’ll give you a high five. I don’t know what I’m going to give you — but here’s the thing — it doesn’t happen. 23,000 genes and you match the entire human genome — doesn’t happen. There are correlations, not causes.

Okay — your diet does matter. Stress matters. Sleep matters. Your environment matters.

Open the air. Open your windows. Get some fresh air.

According to the EPA — one of the top three or top five toxins to humans is indoor recycled air. Open your windows. Get outside. Get some sunlight.

Sun does not cause cancer. Holy — do you know that the UK gets some of the least amount of sun? They’re one of the most overcast, cloudy places basically on earth. They get some of the least direct sun, and they have some of the highest skin cancer rates in the world.

Do you know when you go in for a skin cancer screening — they check everywhere? Everywhere. Because you can get skin cancer in unseen areas that never saw the sun. Go ahead and tell me how the sun causes direct skin cancer.

There’s a lot more to it than just the sun being bad. Our diet, our inflammation levels, toxins in our system — that can make common things like the sun — the sun is a source of all life on Earth. That’s all I’m going to tell you.

Okay — here’s what else we’re going to say. I already said it, I’m going to say it again. Sleep. Sleep is everything, okay?

And taking drugs to get yourself to sleep doesn’t count as sleep. It counts as sedation.

So getting that circadian rhythm regulated as best you can is going to make a big difference.

And lastly, I promised you root causes. Let’s talk about these root causes really quick.

There are three reasons human beings get sick. Ever. Three.

Everything I’ve ever found in my entire career — now I’ve been in healthcare, medicine around 12, 13 years — everything points back to this:

• Toxins
• Nutrient deficiencies
• Microbes

So — everything points back to this:

• Toxins
• Nutrient deficiencies
• Microbes

What does this mean?

Stress can be toxic on a chemical, hormonal level. High blood sugar can be toxic. EMFs, Wi-Fi, cell phones — those are actually toxic. The amount of radiation they can put off. Microwaving your food — toxic. Microplastics, heavy metals, pesticides, toxins, food additives, food coloring — toxins. They all fit into this category.

The next is nutrient deficiencies.

Our soil is depleted. Our food is void. We eat a lot of junk food that’s void of nutrients. We’re not getting the amount of nutrients that we should in most cases. Deficiencies — these are the building blocks. Vitamins, minerals, amino acids — they’re the building blocks of what makes your body do what it does. It’s breaking down constantly, turning over new cells every day. You need these nutrients to build it back up.

So what happens when your house is on fire? You need water to put it out — and you need building blocks to build your house back up. You need bricks, you need lumber, you need whatever. You get them through nutrients. So if you’re deficient, you’re going to keep breaking down — going to stay that way.

The last thing we see, of course, is microbes.

Parasites, fungi, yeast, bacteria, viruses. When these become — these all live natively inside of us. Even mold, which can be toxic — mold is part of our environment. It’s in the soil. It’s high levels, it’s the amount we have in our homes, it’s the junk we get in our food. They can imbalance your microbes, or we get infections of microbes.

Your microbiome is an ecosystem, constantly balancing itself. The minute it becomes out of balance is the minute things start to go wrong. Bad guys move in. Bad guys overgrow. You get infections. And this is what drives disease.

These are the only three reasons I’ve ever pinned it back to for you getting sick: nutrients, toxins, and microbial imbalances. That’s it. If we can fix those, we can get back to it.

And these all impact you of course on a deeper level — what you call on a cellular level. And then we have energy issues, mitochondrial issues, drainage, detoxification issues, you name it. And these all push toward genetic disorders. They push toward autoimmune disorders.

This is why we get sick.

So here’s what we need to know:

Your doctor’s advice can be making you much, much worse.
The good news is — your doctor’s advice doesn’t have to make you worse.

If you’re okay — you have the knowledge and the willingness, frankly, to take a spreadsheet...

I keep tab of everybody I speak to who’s interested in getting help, who ask me for a podcast. I link up with everybody. I try to circle back every one to two months depending on how many people I’m seeing. I have a list of almost three or four hundred names. Thirty percent of them that I’ve just written off sent me a message and said, “Hey I need help. I want help desperately. Help me. Help me. What can you do? What can I get? What can I — whatever.” “Well here’s some information. Just listen to a podcast episode.” “I’ve been busy.” “Well we can get on a call. I can help you.” “I don’t know... I’m not really into it right now.” So it’s clearly not an issue. “I’m too busy.” They’ll read messages and leave them on read.

The number one reason people are sick is because they’re choosing to stay sick by their own inaction, their own ignorance, their own willingness — sometimes even though they don’t know it’s a choice they’re making.

So if you’re like, “Hey, you know what — I’m going to take autonomy over this. I’m going to do what needs to be done. I’m going to take charge of the situation” — here’s how it can be done.

Okay — we’re going to get you guys some help. I got a ton of free stuff. You want free stuff? Take free stuff. I got a podcast. Got a YouTube channel. Got downloadable guides.

But if you’re like, “You know what — this is making sense for the first time in years.” Most common thing I hear is, “I got more from you in 20 minutes than my doctor in 20 years.” I’d love to hear that. And the information is there for free for you to use.

But if you’re like, “You know what — I want to take the guesswork out” — you want some help? Here’s how you can do it:

If you’re listening on the podcast, you’re watching on YouTube — check the links below. There’s a link there — you can send me an email directly. Ask me a question. I’ll get back to you. You want to schedule a call? Schedule a call. There’s a link there. I’ll get back to you. We’ll set something up and we’ll talk.

There’s a way through this. And your doctor’s advice — as far as I’m concerned — is terrible. Because the education is wrong, which develops bad ideology, which leads to bad methodology and bad treatments. And nobody’s getting better.

I’m going to turn over to the questions now.

Colleen asked:
“Any links to the night glasses and stuff?”
Absolutely Colleen. I do have these actually as a downloadable guide. I believe I’ve already posted it — it’s in my IBD resource library. Send me a DM, ask me for it. I can get you some links for some great stuff. They’re not super cheap. They’re cheap to make — I actually looked it up. You can make a pair of these things if you buy them in bulk from China and you have a store for like 12 bucks. But quality matters.

The cheap ones do not block out all the blue light — they leak through like crazy. The good ones — you’ll pay $100 for a set of glasses. It should cost 25. It’s just what people are willing to pay. And so people charge that much because they can, quite frankly — which is a shame. But they make a difference and it’s a great investment.

Anna had asked:
“Can it be caused by disruption of hormones? So can IBD be caused by disruption of hormones? I was diagnosed after fertility treatment. Huge flare-up for IUD and again got admitted to the hospital also after a new IUD.”
Yeah — your hormones are directly tied to your immune system. That’s also a trauma to go through. IUDs — I don’t have a uterus, thank God for that — but I can tell you now it’s not going to be comfortable. I’ve been told it’s not comfortable to get one done.

Your hormones and your immune system play a direct role in each other. So those fluctuations — if there’s something underlying — often time that can be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Will I say that hormones caused this disease? No. It’s not impossible — but I don’t believe it would be a cause. What I can say is that there was probably something underlying, and as your hormones started to shift, something was able to break through — and that’s what drove you to this.

Ann Marie asks:
“If I’m on Humira and it’s controlling most symptoms, can you still find the root cause being outward — if the outward symptoms are suppressed?”
Absolutely. There’s all kinds of information we glean from blood work that we glean from their body. Here’s the thing — your gut, whether you’re on drugs or not, doesn’t matter. Whether you have the stomach flu, Crohn’s, or colitis — your digestive system speaks about 16 words or so.

Those words are something like constipation, diarrhea, gas, bloat, nausea, vomiting, increased or decreased appetite, blood, mucus... right? There’s only so many words it can say. Stomach flu to Crohn’s and colitis — doesn’t matter. We look at the rest of your body.

This is how we identify root causes. And there are also other tests we can look at — which have to be very specifically chosen because you can do a lot of tests and get no information — or get redundant information.

Ann Marie followed up, asked:
 “Does Crohn’s disease itself cause sleep issues — where it takes an hour to fall asleep? When root cause is found, will it naturally correct the sleep cycle?”
 Yes. Crohn’s disease theoretically could cause bowel — or could cause sleep disruptions. There’s a lot of things that go into your circadian rhythm. Your gut is very strongly linked to that based on digestion, flow, what time you’re eating, inflammation.

Common root causes as well — like parasites — can often disrupt sleep. Depending on what’s happening with your backup systems, your adrenals can disrupt sleep. Urgency can disrupt sleep, which will throw off your sleep-wake cycles for sure.

But getting it corrected gets you back to the right place.

Linda asks:
“Can COVID be the cause?”
I’m going to say yes.

Here’s why: I go back to the cup analogy. Your body’s like a cup of water. Now some people’s cups — you’re already riding 80% full. You add a drop in there — a little bit of water — it overflows. And now you got a disease.

What often happens though is most of us — we have toxins, we have stress, we have lifestyle, we’re not eating great, we’re kind of on the edge with genetic predisposition — all these things. And then we get the flu. We get COVID. We get a shot. We get whatever — and then your cup overflows.

We go, “Well, did COVID cause my disease?”
 Two sides of this. One — your cup was already full. And that was it on top.
 Number two — we see from work from Dr. Sabine Hazan — COVID or if it was just the jabby-jab, I’m not sure which one, but possibly both — destroy bifidobacterium, primarily, but also lactobacillus, which are vital for your immune system responses in your gut microbiome.

On the other side of this, the spike protein involved — we’ve seen that targets — I believe it’s heart disease, the immune system, cardiac — so like heart diseases, blood pressure issues, or even — we’ve seen a lot of myocarditis, and then digestive issues is what we’ve seen a lot from the COVID downfall.

Next question we have from Nicole:
“How do I help my 13-year-old son understand how to eat better? I don’t want our relationship to be about me nagging him about what he eats.”
This is such a hard question. At 13 years old — especially with boys. I mean I can’t speak to girls. I’m the middle of five boys so I can talk to that. But we’re all human.

We struggle a lot with identity, with being able to fit in. And if there’s no rhyme, reason, or purpose behind our food — like I often find athletes, child athletes tend to be a lot better with their food because they’re disciplined, because they see food as fuel, as performance a lot of the time.

But if food is social — you’re going out with your friends, you’re going to a movie, you’re going for a walk and stop at Burger King — they’re going to do that for the social aspect. So maybe you give him a snack before he leaves so he’s less likely to eat as much. I don’t know. But that’s really tough.

Having that conversation — that your food does matter — is tough. On the other hand, mom and dad telling you information that your doctor maybe didn’t — or doctor contradicts — they’re going to listen to the doctor. Because kids are dicks. I was a dick. I didn’t listen to my mom. And I paid for it.

So here’s the thing. If your doctor said food doesn’t matter — eat whatever you want — and then you’re coming in saying it does, find another doctor to tell them differently. Or get them to find — or find someone that they will listen to.

But ultimately it’s going to come back to their behaviors and patterns around food — how they understand food. Do they feel good? Are you eating clean enough at home — low histamine, low FODMAP, AIP — whatever diet you’re following — are you eating clean enough at home that they can feel the difference when they go out and get bloated or get to a flare — they know what caused it?

Sometimes it’s got to be a painful lesson as well. And that’s the best advice I can give you around there.

But here’s the hot tip today:

Your doctor’s advice can be making you much, much worse. And it doesn’t have to — if we can circumvent the doctor’s frankly poor education around chronic disease and what to do about it — which leads to a bad ideology, which creates bad methodology and bad treatments — you’re not getting better going through and suppressing your immune system.

We have to ask a question — why?

If you’re watching on YouTube or listening on the podcast — if you have questions or need help with a solution, check the links below. We can just have a conversation to see if it’s a fit.

It’s literally you standing between you and getting help. That’s it. If you have a conversation like, “Man, it’s not a fit.” Cool. I got a ton of free stuff. I got videos. I got podcasts. I got downloadable guides. Help yourself to it.

But if you want to take the guesswork away — that’s what we’re here for. To get you to a straight shot. Take the guesswork away. Take the years down to just a few months.

On that note guys — that is all the questions we have. So thank you so much for being here. We’re going to see you all next time.