Transcript for:
How I Cured My SIBO "IBS" (+Gastritis, Duodenitis, NAFLD, & POTS) *w/ Brain Fog*

today is the day when you have chronic illness you dream of a future day where first of all that you even know what the heck is going on just to finally know what it even is you just first of all just dream of that and then you finally get it hopefully and then you can actually work on it and hopefully it's not too bad in some cases it still is a journey from there in which case you then start to dream of the day where you could actually be better and just totally done with it and be a normal person and you dream that one day i could be so normal that i could i'd make a video just to share with anybody else who needs it it's kind of like those those scenes in the in the movies with soldiers in the in the trenches you know you know please god if you could just get me out of here i'll do something good you know it's like that and today it's hard to believe but it's the day i actually made it and so this is me paying it back this is gonna be a big video um if you have sibo primarily that's what this is about which if you have ibs you're going to learn for the most part you probably have sibo about 70 80 percent chance uh some gastritis there's a lot of um people struggling in that community i can talk a bit about that as well duodenalis is also very related to it pots pots is kind of tangential because there's a lot of different reasons people get pots but that gets folded into this as well what you're going to want to know right off the bat is i am completely cured i had all of this i i'll get into every last bit of it but i was as bad as any of you i promise you just maybe some of you could beat me but it's pretty dang bad um i got to the point at least where i'd say possibly my life was in danger and now nothing no symptoms i have no restrictions i have no diet issues i can eat gluten i can eat lactose i can eat acid i can i have energy i can exercise i can sleep i don't have nightmares every night because of pain i am completely free and on top of that i don't think that any of it will come back in fact i'm confident that none of it will come back because i actually understand what happened now and i understand how i fixed it and i understand the kinds of tools that anybody in the situation would need to get out of this and make sure that they don't ever go back into it because this is a very crazy elusive disease that is very very difficult to get good information about but funny enough it turns out it's a very logical disease and it's it's it's easy to understand and it's it's not hard to see how you get better once you understand and sadly it's not information that's you're gonna probably get from a doctor um although we'll talk a lot about doctors and we'll talk about some of the great ones the greatest one really about this whole time uh on this topic um i'll mention them here if you just want to look up dr mark pimentel for gonna say just look him up you'll eventually figure enough out to be in good shape however if you want to hear [Music] the story from a patient's perspective and uh and just everything that goes into this and maybe even a bit more than you're even actually going to get fr even from him uh just because i have the perspective of having gone through all these things um then you're gonna get it here this is gonna be like a master class in gi disease right here um from the top to the bottom uh so that's why you want to watch this if you got anything to do with any of this ibs sibo whatever um stay tuned it's probably going to be long i'll try to divvy it up in the chapters it's i've got some kind of notes here i've tried to organize my thoughts but you know i'm not some pro streamer i haven't got this all figured out so it's it's going to be kind of long and slightly disorganized but i'm going to try to get through this and um and get you the information that you need and by the way this is not going to be another there's some videos out there like hey i'm better i had sibo and i'm better okay this is not going to be one of those that just ends up with them being like oh and then by the way i found about the elemental diet and now i'm better and now you should do that no all right no there's a lot of information and you've got to have the information because i'm sorry to say there's no simple just like oh and then you just take this and then everything's magic does it work for some people yeah but there's reasons for it and there's reasons it only works for some people you're going to have all that information and more importantly you're going to have the information you need to figure out what fixes you because what fixes you might not even be exactly the same as me however it is gonna be close enough that it's gonna get you the ability to figure it out you're gonna know what things to test for yourself everybody's body's a little bit different especially when you get into this gi stuff um and you're gonna know enough to figure out what you should be testing yourself and what they're going to give you what they're going to want to give you blah blah blah okay so it's not going to just be another one of those where i just go oh by the way and here's the magic fix okay all right before we can get in anything even you know i'm going to talk a bit about it's going to be kind of interwoven with my own story because it's kind of necessary um we got to go over some basics because otherwise none of this is even going to really make sense or have a good reference what is sibo and for that matter what is even the small bowel i mean what we gotta have some good fundamentals here first off the gi okay you got your stomach all right you eat esophagus first stop stomach okay then right after the stomach right you got the little duo duodenum thing do a denim whatever actually it's on this side all right and that just connects it to the small intestine small intestine is like 20 something feet of right in the dead center of your abdomen all right like 20 feet of this winding stuff okay before it gets to the large intestine and here's the trick when people think gi and this is for everybody even doctors even the whole field okay they completely gloss over the small intestine and that is killing this whole sibo field okay it's killing everything about it because they know a lot about the stomach they got they know gastroparesis they got pill they got all kinds of different pills they know how you can get your your your acid levels reduced or stuff to empty faster they got all kinds of tools for the stomach they can do an endoscopy they can see it all right same thing for the large intestine okay on the end right they've got all kinds of tools they can do a colonoscopy they can go in there and check it out in fact if you're a certain age you're doing this it's required they do it all the time right they're familiar with it they got all kinds of pills they got one zest they got things that they can trigger your colon to empty all right they understand constipation or diarrhea all that stuff they're always thinking of it they're thinking of the large intestine the trick is no one's paying attention to the 20-something feet in the middle that's not an easy thing that they go and check all the time it's not easy thing that they go look at they have routines about they don't really have pills dedicated to it they don't have a lot of good tools and we'll get into this but fundamentally sibo is a disease about the small bowel and that is why you're gonna have a lot of trouble finding good help is because they frankly have spent a lot of time on what's upstream and downstream and they're not paying attention to the small bowel the small bowel is insanely important it's literally where your body takes up all of its nutrients it's where it essentially drinks everything from everything good that your body gets comes from that right you eat you go in the stomach all the stomach does is kind of pre-digest your food right then it goes in the small bowel and that's where it sucks up everything that it wants all the vitamins all the good things okay so it's critical super important right by the time it gets to the large bowel everything that it wants is basically sucked out of it and then you just got all this bacteria in the large bowel that just kind of have a big party and that's where they all you know people talk about the microbiome and blah blah that's supposed to be in the large bowel at the end right and that's where you mainly talk about things like oh i feel constipated or whatever you're talking about stuff you're familiar with these feelings down low right your bottom of your bowels right but what people don't think about is you have digesting matter in the dead center of your abdomen right here um and that is also what's stopping people from figuring out what's going on you know when the beginning for me one of the first things i ever had was back pain and um it didn't make sense to anybody because nobody was thinking about the fact that i was swelling up in the dead center of my abdomen right i didn't feel constipated i didn't have issues in my large bowel but what i was doing was swelling up inside essentially the center of my rib cage to the point where it was pressing on everything else right so the small intestine that's where that's what it's all about okay so sibo what's going on with sibo first of all what is it okay so first of all what's going on in about they say dr pimentel his research shows somewhere around 80 of cases are you just got food poisoning people get food poisoning all the time in fact sometimes the food poisoning isn't even that significant it's not like one of those crazy ones where you just are completely sick as heck for days sometimes you get food poisoning and you know you just have upset stomach for a couple days and and then you go on with your life and you don't even think twice about it so the problem is you could have a food poisoning case either super severe or even like not even noticeable and these these poisonings are capable of actually damaging the m the kind of neuromuscular whole system of your intestines doing the whole peristalsis movement where they move things along they call it the migrating motor complex mmc right right off the bat i'll put a link in the description you got to read about the mmc that's everything if you got sibo if you have ibs probably this is this is what it's all about okay and that's not getting that information is not getting out there enough it's about your migrating motor complex okay and what happens is if you get poisoned it can actually impair the function of your migrating motor complex they see that people diagnose the sibo they've done some bunch of studies and they estimate that they do um it says somewhere on that wiki page it's like i think it's like they only have a third as many migrating movements as a normal person and then even the ones they have are only like two-thirds the duration so the point is that 20 feet of of pipe right in the center of your body isn't doing that peristaltic motion enough and so everything slows down right in the center of your body so much that eventually it it is permitting an environment that bacteria are capable to survive in because you're you're not really supposed to have much bacteria in the small intestine all that all that biome stuff is all about the large intestine they usually can't survive in the small intestine be partially because there's so much movement supposed to be happening in there it actually makes it unfriendly for them but once you've had your system injured and now your muscles aren't firing anymore not even nearly as much as they should it's possible for bacteria to start figuring this out and they start migrating out of your large intestine through the ilium up into the small intestine and they just start having a party and in fact they essentially prefer it there because there's more food and it's better food because it hasn't had all the nutrients sucked out of it right so they essentially start a parasitic relationship with your body where they start stealing your food so you eat it goes in there and they're like oh sweet and they just start stealing everything and on top of stealing everything they also injure the villi you know inside your small intestine which is very similar to celiac disease essentially you know you're talking about it you know damage to those little things that all help you absorb nutrients and stuff so now not only are your nutrients being stolen but your body is being injured so that you're no longer as capable of even absorbing the nutrients so you start to get deficiencies you'll get anemia you get b12 deficiency you'll start seeing things like the whites of your fingernails start retreating you'll get brittleness your nails will start breaking you get all this kind of malnourished stuff that'll start to happen eventually um and even eventually pots is part of it as well it's a it's a serious serious uh eventual place you can end up with this um and so anyway that's the general process here and something that kind of annoys me a little bit about sibo it's not their fault but i don't even really like the name of it that much because it is what it is right you have a small intestine bacterial overgrowth okay but when you call it that what everyone gets obsessed with is well let's kill the bacteria right because the bacteria that's in the name that's the problem but it's not the problem the bacteria that's that's like lesson one the bacteria are essentially a symptom of the problem your problem is migrating motor complex impairment okay so but because we call it sibo the few people even ever managed to figure out that they even have sibo end up getting distracted because all they want to do step one right away is just be obsessed with the kill phase they want to kill everything they want to kill the bacteria but i i i i've made the comment that um it's almost like seeing a car broken down on the side of the road with uh rust growing on it right and you go oh it has rust overgrowth and it's like well yeah but don't you think what's more important the fact that engine doesn't work this is not moving you know maybe maybe if you fix that then you wouldn't even have the rust in the first place okay so maybe name it something more direct to the point of what it even is so that people focus more immediately on what even is the problem right because what you end up with is people get obsessed with it's all about bacteria so now i got to kill bacteria but what happens you kill the bacteria you don't fix the mmc's it just grows our back right back exponential growth you can kill 99.9 of it and it won't matter long term we'll just scroll right back you know because exponential growth will grow back in a relatively short period because if you're not focusing on fixing what's essentially a motility impairment okay all right so that's just the basics of what's even going on here which takes quite a bit of work to even dig down to that all right uh but all right so i'll keep coming back and adding more but i'm gonna start kind of tying it in with the history here so i started this whole thing [Music] around six years ago it's too long if you've been sick that long you would under you'll you'll understand hey and by the way i know some of y'all gonna watch this some of y'all had this for 20 30 years all right you make my six years look like nothing but six years it's long enough that you can't even really remember all the chapters of what's even happened to you okay i've tried but i can tell you it was six years and the reason i can tell you that is because i live in a different house and i know my kid was a baby and now he's seven and that's how much of my life was in his life it was impacted by just dealing with this so back then first thing that i had was low back pain um it would get worse at night which now makes sense a lot of digestion occurs at night um but first thing i was like oh i need to go to like a back doctor or something one to some some back specialist dude he took one look at me he saw i was in my you know mid-20s and he's like you know you're fine whatever you know did some taps on my back and he's like everyone gets old you know you just got whatever normal aches and pains welcome to you know getting closer to 30. it's like all right thanks for nothing dude um the other thing that started was i started to notice i could hard i like always had to go pee it was like my bladder was like a walnut it just couldn't hold anything and now i know it's because i'm swelling so much inside the center of my body basically pushing in all directions that i was pressing on the bladder so much that it was kind of artificially making it small so i was just you know going to the bathroom three four times a night because i could just hardly you know i was like always uncomfortable right always uncomfortable in lots of different ways um but essentially when this first started i wasted incredible amounts of money and time uh thinking that it was it was funny enough i was blaming my bed right because i'm getting back pain well it's an old bed the doctor says it's nothing so maybe it's time to get a new bed right and by the way beds those are expensive and i went through way too many of them way too many uh before i finally i mean i'm talking the store beds and the internet beds and the box beds and the special floofy beds and i eventually made a custom bed out of pure latex from africa all right i did everything before i finally was like oh wait what if it's somehow me and there's no there's no answer to like there's nothing that could ever make me feel better i mean i slept on the floor i slept i mean just it was it was it was bad um and so what ended up happening was around this time i started noticing that not only did i have back pain but i was getting uh pain like a real extreme tightness and all these like pelvic type muscles um and so i ended up going to this pelvic specialist md first of all why am i getting just you know from what we've talked about now so we can have a clear thought process as looking back why this happened okay if you have sibo you essentially have such a slow down in your small intestine that remember this is where your body tries to get nutrients from right this is where it drinks from right it's supposed to be just wonderful fresh food coming in full of nutrients if you have sibo i'm gonna make this real simple for you you have human waste stuck in there and your body is drinking it so you're being poisoned it's essentially like food poisoning right because you're just getting it over and over and over um you've got you've got digested matter that's been processed by bacteria like it's in the large intestine and it's just sitting in there taking forever to get out and it's this never-ending traffic jam of waste in an organ that's supposed to be essentially clean right and constantly cleaning itself with these mmc waves and so you just have waste and your body is just drinking it up over and over and over toxic waste and it makes you sick as hell in many many ways i've i've seen a lot of weird things people can get from this it's it's not even like you're gonna all be the same you're not gonna be the same as me people are gonna have weird stuff here some people have tons of skin issues which makes sense i didn't i don't know why but i didn't um i started getting my hair falling out that's that's come back but it's you know you're being poisoned over and over my teeth were grinding away because of the chronic stress of being poisoned over and over your body doesn't know what to do about it and so you start grinding your teeth all night and all these things um but point is why was there muscle spasms um it's just yet another thing that can happen if you're having that waste pulled into your body over and over you can get these crazy chronic muscle spasms so what ended up happening was i went to this pelvic specialist and we're going to talk about doctors it's a big part of this whole process i'm going to try not to just rant about it but i would say a fair a reasonable statement i'm going to make is i've seen quite a lot of the spectrum of doctors and this first one was way on the end of complete garbage just a complete quack okay she was an md she was a pelvic specialist i go on and say hey i got these you know spasming muscles like in my upper legs and all this kind of stuff it's just like really seized up and essentially was happening was my um my muscles were permanently in spasm i can't remember the name of that anymore i used it was years ago when i got treated for this but they were permanently in spasm and they were in spasms so hard and so long that uh they actually were pulling my si joint out of place and when you do that it puts a crazy amount of pain on in your low back and so but anyway i get this lady and she doesn't figure out any of this she basically just is like oh yeah you you just have chronic pelvic pain and then she's like you know we need to do we need to just sell you these shots we're just going to basically inject like rose herbal like it was like it was like rose petals and and hibiscus or some junk er into your groin for like 18 000 a shot you know and it was all like she was not in network anywhere it was a total total screw job it was crazy they wouldn't even let you talk to them unless you had out of network benefits when your insurance plan it was just craziness and i could see right away i was like all right well this is this is freaking great so i kind of managed to weave around her actually doing anything but i got a um script to a doctor physical therapy from her and that was the only useful thing that was a very useful thing i got it from her i have a lot of respect for dpt so they've done a lot for me even way before this with other surgeries and stuff so i guess dbt she takes one look at me and listens to my story and she goes lay down and she pulls my two legs and right off the bat my ankles don't line up one of my legs is longer than the other she goes yeah your side joint is messed up and uh she ended up working backwards with me it ended up figuring out what i was saying which is that i had chronic muscles that would never stop firing because of a reason that was yet unknown so then i ended up getting something called dry needling which is as fun as it sounds just literally sticking needles in your muscles until they spasm back basically they it makes them stop spasming but it would keep coming back so i'd have to get needled over and over and over and at this point she's like okay something's wrong that's causing this this isn't normal and um then they started noticing like i kind of started mentioning gut stuff i was like i i stopped eating lactose i feel like it's not helping and they started doing all this kind of like gi manipulation stuff they call visceral massage and stuff and they were noticing they're like yeah you feel like not normal in your abdomen and something's going on food wise or some or something it might be like you're allergic to something or we don't know what's going on but it's something digestive so i owe her a lot for connecting that making those jumps she really was the first person to make me even realize it had anything to do with with anything gastric related um which a lot of people miss that even in the sibo communities and stuff they just think like oh how didn't you just know right off the bat it's like people can have all kinds of weird symptoms for a long time before they even know that it's even digestive so anyway around that point i started increasing restrictions in food um my wife started noticing she's like you know you're always worse when you eat gluten she noticed because she couldn't eat it and so i was like well fine i'll do whatever i gotta do you know so i can sleep through the night without being in pain so no more gluten i was gone um no more lactose i stopped like started being careful about red meats just anything that seemed like it was inflammatory or just generally a bad idea i started just avoiding or basically just completely canceling out and they helped uh didn't but the problems didn't fix you right a lot of this is about you just start retreating into an increasingly constrained quality of life that's worse and worse without actually getting better and that is an important concept by the way there's a lot of different ways people can experience that in attempting to cure this on without understanding what it is there's a lot there's a lot of that going on and you got to be careful that kind of thing that's how you end up with serious malnutrition that's how you can end up with pots so you got to be careful following those rabbit holes even though they might seem like they make you better i mean some of them see some of these some of these things the doctors will even tell you to do them and they already know they're going to make you sick after three months but they tell you to do it like like low fodmap and stuff just because it makes you shut up because you say you feel better but it's not a solution and you got to be careful with those things long term but anyway so i started getting really more noticeable swelling in my abdomen i had to get something called a ratchet belt which is just like you know like the buckle the belt you use for pants for work or whatever they have like special ratchet ones because i was literally having to they're like really easy to like manipulate on the fly um it's not like you have to totally take the belt apart and re-like you know do the thing it's it's like they're real easy to just like constantly move in and out i would have i would have to wear pants i would have pants like i would own pants that were like four different sizes like everything from like 32 to like 36 and i would just constantly be like i don't even know i would just kind of give up and just wear like 36 with just using the ratchet belt is the only reason it would even stay on for part of the day and then the other part of the day it's too tight uh just huge like variations and it was uh because of these bacteria they are feasting on your food and they just produce incredible amounts of off gas and it just swells you up from the dead center of your body and you're not thinking like it doesn't feel like some of these things people think of when they talk about gi issues and that's why we don't recognize it we're not we're not used to the idea of like being swollen up like a balloon right in the middle of your abdomen you're not even noticing that it's hard to understand that it's doesn't have a sensation that you recognize in fact i don't even know if the small bowel has many even nerves in it right so if you you get backed up in the large intestine the colon you know what that feels like it has a feel to it it's uncomfortable right that doesn't exist in the small bowel you're not gonna feel that you're not gonna feel those kinds of things so it's tricky so anyway yeah uh it um more more restrictions more symptoms things kept getting worse okay so then i just go i get like a general physician at this point because my dpt has done what she can she's indicating there's some kind of get some kind of something right i go to a gp and i'm like hey what like a family doctor you know and i'm like what what is this what's going on tell them a story all right and all you guys are gonna know what happens right he says oh you got ibs and what you need is probiotics and and this joker gives me cbd cream too which by the way that stuff actually kind of works for like local pain or whatever i'm not against that but in terms of like okay really was it gonna treat me you know um so ibs okay ibs is a freaking mess and the professionals in the field know it too if you get a good one they'll tell you they they'll admit it they know it's it's what they call a trash can diagnosis okay they they just give up on people or whatever or there's enough of them that sounds similar enough um the first thing they're going to do is just diagnose you with ibs even though you can't even really diagnose it because there's not really an actual protocol where they can say oh this is the test and this proves this well actually i should caveat that there is now uh dr mark pimentel's anti-vinculin blood tests to determine if you've developed an autoimmune disorder essentially from this whole process which that that is kind of under the umbrella of this so to be fair there is actually that now but for the most part virtually nobody's even aware of that doctor-wise or otherwise um and they're just gonna say oh he sounds like you know the same old thing so let's just tell me his ibs and food intolerance oh and then they'll say oh and do the low fodmap diet that'll make you feel better all right so what happens then right all right right off the bat probiotics freaking mess all right because what's your problem your problem is that you have bacteria having a giant party in your small bowel and so what do you do you eat more bacteria it's not even that they're good or bad right because the whole thing is oh these are good ones it doesn't matter right you have them living in a place where they're not supposed to be so they're feasting and all their off gas and all this stuff is screwing you up they're stealing your food they're harming your villi right so you're just throwing gasoline on the fire taking these things and especially the ones they give you right because they give you some crazy nonsense where it's like here's these like 30 different random strains with incredible billions of them right yeah it's just it's a freaking mess and uh and then they go oh and then do the low fodmap because they love that whole thing so then you oh okay great more food restrictions right um so then by that point i'm like no gluten no lactose no red meat all low fodmap which is a fairly restrictive diet um and i'm doing all this and then you know what happens is you well first of all the probiotics made me feel real messed up real fast and that made my my doctor go well that's so strange i don't understand that ridiculous okay it's gonna screw you up it's gonna screw up anybody if you take any of those crazy things uh with sibo with seriously sibo um the lofod map though it gives you the illusion of that it helps right because you're reducing fermentable foods right which are foods that bacteria love because they stick around and they can eat them right and not to mention also they produce their own amounts of gas which doesn't help when you're already having all the swelling and stuff right so it makes it seem like they're helping and it does reduce symptoms the problem is they've proven that the low fodmap diet creates nutritional deficiencies after 90 days right and what these doctors will do if you're not careful uh they'll just be like yeah just go love five man have fun have a nice life so you know who knows how that's gonna end up for you right um and how long you're gonna be doing that to yourself either until you just get so fed up with it or you actually end up with serious problems um so it's not great and specifically i'll just mention here dr mark pimento literally made a different diet because of his concerns about the use of the low fodmap diet and it's called the low fermentation diet and that is a better idea for sibo people um he'll tell you though it's not to treat you it's just if you really want to be more in control of modulating your symptoms that's all it's going to do for you but at least do to do that don't do don't do low fodmap not for any serious amount of time little fermentation diet you can beat on that as long as you want won't do anything to you um all right so the gp right he goes take this stuff it's no real good right um and i just keep kind of hanging on doing what i'm doing and then things get worse basically it's what i'm talking about your quality of life just keeps shrinking it's like you have to give up more and more and more just to be in the same place you're not getting better you're just you're just holding as bad as you've always been while you do less and less things and you slowly get more and more essentially sick until i end up with this crazy pain in my lower bowels and i went in and was like i think this is some see like this is like almost like er level of pain i think i remember specifically on that day i had eaten nothing but a potato the whole day because it's all i could take and i thought felt like my lower intestine was going to explode and i went in and i'm like this is uh and it was an area they call the sigmoid colon specifically and the very common disease there is diverticulitis and so i thought i think this is diverticulized i went to i said it's got to be the pain is crazy it's right in the right spot um he goes well there's a whole thing here we got to do but if you want to just do something fast because this feels like an emergency you can take this medicine called flagel this uh antibiotic right it's very good at diverticulitis and i'll just give it to you right now and you'll know if it works real quick great so i go i take it and it works real well real fast um i felt so much relief so quickly i it was i actually thought well this was it then this is this my must have some kind of like damage way down there and uh this is clearing it up and and hallelujah right sadly i keep taking this stuff and after like three something days i start getting super messed up sick weird stuff i've never felt before like it was like i had a super flu i couldn't like i had to like be in the dark i couldn't see the light it was like i was turning into gollum on this stuff it was freaking crazy and turns out flagella's got a reputation it's it's a pretty nasty drug and um i started feeling like out of body i remember looking at my arm and thinking like i'm not sure if i could move my arm if like i wanted to i was like i had to think an unnecessary amount to control my own body parts at that point my wife had enough and she called and i said all right he needs to stop so what happened looking back alright well basically you got enough of a slowdown right sibo all this stuff you you start to get such an impairment that you start to just get everything blocked up and everything so inflamed everything just it's just waste packed in everywhere and uh you get so much inflammation i had a gi later telling me she's like i'm pretty dang sure you were essentially starting to feel the beginnings of maybe some superficial tearing because of how swollen up you were um and that was the pain that you were starting to feel a sense of urgency about and why did flagella help well flagellus actually used for sibo funny enough it's kind of a backup they don't really want to go down that route but it's effective at wiping out bacteria and so it was very good at taking away my symptoms very quickly however it also is very well known for causing something called die-off or herx reaction because it kills so much so fast that you essentially start to get some crazy super flu and it's very likely that's what started happening and without having that perspective or warning or thought of like this might happen going into this it was like this is scary and this needs to stop um but all this happened and no one could explain any of it i tell my gp and he's like none of that makes sense i don't know at this point i'm like all right screw this guy i'm getting a gi because something it's a gi issue at this point you know i'm not going to use a general doctor anymore so i get a gi um the gi is like well let's do a colonoscopy let's go in there and let's see what happened i'm like all right we gotta do it so we have that whole fun thing um it's not that big of a deal to be honest the thing itself was fine it's just the prep that sucks drinking that stuff is is not fun so they do the colonoscopy and i remember thinking man i'm happy about this i'm gonna get answers because we know where it is now and uh of course you go through it all and you wake up and you finally you know you get back to normal and they're like well congratulations you're perfectly fine it's like and that's not the the last time right it just keeps going i can tell you there's there's nothing more upsetting than being so sick for so long and then finally thinking you have an answer and they're like oh guess what we found out it was nothing you're like i hate you you know it just thanks for nothing so that was you know that they go oh you have a great call and everything's perfectly fine so then i go back to life everything still sucks nothing's been solved i've had all this stuff done no one can explain why any of the medicine did anything um and the problems get back to being worse and worse again i go back to the general physician at some point and you just start they just start this whole gaslighting procedure which you guys probably know a lot about um it's it's their favorite right anytime that they can't figure out what it is it just goes straight to how are you feeling are you you know they send someone in with like a depression questionnaire you know like they basically just don't believe you anyone's like if i can't if they can't do their job they're not going to admit it they're just going to start painting a picture that you're a freaking lunatic right who just can't get better won't get better whatever so the gas lighting starts so you know i restrain myself and i just move on right and this is years you know i don't even know anymore how many what year we're on in the story okay i can't i can't piece it all back together but as much as i can remember this is what's going on all right so after this point though something starts that's the real problem and i can say that this started about two years ago year and a half two years ago brain fog but when i say brain fog you're not gonna understand unless you're one of the people who had exactly what i had and i can tell you what it is if you're a sibo person and you are like my life is over because of brain fog welcome because i am going to tell you exactly what you need to know because i spent my whole life for years trying to answer that question and i know exactly what it is and what to do about it but basically what happens is for a certain subset of sibo people we are unlucky enough that the bacteria that are going crazy in our small intestine create a byproduct called d lactic acid not all of them do only some of them some of them make lactic acid which funny enough is not even that big of a deal our muscles make it all the time no no biggie if it makes galactic but if you're unlucky and has delactic acid-producing bacteria you are in for a world of hurt you end up with something called the lactic acidosis which is a nightmare and not only is it a nightmare to experience but it's a nightmare to get any help for because it is essentially an insanely rare disease before the existence of this process uh with the whole sibo understanding thing uh the only knowledge that all the hospitals and doctors have about d lactic acidosis up until they figured out in 2018 that sibo can cause it uh was it was an insanely rare complication of a surgery like i'm talking like two and four million people would get this and so it's one of those things where it's like the only resources they had would have for it it would be like some really rare thing where somebody somebody would have to go to like a specific hospital in the whole country like the only place i would even know what it was um but essentially what happens is your body's not supposed to have the lactic acid in any real meaningful quantity outside of the large bowel and the bacteria make it in the large bowel because again these are the bacteria they're supposed to be there they're supposed to be trapped down in there but the stuff down in there is not supposed to be getting up into your bloodstream and in your body right so you're just excreting it you're never your body's never having to deal with it but it when it's in your small intestine and your body's sucking it up it's producing it in quantities vastly faster than your kidneys are capable of processing and it's like a neurotoxin it goes in your brain and it stops the it gets complicated but it's directly interferes with energy processes in the brain so all this whole atp stuff uh when that makes like your brain cells able to fire and communicate and do all this kind of basic like housekeeping stuff they need it all requires basically like energy right this d lactic acidosis goes in your brain and just starts shutting that down so your brain cells essentially stop being able to fire and what it does is it creates this crazy experience that is almost exactly like serious drunkenness i'm talking just about [ __ ] based drunk um so if you could think of like when a time where you were not black out but you were real drunk and then strip away anything remotely fun or entertaining there's no fun about it at all just the cognitive impairment aspects of it and the sloshiness the slurriness the lack of balance all of that all of that is there you will have that happen to you every time you eat for about three hours because that's how long it'll take your kidneys to catch up by which time it's almost time to eat so you're basically permanently almost almost permanently completely drunk out of your mind and you can find stories sad sad stories of people whose lives are essentially just destroyed and uh you know can't work the there they can't even drive um now they've started figuring out what's happening you can find some stories of doctors already making the point of you need to write a note for these people just so if the cops pull them over they don't send them to jail thinking they're drunk driving um because that's what it feels like um so if you feel drunk as heck that's what's going on it's called d lactic acidosis and it's not a good situation and that when that started about one and a half two years ago that's when this took a serious turn because it's one thing to be like man i can't eat a bunch of food or and chronic pains real sucks but i kind of had a handle on that after the after the physical therapy but everything else you could kind of live with your life just sucked but that was like life's over i mean this is just a matter of time until your work figures out how sick you are and then you i mean you can't function as a human in society anymore it's over for you and when that started it was like all right this is different now this is like this is the only thing that matters um and every once in a while i see people in sibo community and stuff and they'll they'll be talking about like what is this brain fog like i could care less about swelling and bloating and and and discomfort and you know some of this miscellaneous stuff but like this this is what matters and um i feel for those people i always try to reach out to them because this this is the serious serious stuff um the brain fog is horrendous i had covered twice i had copic brain fog it doesn't even hold a candle to delactic acidosis okay um so once that started it was like all right this is now my life mission because my life is over if i don't solve this and to be honest a lot of people out there they've had this sibo ibs gastritis they've had a lot of these things and the reason that they're not getting solved because you can for the most part you still live okay the only reason i had to solve this was because of this okay it was because of the lactic acidosis um that's why i got to the absolute bottom at any cost okay um so okay so that started happening and it was like all right this is getting serious and soon after that started to develop i got a crazy new sharp pain on my right uh just under my ribs right here and right after i ended up going to er it was pretty serious feeling and uh they're like oh okay yeah you must have uh gallstones very common whatever so check them for gallstones i got these like mixed weird signals from the ultrasound people it seems like some of them thought that they existed some of them are like nah so then i ended up going to a more like full hospital later like the next day and they were like no i don't i don't really see gallstones and then but i was like but this pain is like serious like i'm worried about this and they start worrying about maybe the gallstones already moved on and they're trapped in some other duct it can get kind of scary with the whole gallstone thing so they're like well we need to hide a scan so then they start doing this high to scan stuff spend a zillion dollars do this whole specialty high to scan whatever and guess what it's all said and done they go congratulations there's nothing you don't have gallstones bye right so again i control myself and i'm like this is crazy i'm in serious pain and after like two weeks of all just jerking me around all they want to say is you have nothing so i started looking and uh just looking literally at a picture of like a anatomy and being like what else can even create pain there at that spot and the only thing i can find is basically that duodenum which is that connection between the stomach and the small intestine and there's this whole thing called duodenitis or duodenitis however the heck they call it i really say it and i write my gi and i say i must have this it's the only other thing i can think of and she's like well greg let's do an endoscopy and that's where they go and tube down your mouth in your stomach the camera i'm like let's do it now tomorrow i want it right and so she was really helpful she she got me in immediately so we do this this uh endoscopy deal so they go in there they check out the stomach really annoying it takes a long time because they they take biopsies they cut pieces of your stomach out and send them off to a lab so you gotta wait a couple weeks still in pain wondering what the hell is going on so it turns out it was right it was uh chronic duodenitis and also chronic gastritis okay so what the heck is that well essentially the acid is not draining from my stomach not enough not often enough or whatever spending too much time in there right compared to what it should be doing it's not flowing properly well why well because immediately downstream i've got a freaking bomb right i'm just swollen up all the time it's putting so much back pressure it's pressuring on my bladder it's pressuring on my low back it's pressuring now on my stomach upwards so my stomach can't even drain so there's so much acid trapped in there that it's eating away my stomach lining starting to form ulcers okay great so new disease but at least we actually know what the heck it is right okay this whole gastritis thing is interesting um it's a tricky disease it's a tough disease there's a lot of people that got it and you know what's really funny about gastritis is it has an extremely parallel story to sibo i haven't even seen anyone comment about this yet really in general but it's why i think doctor mark pimentel should seriously be considered for a nobel prize so at some point in his life especially if he considers or continues going on the path that he's going um because basically the guy won the nobel prize for doing exactly what he did for the stomach because back in the day they used to tell everybody that stomach ulcers were stress they would just gas like the hell out of everybody they'd be like all you all just need to chill out just chill out you're all just freaking out too much and then uh they ended up one doctor ended up figuring out oh all these people have a bacterial infection in their stomach this is bug called h pylori it's like 80 of them they've got literally some something is eating away their stomach right and the you know here we are telling everyone to just calm down and their insides are being eaten so he finds this he um proves it and the scientific community takes absolutely forever to do anything about it they take you know i mean science is science right they they got to prove it they got to re-prove it they got to you know do the whole duke it out to really really make sure it's it is what it says it is the thing is it took like he's he waited like 30 something years and they were still not getting anywhere on even just recognizing this is the problem and what was also really important is if you recognize it as a problem you can kill h pylori you can kill it and then move on and your stomach will heal and meanwhile they're just sitting there you know fighting and so one day he famously gets fed up with it and poisons himself with h pylori drinks a beaker of it to be like look at what's going to happen to me because of this and he ended up famously getting nobel prize for this whole thing eventually but it took the scientific community absolutely forever right and there's a very similar story going on right now with ibs and sibo because for forever ibs is like this whole oh people need to just chill out it's stress it's anxiety people are just too whatever and everybody just chill out and and you'll be fine and you can eat whatever you want well now they've proven that somewhere between 70 to 80 of all ibs is sibo so you have bacteria in your small intestine that are destroying you and there and this that's what's still going on as they're saying well you just need to chill out chill out and take probiotics great thanks right so there's a huge revolution the thing is this is just happening now um i mean dr mark pimentel proved that sometime in the mid 2000s and i think it was even 2015 when he got basically it didn't he ended up pushing and proving through getting fda approval for zifaxin as a one of the official tools really the only official tool to eradicate the bacterial problem in the small intestine so when you think about the ulcer story in the stomach story it took those guys you look at how long it took and then you realize dr pimentel is just now figuring this stuff out like right now like in these last few years it gives you a perspective on well this is why we are where we are right this is why you're stuck here on youtube listening to me instead of going to some doctor who can actually tell you what the heck is going on so um basically i got this whole pre-ulcer thing now i got gastritis i got duodenitis which basically is just it just means acids eating away my duodenum and my uh stomach line so at that point i'm like well let's do an h pylori test because i figure out all that like let's go make sure because there's 80 chance that i have h pylori and that's going to solve everything and in fact it kind of seems like this is a bacterial problem so i must have this it's got to make sense i test twice both negative man that sucked that sucked to get so close to feeling like you finally knew what the heck was going on right and and to have such good odds that you that that was right and nope you don't have a bacterial problem there's no h pylori um so then they're like well you need to go on these h2 drugs and ppi drugs and these acid reducers well guess what those things make sibo worse they know that but nobody had sibo on the radar yet so i take those drugs i will say they're quite effective at healing the chronic erosions that i had started because they weren't super mature yet so i did get pain relief quickly to their credit they did work but those ppis are kind of a dramatic thing you don't really want to be on them super long what was interesting was the h2 actually kind of took the edge off my main thing the only thing i truly truly cared about which was my insane acidosis brain fog problem brain brain fog those words don't even do credit to it i'm just gonna acidosis okay that's what it is so it turns out that there's actually two parts to how sibo can jack up your brain the main one is acidosis but it also causes they call it histamine intolerance which isn't even really a great word because it implies that you have some special reason that you can't handle histamine it's not an intolerance all it means is that you're having so much inflammation it's like an allergic reaction your body is just producing lots of histamines in response to it it's producing more than your body can process uh quickly and it's essentially like you're having an allergic reaction and h2s are histamine blockers so um it kind of started taking the edge off of some of my brain stuff and i started thinking well that's really nice i mean i i don't know but some somehow it must be related i don't get it but anyway that's that's why it didn't solve it but it helps a little bit um but it didn't do anything for the acidosis and that was the real problem so anyway i'm looking at this i'm taking these drugs and the pain goes away but i they basically tell you to take these drugs for like an insanely long time and i start basically getting involved in this whole gastritis community online and right away let me tell you i've been through all kinds of doctors i mean you've heard enough of it right now to get the idea the single most important resource i've ever had to ever finally get better was reddit period it sounds ridiculous but it's a freaking fact um reddit if you if you get a diagnosis like oh we went in we scoped you and we know you have gastritis here's the image here's the proof you know here's the biopsies go you know get on our uh gastritis you know there's subreddits for every disease you can think of and they're just full of hundreds or thousands of people constantly sharing their stories and everyone kind of bouncing off each other and if you observe it for long enough you start to see the repeating stories and the repeating trends and some of the outlying things to be worried about right it's not like the end-all do-all but man you really really do yourself a lot of favors by getting involved in the community for whatever if you have a serious disease you can learn a lot and that's the only reason i ever actually ended up figuring anything out because i started to get an argastritis and just watch everything about it i was determined to get rid of it and one day some guy did me the biggest favor of my life and he went in there and he said if you got gastritis and you're like many many people with gastritis sadly and you're never getting better no matter what you do the drugs you don't get better you know you're not you're hardly able to eat any food you can't eat acids you get all these other dietary issues with gastritis because your stomach is falling apart um and he's like if you're just losing it you can't eat anything and nothing's getting better for months and months he's like you gotta check out sibo because if you don't figure out what the root cause of your issue is you're never gonna get better because gastritis isn't even really a disease it's actually a symptom of an underlying cause so until you figure out what the underlying cause is you're not going anywhere you're just hovering in place and they'd already said well it's not h pylori so you know at that point i was like considered idiopathic which just means we don't know what it is and that just kind of retreats back to the whole maybe you just have stressful or life or something like that well no [ __ ] i have a stressful life i'm sick as hell all the time but it still doesn't make sense right um it's one thing stress is one thing right but it's you know it just it's a circle right because how could you not be distressed right at a point of living like this um so anyway they didn't really have an answer and i didn't think the whole stress thing was very convincing which is that's all they wanted to leave it with was well you just need to chill out and your stomach will get better and just keep taking these pills to me the odds seemed pretty bad um so when that guy said that hey if you're going nowhere you need to check this this thing out that's the first time i ever heard sibo ever and at first i made a note and i thought i should look that up and then i didn't and it wasn't until like some time about i was like oh i better i better look at that and uh just right off the bat it was like whoa whoa whoa whoa wait a second and everything started to click and i thought wait a second how could i have these problems or like unexplained in my large intestine to now i have problems in my stomach what is it i've just got problems everywhere you know problems just it's just crazy but i was like but and it's one thing for it to be like muscles in my legs and my groin to hair to to brain to you know to but but when it went from large intestine to stomach i was like but that's like a that's a direct path and there's something in the middle of that path right it could have went from one end to the other and i'm looking at this sibo thing i'm like but that connects the dots that's that would connect these things and um i keep looking at it and i'm like oh my god this could be absolutely everything so i asked my gi i said do you know about the sibo thing because i'm getting pretty convinced by this this looks very interesting and she's like yeah yeah it's a thing we can order a test okay you could have it and i started telling her i think that could have even been the whole flagella thing i started i started looking back at my whole story and being like that makes sense and that makes sense and that makes sense and everything makes sense um so they get the so they order the test all right so first of all kind of you gotta quit all the drugs and stuff to take the test be aware of that um so i did all that and uh then you gotta eat special diet which is you know you've done that forever by now um then you drink the stuff which is basically um a fake sugar and you reason they give you that is because fake sugars don't get absorbed by your small intestine they're non-digestible that's why there's zero carb right that's why people think that like oh i want to have this fake sugar because it's not like real sugar where you know i absorb these calories well what ends up happening is you just feed all the bacteria because they can eat it you can't so you're not absorbing it through your your small intestine walls but they can so they just have a feast and uh so what happens is i take this stuff i drink it and within about 15 minutes i was at a 10 out of 10. i was done i mean my brain it was like i could have had a stroke i was completely screwed um and the problem was i was home alone and i was not sure i was capable of even breathing into the bags properly so be aware of that you got to take these breath samples after you drink this stuff and i was so impaired after drinking it i was like oh my god and i remember it's funny kind of funny but um i was so obsessed with making sure i did everything perfectly um i had all these clocks out everywhere because it's like every 20 minutes you gotta blow into the bag and then i drink this stuff and i get basically shit-faced right just out of my mind can hardly stand up and um and then it's like okay and then i realized that like the toaster ovens clock was actually off because it hadn't been adjusted properly for like daylight savings or something and then like my phone was off from this other watch that i had and all this stuff go and i was like oh my god what was the actual 20 minute i can't i'm sitting here trying to figure out which one's real what's the real time oh my gosh but i ended up getting it to be okay and i did the three hours of blowing into bags and whatever and send it off but be aware that it's can be rough it's going to send all your symptoms through the roof because you're just given those bacteria feeding frenzy but when that happened it was funny because as insanely unpleasant as it was you gotta remember i was having that or at least close enough to that every time i ate multiple times a day for years and this was the first time it mattered because when it did when it did that and i went all the way to 10 i was like then this is it because there's no other answer left there's noth it has to be um so i was actually happy how horribly sick i was because i was like there's no way this isn't going to be positive sure enough i wait like a week or however long it was for them to analyze it and uh it was a very positive result my hydrogen i was a hydrogen positive case there's different types of sibo depending on what type of bacteria has invaded your small intestine the uh there's basically three that they figured out now the most common two are hydrogen and methane so basically the bacteria they eat and then they are that's the off gas that they're creating it shows up in your breath and then the third one that they've always recently started understand is uh um h2s hydrogen sulfide um so those guys are now in the group and the only test that they can do for those guys is called the trio smart test and that's really the best test you should be getting that test if you have sibo or are concerned about it the trio smart test is the one that can measure all three at once so i was specifically hydrogen positive and i had an increase specifically of about 50 parts per million uh in like 20 minutes it was just off the charts so that was cool because i finally had an actual answer and here here it was sibo and so now i'm going okay so what the heck is sibo how do i find you know i'm super happy super excited oh my god but at the same time okay what do i do and once i start looking into it it's just it's just like a abyss you know you hope that you can find okay well now i'm gonna get on subreddit for sibo and you hope you're gonna just look in as just a bunch of people like yay i just did the thing and i'm better and that's not what you find but it's okay i'm determined it's been all these years right i gotta get better whatever it is but it's a maze there's so much stuff going on there's stuff about prebiotics and probiotics and specifically right certain strains and the kill phase and zyfaxin and flagella neomycin and uh then motility kind of in the side and and all this oh man uh biofilm disrupters i mean oh geez what a freaking mess guys okay so really what's going on here you got sibo you gotta deal with it you know what it is um what's going on is right off the bat your doctor's probably going to say well let's do xifaxan it's really the only thing that they've ever gotten official approval for and even that is kind of a weird approval they actually have to do some kind of shenanigans where they tell the insurance that it's ibsd for them to give it to you so it doesn't cost you like two thousand five hundred dollars um even though there's not even really real qualifications for what ibsd is so it's all kind of a joke that they all just kind of wink and nod about even though they now actually understand this is a what it is and what it's doing but anyway they're going to give you xifaxan or rifaximin whatever they call it and so i got that i'll just say that right off the bat i got i got my hands on some type of facts and start taking it it worked right it it go the whole point of it is that it's a pretty cool drug it's an antibiotic that doesn't totally screw up your microbiome than your large intestine which is usually the problem with antibiotics they go in there and they just wipe out everything and then you end up with this hard reset uh that can be tough on the body the diffaxin is cool because it gets completely absorbed by the body before it gets the large intestine so you don't have any of those nasty side effects which is really neat cool drug part of why it's so expensive the thing is it goes in a small intestine and does a good pretty good job of killing things now however it doesn't do a good job for everyone there's a reason and they'll get they'll talk about it you watch like pimento's lectures and stuff they talk about this like archaic bacteria stuff the point is it all depends on what bacteria is going on with you right there's a zillion different ones and zyfaxin in fact no antibiotic was ever really made like for specifically for some of the varieties that can be infesting your small intestine so it's kind of just a crapshoot you're taking this because you're trying to figure out am i in the lucky group that this medicine even does anything and it kills the bacteria that i have and it's pretty much a yes or no question um some people take it and they're like i don't know what y'all are talking about this didn't do anything for me it's like well it's because you have one of these specific rk bacteria varieties that this just simply doesn't work it doesn't kill that so i was fortunate i had a hydrogen type that zyfaxin worked well for so right off the bat i started getting the first time i ever felt something actually directly attacking my symptoms specifically in every sense of the word i started feeling everything improve and that was a wonderful wonderful feeling um so it's good stuff however like i talked about in the beginning it's all this it's all about motility it's all about those migrating motor complex that all that scenario you got to get things moving again so can you take drugs or different other techniques to kill this stuff yes and you probably will want to you might even have to however doc dr mark pimentel makes a great point that you you could cure sibo without any kill phase ever and i feel sad sometimes seeing these people do really extreme things to kill bacteria because they might not have even had to do that if they just focus purely on fixing their motility at least try before you do some of these extreme things i would um it's something i think that should be advertised more i mean some of these things are pretty scary i mean these methane guys they'll give them xifaxan plus neomyosin because they think that that apparently that statistically that helps the likelihood that it's going to reduce the bacterial overgrowth subtype that they have well neomycin's kind of a scary drug man it's got you can probably just get tinnitus forever just like oh whoops sorry you know you just started to hear something and now you're never going to stop hearing it for the rest of your life whoops i i would rather try something else before risking that that's just me but they don't tell you that you know it's one thing if you're like at wits end and you've tried everything and that's you know that's what's left i get that but i don't think a lot of people are making an informed choice about that their doctor is just going oh yeah this is what you're supposed to do here you go um and you might not have even needed to kill phase anyway point is if you can restore motility again you're you're good because essentially you're going to not only you're going to clear yourself out but you're going to eventually continue to make your small bowel an uninhabitable place as it should be and any bacteria that are in there eventually are going to retreat to where they're supposed to be at the end of the day that's what you have to do anyway so why do they even do this kill phase well first of all what what do they do they do the xyloxin or they'll do the zypax and plus neomyosin some people if they put up a fight about the neomycin we'll do xifaxan plus flagel the thing that i was on um and then if none of that works they'll do this elemental diet which is essentially that they give you just like water with powder in it that has vitamins to keep you alive because essentially the only way that you're going to starve the bacteria is if you starve yourself and because bacteria can eat carbohydrates or in sugars which are just you know come from carbohydrates and carbohydrates are virtually all food you know it's only animal protein that doesn't have carbohydrates in it so that's why you're never getting away from it even though even if you do diets and whatever you're never completely escaping carbohydrates right so you're never curing anything with a diet um so they got to go to this extreme thing where they just give you this powder and water and it's like weeks of that and you just are basically starving to death it's only because there's artificial nutrition in there that you're even you know okay and you gotta chug a lot of this powder water stuff while your insides are basically just going crazy and um you know because all the bacteria are dying or whatever so you can do any one number of those things now and do you know whatever you think works best for you the elemental diet the one thing that has good for it is it's quite effective i think it's somewhere around eighty percent effective which is more effective than difaction statistically um why do they even do this the reason why is because if you kill enough of the bacteria they have found that it can restore a certain degree of motility your mmcs can actually start to come back you know how much exactly is that that's nobody knows nobody at this point can really give an answer to that but they do know enough that hey you can actually restore some function so if some people have a mild enough case some people are fortunate enough and they can just do the kill phase and if it worked well enough and they had a mild enough case their not only is everything killed off but they might have done enough to kick start their mn their motor function again and that really solves the problem okay so you know some people that happens hey that's awesome but the numbers aren't great okay i wouldn't plan on it you should definitely be looking forward past that because there's a whole lot of people out there even that first of all they'll take it and feel nothing but even if you take it and feel something odds are pretty dang good that it's going to come back even if you feel better that's what happened to me so it took zai paxton felt like man this is it i wrote my gi i was like this is you we did it we figured it out and we're killing it and i'm finally for the first time ever actually feeling like i'm getting help then the pills stop after two weeks and everything comes back in two days so now what so then it's like okay well i you know screw everything i screw the doctor's screw you know i'm gonna get one of these like naturopaths who's like focuses on sibo because there's like a whole sub thing where these some of these naturopaths have figured out that doctors basically aren't curing it and they're like well we can get in there and we can do alternative approaches because they've also figured out that there's certain herbals that do um statistically apparently as well as as uh even like xifaxan at killing massive amounts of bacteria like fc cyto dysbiocide candibacton they are br some of these things um they can be quite effective at killing bacteria and once it became kind of like well herbals work just as good it kind of like naturopaths kind of jumped on that and then there's this whole thing like well we focus on sibo in your doctor all they're going to do is give you x in every six months by the way that's something you should be aware of going into this i mean xifaxan literally the manufacturer advertises on the commercial um you know it can give you symptom relief for up to six months that's literally what it says so it's not it's not cure they're not even expecting it to be a cure so that's something just to be aware of um so you end up with this whole sub industry of like well we're really going to solve it you know all these guys do is want to sell you pills it's you know that kind of thing which is true but also not totally true um so anyway i get this naturopath i'm like alright well i might as well explore your whole thing so they give you all kinds of stuff you start getting a biofilm disruptor it's like well you can't really kill it all because you know you have this thing called a biofilm in your intestines and the bacteria are going to basically retreat into that and they can feast they can kind of hibernate and eat off of it so you're never really going to be able to kill them you so you got to get you got to take these weird herbal combinations that destroy your bio film which by the way should be there for a reason doctor mark tipton intel talks about that he doesn't mess with those things your bio film has a purpose and you probably shouldn't be just wiping it out um especially because the other day are you really is it going to change anything i mean again you can kill 99.9 of it they still come up come back so but they come up with all these different angles of like well we got to do this and you got to take this good stuff you know these good probiotics that are specifically good for sibo for certain reasons as opposed to just taking like random probiotics or whatever you start talking about espolarity and which isn't a probiotic it's actually a fungus but it's good because it competes with resources with some of these bacteria and then they get into the whole like l-glutamine like we need to repair your intestinal lining and all this kind of stuff which is going to happen anyway if you just get a heal on its own if you can just get rid of the infection right but anyway so i started exploring some of this stuff but around this time is when i found dr mark pimentel and even though i had a whole shelf full of all these supplements and stuff i hadn't started them yet and once i found dr pimentel that was it i would just every second that i wasn't drunk i would dedicate to listening to everything he had ever done and um everything he was saying was makes sense and basically it was like look you the message was clear we gotta restart your migrating motor complex that's gotta start working again one way or another um so that's why i started looking at now the problem is even with dr mark pimental here's a problem you're going to run into you can follow everything he says and you're going to find out all rows lead you to procala pride basically because they used to do low dose ether myosin but basically here's what it comes down to and i got my own gi to just straight up admit this after she wasted my time with some lenses they don't have any tools to stimulate the small bowel mmc that were made for that purpose they've never made a drug to stimulate the small bowel they got all kinds of drugs to stimulate the stomach look at drugs drugs drugs drugs for the colon but the whole 20 feet in the middle they got nothing they just got stuff that they made for other reasons and then they're like oh oh it kind of kind of works in the small bowel and to be honest with some stuff i've seen they don't even fully understand how small about mmc's even work fully they don't they don't fully understand the mechanisms of it much less have they made drugs for it targeted to it so what they end up with is like well we've got these things that we've used because they're the best that we that's the best that exists that we have pharmaceutically so and basically in the the latest greatest is percala pride and he focuses on he i think it's a pretty significant piece of his arsenal he does other things because he he's an excellent doctor and he pays attention to the individual needs of individual patients but essentially what you're going to find if you're determined to find like what's the magic pill if i had the best treatment in the world it's pro cal pride is is what lies at the end of that right now now here's the problem it's not really approved for nothing's really approved other than xifaxan which is only kind of part tangentially approved for this disease um so if you tried to get it first of all good luck finding a doctor who even knows what it is who even is willing to write you try to write you script and then even if you have that good luck your insurance approving it right so that's the situation there pretty much some people get lucky and they get to play with it supposedly it works okay um however it's not needed um there are easier cheaper simpler ways to get things flowing in the small bowel and that's not getting enough attention specifically they have a few different things that are just otc type things and they're really just blends of a couple things that have been noted over time to get the small bowel moving again and funny enough it's real simple the most popular ingredients are ginger extract and artichoke extract those two things have been studied a number of different ways for a number of different reasons whether they call it functional dyspepsia or whatever brand name they want to put on it ibs or whatever they have shown that um they get things moving and i think ginger if i remember correctly more stimulates the stomach and artichoke more stimulates a small bowel but either way especially for someone like me who had stomach slow down right that's why i was getting acid issues there it's just it's great just gets everything moving um and uh so they you can just find these extracts like you know some of these grocery stores just got like weird random like oh here's ginger extract you know like that kind of stuff you can just get them probably anywhere which is also what's cool because a lot this is a global problem and a lot of these places you know their governments their health care systems are it's it's all over the map it and some of them a lot of them you can't even get xifaxin in the whole country right so it's it's tricky much less procalipri you know who knows so but you can get ginger an artichoke freaking anywhere pretty much so and it costs like nothing so you might as well go try it i found this one a few studies where they were actually specifically studying a certain dosage and combo of ginger and artichoke put together into a singular pill called pro-digest is what they were calling it when they were researching it it later got licensed off to orthomolecular labs as motility pro so i ordered that wasn't even much money and um um just that was it i mean that was it guys uh for me okay but also for a lot of others i see in the subreddit it's become quite popular it's not the only thing but it's a leading one all right um they do pretty dang good at stimulating the small bowel if you take this stuff you're not gonna wonder if it's working you're gonna t you take it in the morning on an empty stomach so that it quickly gets through the stomach without wasting time in there and the acid eating it away because if if you take it after food it's going to sit in your stomach for a while and then you're going to taste it because it's going to go off in your stomach it's not going to get where it needs to go right because it's going to sit there and the acid is going to eat away at it so take it in the morning empty stomach and that way it'll get through to your small bowel and you are going to feel it you are going to have gurgle girl gurgle all this activity right in the dead center of your abdomen where you don't even remember what activity feels like because you hardly ever have any because you have sibo you're just going to get go go go go all these movements and you know whatever you're going to feel the muscles firing and you're gonna be like holy crap this works and it's not even a prescription drug it's freaking ginger and artichoke um once i started taking that that was it um boom everything started getting better everything and it wasn't like xifaxan where it's like oh yeah right away you just feel better because it's like well i'm still all backed up and slowed down but it's just it's just like killing bacteria um it was like no everything's getting better and it's staying better and and um and it had other benefits too like when i started taking that i lost 35 pounds in a very short amount of time just purely because of all the swelling inflammation sickness was leaving my whole body just shrunk that didn't happen on xifaxan because i still had the problem i had just basically poured a neutralizer on the problem but the problem was still there so everything started getting better um there's other things uh there's another popular one called sibo mmc i've heard that one's even stronger uh it's a different combination of things that that are uh i think ginger is in there too but it's other things that apparently are known to trigger uh specifically mmcs for sibo and it's just otc you can just get it online and uh so point is guys you gotta get the small bowel moving again and the reason why doctors aren't really helping a lot of people is because even if they know what this is which a lot of them don't a lot of these doctors they're trained to think by the book like i can only give you things that have been proven in in double-blind placebo story uh studies of you know 10 000 people for 30 years that prove that you know if i give you this then this happens right if they are that kind of doctor you're going nowhere because they don't have that right um if you really need prescription level intervention it's going to have to come from a certain a certain very involved group and they're going to have to make some very serious debates to your insurance company too to even try to do some of these things you know i'm pretty sure dr mark pimentel has to put up a lot of put a lot of energy into dealing with insurance companies for the sake of his patience i mean i've had look this is gonna be my little rant i'll let myself have about doctors i've had doctors literally tell me ask me to call my insurance company to find out what they're allowed to prescribe me who's the doctor right they are right this is the problem doctors don't work for us we all think they do but they don't they work for the insurance company standing over our shoulder right that's who's paying the bill they know who's paying the bill it's not us it's them so as much as you think that you're there and they're working for you they're winking and smiling and shaking hands over your shoulder with the guy who's actually done a little contract with them on the side that says hey if you want to be in the the cool kids group and you want some of this money you're going to follow my rules and my rules say you're going to say this and this and you're gonna follow this flow chart and you're not deviating from this or you're out so good luck right they literally talk about this at sibo conferences you can watch one of the most popular questions is what the heck as patients are we supposed to do because there's like 10 doctors in the country who are even seriously versed in this and willing to put up the fight that it takes right everybody else is a pawn of the machine it probably doesn't even know what sibo is they're still just saying oh you have ibs here's probiotics right and even some of the ones who do aren't really going to do anything for you right because they knew who pays the bills and they're not really going to put up a fight the tech they hardly even do their job all they really they're not seriously being doctors all they're really doing is following the pre-prescribed flow chart of this is what you're going to do this is what you're going to test and this is what you're going to tell them so that's why it's really important with such few tools at our disposal to be more aware of our otc options here especially when they're incredibly effective it sounds ridiculous that some a disease so heinous could be fixed after tens of thousands of dollars dozens of doctors all these you know almost a decade of work all this stuff it's like oh you just need a ginger and artichoke it seems impossible but it works and you know look everybody's different everybody's got different levels of impairment how impaired is your small bowel i don't know everybody's different how severe is your infestation you know what species has infested you maybe you need higher doses but the point is what you need is to find something that gets your small bowel contracting and doing its pulsating motion that's it that's how you're going to get better period and if you just focus your work on your time and your effort and your search on that and looking at some of the most popular tools for that and stop obsessing about what's the best kill phase and what's this special new biofilm disruptor and i'm going to do this glutamine healing whatever stop it we need to be focused on let's get the stuff moving again because if it moves everything takes care of itself your body wants to heal itself okay once you get out all the junk and you get things moving again and it's going to help you there's a certain amount of feedback where once you've cleared it out it's going to start working again um even some of its own capabilities are going to start returning so just focus on getting things moving okay ginger and artichoke did it for me there's other things like sibo mmc to try out there but there's probably even more stuff out there i messed around with try follow for a little bit that didn't do it all for me but it worked a little bit um there's probably a lot of stuff that's worth investigating okay um a note you're probably gonna need a little help on your large intestine probably because things have been so slow your body's probably slowed down as a whole you maybe even have some harm down there um for me what really helps me see if i literally do nothing but ginger and artichoke i end up with a traffic jam at the bottom of my gut because all this works so well and so constantly that it pushes everything down and it just gets stuck because my large intestine isn't primed to keep up and i found the thing is there's lots of tools for large intestine including prescription tools you probably don't want to go that way if you don't have to so why don't you go ahead and try some natural things first literally i'm one of these people where caffeine is extremely good at stimulating the colon and there's a lot of people like that you know you people talk about drinking coffee and having to go to the bathroom i don't like how coffee um in the mornings i don't like the oiliness and the fattiness and all this stuff so i do black tea black tea in the morning it's it's like a miracle pill just bang everything's gonna clear out so literally ginger artichoke and black tea every morning that's it done everything gone um okay let me look back here at my notes and see some things that i missed oh this is an important one stress okay let's talk about this this is a big issue because yes are we all getting gaslighted yes we definitely are by a lot of doctors okay however there's a seat of truth here to see the truth is stress is extremely well known to impair motility it slows down the gut stress does so you there is a certain feedback going on here if your body's under stress and it doesn't have to be mental i mean certain mental stress it's physical stress it's all stress on your body right if your hair is falling out your teeth are grinding this something's going on okay um muscles are spasming whatever else so stress impairs motility so you need to spend a certain degree of effort on stress reduction you need to get serious about it treat it like it's part of your cure because it is it makes a significant impact and i had to kind of go full circle on that because of you know having experienced doctors so full of it you know acting like oh you just chill out it was you know not fun to be like oh there's some truth to that but at the end of the day you got to spend some time on things that are going to stress your body and make sure that those are being reduced okay and some of it's stuff you didn't think about like screens looking at screens you know the whole blue light thing i mean they know the stuff it stimulates a certain amount of anxiety right and so things like that you need to be aware of you know are you having a long commute you know are you you know as much as you can try to reduce these things because anything that impairs motility that's your problem that's your enemy to that point on dieting um there's only one thing that i pay attention to on diet like i said everything i'm good however i don't eat just garbage fat like some super fried grease junk why because fat is the single food that impairs motility the longest slows down your body it slows down your stomach takes the longest time to empty everything just takes longer if you eat fat large amounts of fat so be careful with fat it's not about like don't eat fat or go on an anti-fat diet but you need to be thoughtful about that because it's like do i need to be on some special thing no i can eat it but i'm always paying attention to my motility i'm always making sure my body is flowing really well top to bottom and if i'm gonna eat some big greasy pile of whatever it's not doing me any favors so that's all i pay attention to moving forward um as far as diet goes something to think about so reduce stress spend some real time looking for any low hanging fruit to get rid of to improve that and um watch fats watch really really fatty things um let me see what else did i miss um pots i forgot to mention pots yeah at some point in there i started to get pots and that stuff is scary as hell um be really careful about that dr mark pimentel has literally said that he has had patience he's lost patience to pots um it's scary scary stuff your heart forgets how to function properly and it's not good so i was in the position where i'd be at work and if i ever stood up i would have to lean on something or i would fall over because my heart rate would go through the roof um and what happened there the reason i got pots is because i had been restricting way too much to be honest i think part of it was probably malnutrition and like the villain were being damaged and stuff like that but pots was because i was evolving this procedure of i can't have that i can't have that and i can't have that because i've attached all these bad experiences to all these things and you just keep retreating like i said into a smaller and smaller cone of how you can live right and what happens eventually is your body is getting sick over and over and over horribly ill and you're not getting nutrition and your body starts to freak the heck out and it can be so messed up that it starts to forget subconscious capabilities like how to manage your heart rate and that's serious [ __ ] um when that started happening that was the first time i ever felt like something was more dangerous than my brain my acidosis and i actually reached a point where i was at a table with food i would have never eaten including a bag a whole basket of french fries and i felt this overwhelming feeling of you need to eat that right now you need to eat that and i did and i felt insanely better quickly and i thought oh my god what is going on i mean i'm starving to death to the point where my body's starting to fail and so i just started eating everything for a little bit and the pots went away pretty quickly within a couple weeks i just said you know what screw the brain frog screw everything i'm just going to endure it but i can't do whatever the heck this is so be careful out there be careful pots is some serious stuff um yeah i think that pretty much covers it feel free to write me like a note or something if you want to send a private message you have questions but overall focus on motility guys if that's what's going on here oh i was going to say look i'm going to say this in the beginning video but i forgot when this all started and actually over years i thought one day i'm going to find out what this is and it's going to be some weird rare disease right i'm gonna be like one in a million and whatever it blew my mind that ended up being something i was like oh wait a second twenty percent of the world has ibs and seventy something eighty percent of them it's sibo we're probably talking about a billion people that need to know this and they're all being told to just calm down and have probiotics so this is important this is seriously seriously important stuff so that's why i want to get it out there um i'm paying it back for me never being able to get to get better and um there's it's not like i'm looking for a needle in a haystack there's a lot of people i already met someone at my work whose daughter was chronically ill for over 10 years and after my story he had her tested and it was methane dominant sibo so there's people all over with this and some of them there is just like more of a convenience issue it's like oh i have ibs and you know i feel bloaty or whatever i get it people shouldn't live with that either right it's not always a life-threatening thing but the thing is this is all over the place and it's just inexcusable okay because it's simple it's the small intestine it's the spot we're all not paying attention to and it's an insanely critical part of the body where we get literally all of our nutrition and there's no attention being paid to it and when you start looking at what it is what it does and you know why this could be happening it's just like it's it's logical it's simple it's like look this this could be happening to just all over the place and all it really means is we need to be improving our motility we need to be actually getting a little more exercise is good too right that's stress reducing and it helps motility right um all these things are important right and and that's the answer okay getting things flowing so um yeah there's a lot of people out there that need this and i hope i helped some yeah this ended up being a completely stupid ridiculous long video i don't know who knows if anybody even watch it but i'll put it out there and like say you know feel free to send me a note or something but i think i said just about everything i could think of so good luck guys you