5: Can Antibiotics Cause IBD (Crohn's and Colitis)?

Doctors often give out antibiotics like candy... but this is a HUGE PROBLEM because they can destroy your gut, leading to inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn's and Colitis.

So, what happens to your gut when you take antibiotics?

TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• How antibiotics works
• What they do to your gut bacteria
• Natural antibiotic alternatives
• Alcohol vs your gut
• How to fix your gut after antibiotic use
• The role of probiotics
• FMT (fecal transplants)
• Simple steps to start repairing your gut

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Transcript

Josh Dech:

Contrary to what your doctors told you, Crohn's and Colitis are reversible. Now, I've helped hundreds of people reverse their bowel disease, and I'm here to help you do it too. Because inflammation always has a root cause; we just have to find it. This is the Reversing Crohn’s and Colitis Naturally podcast. Now, I do these live trainings in my Facebook group every single week and put the audios here for you to listen to. If you want to watch the video versions of these episodes, just click the link in the show notes to get access to our Facebook group and YouTube channel. And for weekly updates, information, tips, and tricks, you can sign up for our email list by clicking the link in the show notes below.

Hey guys, welcome back! It's Tuesday night, we're here doing our live as always, and so today we are talking about antibiotics and the damages that happen when you take them, why you take them, how you can avoid them, how to fix yourself after, and their connection to things like Crohn's and Colitis. And so the truth is, the unfortunate truth is that many doctors still, to this day, prescribe antibiotics like candy, and this is a really unfortunate thing. It causes a lot of different issues. And so, even though they can cause Crohn's and Colitis, they’re still thrown out there. I've literally worked with clients—like a 9-year-old girl who from ages 3 to 9 was given antibiotics for every virus, every flu, every bug, every infection, every everything, four to six times a year—and she had colitis. No wonder why. And so we see this a lot. If you've ever taken antibiotics, you're going to want to hear this today.

Guys, we’re going to be talking about in this episode how antibiotics work. Number one, we'll talk about how they can lead to gut diseases like IBD. We'll go over the pros and cons of taking antibiotics, the risks of taking them, and what happens to your gut and your gut microbiome when you actually take them. We're also, of course, going to talk about how we can begin repairing your gut and your microbiome after taking antibiotics because that's just as important. It's great to know how they work, but how do we fix it? That's very important. We will go through that.

So if you guys are new here and you don’t know who I am, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Josh Deck. I’m an ex-paramedic, I'm a holistic nutritionist, I’m also an IBD specialist, and now I’m also a medical lecturer and a physician’s consultant for Crohn's and Colitis and severe IBS. I’ve helped hundreds of people now come off their medication and reverse their IBD. This is all I do: just IBD. We’re here to help you, and we want to help the world see that IBD is reversible.

Alright, so let’s get right into this. The first thing we want to do is talk about—you guys probably have a good handle on this—but I would be doing a disservice to those who might be new to the gut health space or to gut disease. I want to talk about what the microbiome actually is. So, a microbiome is a community or an ecosystem of all kinds of bacteria, fungi, yeast, ARA, protozoa, viruses—all living in harmony. You have them everywhere—in your mouth, in your nose, on your skin, in your armpits, your groin, rectally, vaginally, nasally, in your scalp, your eyebrows. Microbiomes live everywhere. And we’re talking about your gut microbiome specifically today, which has—well, I’ll give you a note—you are born as 99% human cells, 1% microbes. So all these parasites, fungi, bacteria, and all this stuff—99% human, 1% microbes. By the time you die, you are 90% microbes and only 10% human cells. They don’t number us 10 to 1. It’s actually astonishing.

So we’re here going to be talking to you guys about this microbiome. So we know what it is. So we know it’s all these microbes, right? Bacteria and all kinds. So, what are antibiotics? Well, obviously, antibiotics are anti-bacterial; they kill things off. But here’s what we need to know: There’s a couple of ways antibiotics work. So, the first thing they will inhibit—hopefully my marker is working here—is they inhibit and they block certain mechanisms of these bacteria making themselves. They inhibit cell wall production. So, it’s like you having no skin. You’re going to get sick and die very quickly if you had no flesh on your body. And so that’s what antibiotics do—they inhibit cell wall production. They inhibit protein synthesis so the bacteria can’t make vital proteins that they need to survive, and they can also inhibit DNA reproduction. So, imagine your cells never turned over. You’d age very quickly, and you’d die within like a couple of weeks, maybe less. And that’s why we need this replication. So antibiotics inhibit these vital processes that bacteria need to maintain life.

Now, this can be great, right? Obviously, it makes them permeable, it makes them weaken, it makes them die off if you have a gnarly infection. You need these as an emergency. They’re very helpful. But here’s what happens. It attacks different bacteria; they have different weaknesses. Some are more prone to having protein synthesis blocked. Some will die off easier if you poke holes in the cell wall, they become leaky and die. If you inhibit the wall production, some—if you inhibit their DNA production—will kill themselves out naturally. So, different bacteria react to different things. But I think of it this way. Imagine you have different animals and you're trying to hunt one particular animal.

 Right? If you were trying to hunt dogs—God forbid, I love dogs, just an analogy because I know what they're allergic to—if you try to hunt dogs by using antibiotics, air quotes, food, you're going to use things like chocolate, maybe grapes or raisins, right? Really toxic things for dogs. Well, here’s the thing: if you start throwing out rat poison, you kill all the dogs, all the elephants, all the tigers, all the everything. It’s very, very hard knowing how complex our microbiomes are to throw in an antibiotic targeting one specific type of microbe, right? I know if I want to get dogs, chocolate and grapes and raisins, great way to do that—God forbid, right? You’re going to hell if you kill dogs, but great example, right?

So, if you have to target one specific species or strain—one microbe in particular of the entire ecosystem—it’s very hard to do in our gut microbiome. And this is why antibiotics are dangerous. So instead of going after just the dogs, they will go after all the mammals. All the lions and tigers and bears—oh my—will just get hit with the same poison, and this is a problem because we need them for the ecosystem. And so they’re killing these umbrellas of weaknesses in cell walls, protein synthesis, or DNA, or whatever they want to kill off. And this is what becomes very problematic. We kill off the good and we kill off the bad. But the problem is, your microbiome is structured in such a way that we have everything in your microbiome in imbalance.

Everything in your microbiome is imbalance, right? And here’s the problem. When this balance gets disrupted—say we kill off all the good, they’re way down here now instead of being way up here like they should be—we kill off all the good bacteria. What happens? Well, the opportunistic microbes, we call them, they take the opportunity. There’s nothing there to police them. If you kill off all the police and baristas and school teachers and kill off everything that’s helpful for immunity, well guess what takes over? Drug dealers, gun runners, you know, violence starts to run the streets and drugs go rampant because there’s nothing keeping it in check. There’s no balance. These opportunistic microbes take over.

 How many of you—let me know in the chat—how many of you have had C. diff? Just type in CI in the chat if you’ve had CI before. I would venture to say, having done hundreds of cases now, probably 70% or so have had a run-in. 70% of people dealing with Crohn’s or Colitis have had a run-in of some kind with C. diff or Clostridium difficile. If you’ve had C. diff, let me know in the chat. Here’s the thing—if you’ve had C. diff, let me know, because C. diff is an opportunistic microbe, and it’s extremely common. Antibiotics can kill off all the good, leaving room for the opportunistic to overgrow, like C. diff and fungi, especially like Candida, will overgrow when they have the opportunity. And it makes a big problem, contributing to inflammation in the bowel.

C. diff can not only be highly inflammatory but also fatal. But here’s what drives me nuts. I have had so many people come in to see me who are already inflamed. So, Clostridium might have been riding a little bit, they get really bad, they get really sick. This is maybe before the diagnosis, even during. What does the doctor do? Take some antibiotics. What does that do? Kills off the good, leaving room for the bad. They overgrow, and now we have more C. diff, and you get recurring C. diff infections. That’s so bad! We’ve now developed treatments like FMT or Fecal Microbiota Transplants. So, we’re actually taking stool from one person and putting it into another because the C. diff is overgrown.

We need more bacteria because you killed off everything, and the C. diff are smart. They can become resistant. There are a lot of very strong resistant microbes like C. diff, MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), which you might have heard of if you’re a hospital worker. You’d be familiar with that. That’s how they proliferate and become extra strong. They take over an ecosystem. Now, you have gigantic gangs and violent guys going in to cause problems in a normal city. And so, the more antibiotics we take, the worse the problem gets. And what do you do? You go back to your doctor with more C. diff. What do they do? More venom, more Clindamycin, more whatever antibiotic they throw at it. And it’s crazy. You just get worse and worse, and they blame it on your IBD. We call this medical gaslighting.

 It doesn’t have to be that way, because here’s the thing: there are many other ways to find alternatives. Now, I’m going to give you guys here some alternatives for antibiotics that are going to make a big, big difference for you. But here’s something we have to know: Once the damage is done, if we continue taking even plant-based or natural antimicrobials or antibiotics, this is where we run into problems. Because the major problem we run into is residual damage. If you’ve got a fire in your house, right, in your kitchen, that half the kitchen burns down, awesome—you can repair and replace the kitchen. It might cost 10, 20, 30 grand to do your kitchen, depending on what you’ve got in there, right? It can be very expensive.

But now you have more damage done—appliances have to get replaced, there’s smoke damage in the house, you might have to redo the carpet because the scent won’t come out. There’s a lot of residual damage. And so, people who have had, in your situation here with IBD, everybody we deal with with IBD needs more than a GI map and some microbiome testing. Now, GI map again is like a stool test that we utilize. It gets very complicated. So, we’re at this point now where antibiotics have been induced, there are other overgrowths, there are fungal issues, or Clostridia issues. This is where things get very complicated because there’s a lot of residual damage. It now has to be undone, and we’ve got to go through the works. We have to go through drainage, liver, gallbladder, lymphatics, skin, lungs, kidneys, and all this stuff to get junk out of the system to allow you to even clear out junk.

All the opportunistic— the longer you’ve had it, the more likely you have overgrowth. So more opportunistic microbes come in. We get more Candida, Candida can go mouth to anus. Candida, I have seen as a root cause or one of the layers of causes for IBD so many times. This allows other things that we live with in harmony, we mentioned the microbiome with yeast, fungi, parasites, protozoa, viruses, the works. Well, how many people have experienced this in the IBD community? If you’re new to this or if you’re listening, this episode, by the way, is now on a podcast, guys, if you want that, message me for it. I put all these episodes on a podcast now, so you can listen on the go. But think about this: if the longer you’ve had it and the more antibiotics you’ve had, the more things can overgrow. There are millions of opportunistic microbes.

And so we see fungi, we see Clostridia, we see parasites at the root of everything. They’re very difficult to remove. This is what half of what I do is just helping people remove this junk. We had one of our clients, currently, just last week, who did one of their first drainage protocols that we’re doing now to get rid of parasites. We have big worms, guys! I’m seeing rope worms the size of my arm—not like the thickness, but the length. We’ve seen people—there was a mom, she got a 14-year-old, just turned 15 here recently, sent me a picture—Chopstick! She picked up a 38-inch worm that came out. It was never seen or detected on any of his tests before. And this is the problem. We’re missing these things like crazy. They can burrow, they get into things, and they’re everywhere. So, we have a lot of residual to clean up.

Okay, so what I want to do right now is get into the next stages here. We’re going to go into alternative antimicrobials. Now, here’s what I want to tell you: there are a lot of methods, but again, if you’re somebody who’s already got an altered microbiome, if you’re inflamed, it’s altered. If you’ve had antibiotics, it’s altered. If you’ve got fungal issues, it’s altered. Basically, if you have IBD—Crohn’s, Colitis, and anywhere on the severity spectrum, a 1 out of 10 to a 10 out of 10, if you’re constipated and having a bowel movement one every two to four weeks, or you’re having 50 a day, your microbiome is altered, and this is a major issue.

So, the antimicrobials I’m going to give you can be really great for future, but if you have a recurring C. diff infection, this probably isn’t going to do the job for you. There’s going to be a lot more layers to that, so I want you to keep that in mind as we go through this, okay? So here’s what we’re looking at. I’m going to give you a quick little list of some really good ones we can use, like clove and oregano. These are no-brainers. You guys could probably Google these, and so there was a really interesting study done as a school science fair project. I don’t know if the kid was in like the third grade, or the fifth grade, or seventh grade—I forget—but he had actually compared penicillin to oregano oil, and oregano oil beat it out 100 times in a row. It was incredible. Very, very powerful antimicrobial.

And if you find things that are antimicrobial, they often are also antifungal. This is where we’ll get into things like our clove, oregano, and garlic. Was it, I think it was lemon balm, if I’m not mistaken, is also antimicrobial. We can use tea tree and tea tree oil. And some of my personal favorites are things like olive oil. I had a really nasty infection in the inside of my right arm. I had a tattoo in here that got done. I actually used a numbing cream on it because I’m a big baby, and it turns out I was highly allergic, and I got a huge infection. My arm swelled up. It was jiggly. I’d shake my arm, and it would wobble back and forth like a water balloon. It was crazy, and this infection got massive, and all my skin fell off right down to like that white fibrous layer. Looked like road rash.

And I remember I was standing in the kitchen. I was sitting there with my wife at the table, and she’s looking at me. I’m pale and I’m sweating. My arm, I got shakes, and I’m like—I don’t know yet. My skin literally fell off my arm. And so I went into the kitchen, and I grabbed a sterile pad and I covered it with honey—pure raw organic honey in olive oil. I put it on my arm. Pain was unbelievably painful. I was pale and sweating. I was shaking. My pain was cut by about 80% within about 10 seconds, and it was the antimicrobial that I needed. So honey and olive oil. Now, particularly things like Manuka—Manuka is very expensive. There are different potencies, but they’re also very antimicrobial.

But this is where nuances come in. If you’re somebody who takes, for example, honey for antimicrobial, but you also have Candida, the sugar is feeding the Candida, so we have to look to other things. We can also get other ones. There are some great ones like thyme, even rosemary, can be a very good antimicrobial depending on the usage. But these are plant-based antimicrobials. Now, there are more antimicrobials we can use. These ones are great for ingesting. Even colloids can be great for ingesting. Now, those colloids—whether we can use them topically...

 My wife, again, used to tell me stories—her mom had a gold ring from her grandmother. Her mom would actually just rub it if she got a sty on her eye. She would just rub the gold, because gold, silver, and, of course, copper are extremely antimicrobial. They make these in colloids. You can get them in a blend—silver colloids or colloidal silver. It’s often called, and it’s very easy to come by for the most part. You can even make your own, but gold, silver, and copper are very antimicrobial.

So, other things we can look at? UV light or sunlight. If you guys have ever left, like, something colored out in the sun, like a blanket or a T-shirt, and it bleaches it, it’s extremely antimicrobial. The sun itself is antimicrobial, and this is part of why getting fresh air and sunlight—not only does it boost the immune system, it’s also antimicrobial. It helps with drainage, helps with DNA, we get our vitamin D from the sun. We need so many of these things. The sun is not the enemy. Fried food, fast food, junk food is what leads the sun to causing cancer and inflammation. But that’s because these foods—these seed oils—cause DNA damage. The sun gets in, leaves a little burn, causes more DNA damage.

So, it’s not the sun that’s the enemy. The sun is incredible for our bodies. We need it, and it’s extremely antimicrobial. Other things we can use—again, this will be topically—is alcohol. EOH is just eth—alcohol, sorry, it’s an old paramedic thing when I write it on the board. That was shorthand. But alcohol can be really beneficial for antimicrobial topically. But here’s an interesting thing about alcohol. When you drink alcohol, right, typically what happens if you ingest something your body doesn’t want? I’m sure we’ve all been there where we’ve taken in something that maybe caused diarrhea. We’re in the bathroom, like boom, 10 minutes, I’m in the bathroom. For me, dairy—ice cream—I’d be running to the bathroom.

And so here’s what happens. You have these things we call TLR4 receptors—these toll-like receptor number four—and they kind of sit between the stomach and the small intestines here. They stand guard, and what they do is they open the floodgates. If something comes in, they’re like, "Ooh, big problem. Gluten, big problem!" They open the floodgates and say, "You should not be here," or "You look like a pathogen." Gluten on a molecular level looks like pathogenic bacteria, and so your body opens the floodgates, deliberately creates leaky gut, it draws water into the intestines to push things down and out the back end. That’s what leaky gut does. Now, leaky gut’s a defense mechanism.

In this case, it’s long-term leaky gut that’s a problem. And so if you have something you shouldn’t have, and these TLR4 receptors open the floodgates, they can open or close the gates. They want to get rid of it, but here’s what’s interesting about alcohol. Alcohol is extremely antibacterial. What lives inside your intestines? 90-95% of your microbiome in your gut lives in your large intestine. Well, your body—this is my theory on it—has a really interesting thing. What actually happens, this has been studied and tested, is that when you ingest alcohol, instead of those TLR4 receptors opening the floodgates, right, to try to let stuff out, what they do instead is they close it down.

So things have to trickle through even slower. And now here’s what’s interesting: we know this happens when you take alcohol. My theory as to why is I believe our bodies are very intuitive. Your body, I believe, knows so well that alcohol is an extremely dangerous thing to enter your gut microbiome because it would wipe it out. When your microbiome may be as important as your DNA, and the alcohol wipes out the microbiome, it says, "Nope, we’re going to slow you down." But here’s the crazy part: what it does instead is it says, "You know what? I’m going to let the alcohol absorb through the stomach, right, some in the small intestine, and get to your liver, your blood, and your brain before I let it get to your gut."

Your body is willing to sacrifice your freaking liver, which is probably the most important organ next to your heart and brain, and your brain, before it allows it to just flood through your gut. So it sends it out to the body instead of through the GI system. That’s how toxic alcohol is. That’s my theory on why it slows things down. But anyways, aside from that, so alcohol—very antimicrobial topically—but again, you can get antibacterial creams to put on top. Something else we can look at, like "fights like"—it’s a theory in Homeopathy, like feeds like and all kinds.

But here’s something else, guys. If you have to take antibiotics, you may have heard that taking probiotics can be extremely beneficial. Well, it’s true. There are studies that have shown that taking probiotics, heavy doses of bifidobacterium and lactobacillus, very common ones that you’ll get on probiotics over the counter, taking these when taking antibiotics can help prevent recurring C. diff infections. It can reduce them by something like 60% or more, which is really incredible. So whether they act as cannon fodder, whether they help block the opportunistic microbes, whether it’s immune pathway immune signaling, who knows? So we don’t know why it’s happening, but we know it’s happening. Taking heavy doses of probiotics is extremely beneficial when we’re taking antibiotics.

But here’s what’s even more interesting: 177% of cases—so something that happens fairly frequently—is that it’s called AAD or antibiotic-associated diarrhea. This is the lead-in to what I believe causes inflammatory bowel disease when taking antibiotics because we kill off the good and the opportunistic microbes overgrow. Huge prevalence of C. diff infections after taking antibiotics, oral antibiotics. And so what happens is taking probiotics can help reduce that C. diff, but something that can happen with taking these antibiotics called AAD, or antibiotic-associated diarrhea—one in six, guys—at 177% of cases are fatal. That means deadly. One in six cases of antibiotic-associated diarrhea can be deadly. But simply taking heavy doses of probiotics can reduce that by 57%.

It can reduce the instances of AAD, and so they are extremely powerful to utilize if you’re going through this process. And so the question we then have to ask is how to fix it. It’s very... here’s the thing, guys. There’s something called the Dunning-Kruger effect, and I don’t say this to, like, you know, on anybody in particular—no pun intended here, can’t for what we’re talking about. There’s something called the Dunning-Kruger effect: when we don’t know enough, we can become overconfident with what’s going on and how to fix it.

So if I’m like, "Yeah, a house takes a roof, walls, and a floor to build. I’ll go put up a bunch of sticks." I don’t get the engineers, the framers, the drywallers, the electricians, the people who put down the actual foundation itself. We don’t get that right. And so you don’t really have a home; you have a shack. So here’s the difference. What I’m going to tell you guys is going to make it sound very simple. Please know it’s much more complicated. And randomly going out and doing these types of things and interventions can be highly problematic if not done by a professional. I just want you to understand some of the things involved, okay?

So let’s talk about how we can fix a microbiome. So there’s the obvious way—if you’re a current C. diff infection, is FMT, like we mentioned, fecal microbiota transplants. Now, what is FMT? They take literally, take stool, or they’ll take an extracted bacteria from stool and insert it. There are a couple of ways you can do that. They have capsule forms, which are slow-release, so it gets to the colon and releases. They have retention enema, where you put the enema in, leave it, so you kind of face down, butt up, 10-15 minutes, a couple of times a day or a week. And then they have colonoscopy, where you have anesthesiologists and GI doctors, and they go in through the colonoscopy in place and scrape and all that.

Very complicated. There have been people who have done their own FMTs. Some have gotten very lucky, but there have been many dangerous cases of people getting fatally injured doing FMT at home with, like, their partner’s stool. There’s an interesting documentary I talked about. Actually, it was just last year. I invited you guys all out. If you’re new, you missed it. If you didn’t see it, you missed it. But you can actually look it up called Designer Shi by Saffron Cassaday, and she actually did her own FMTs, kind of supervised by a doctor. She got temporarily better, and then she got worse again. It was actually pregnancy. She got lucky. Some things changed in her immune system, and she got better. To my knowledge, she’s still fine. But she did the FMTs, like, every day for like a year or two years. She got a little better, then she fell off and got better, then got worse again, and we never know what we’re doing.

There was another fellow in this documentary who used his mom’s stool, did his own homemade FMT, developed anxiety and menopause symptoms. This, like, 30-year-old guy started getting hot flashes and all kinds of menopause symptoms. There have been people who’ve given themselves infections and died because you don’t know what’s in somebody’s gut. You don’t know about the parasites, you don’t know about the fungi, or the E. coli, or what they’re carrying, whether they have symptoms or not. They can be asymptomatic carriers, and it can kill you. So, if you’re looking at FMT, it’s only approved, at the time of this recording, in the USA for recurring C. diff infections. But even that, I had so many people go through FMT, and it didn’t work because they’re missing every necessary stage. They’re missing drainage, they’re missing detoxing, they’re missing inflammation and immune system and all that. They just shove it in and hope for the best. It’s $5 to $10,000 for FMT, and it’s useless if you miss the steps.

These doctors are brilliant, but they’re applying information so wrong. People spending tens of thousands of dollars on FMT and going nowhere, they don’t get any better, but they do it out of desperation. So anyway, FMT can be a thing. If you guys want help, comment “solution” and I’ll walk you through this process and how we can help you fix this. Another thing we can look at, of course, is it doesn’t hurt to measure a GI map, but that’s later down the road. So, to get a stool sample to analyze your own gut microbiome, that’s much later down the road.

Other things we can do to fix it, we have to go through these layers. We have to know what is inflaming you. So the first thing we have to look at, of course, is going to be drainage. This is very complicated. It can be, again, very difficult. If you guys want help with this, we have all kinds of programs and courses, literally for every budget. We’ll help you any way we can. My goal is to make this information available to the world. I have it for free here, we have it for pennies on the dollar, and we have all kinds of custom programs in the works. If you want help, comment “solution” and we’ll get you guys the help you need to actually fix this, okay?

So we have to work on drainage. That’s going to be important. That’s liver and gallbladder, that’s your bile ducts, that’s going to be your gut, your kidneys, your skin, your lungs, and sinuses—all these drainage pathways have to be opened up. It can be difficult to do, but very doable. But this is the number one thing most clinicians miss. I missed it myself for many years until I saw it in action and was taught it by my mentor. So, this is something very important to understand: we have to understand drainage. The second thing to that is we have to go after the root cause.

Now, if you guys are listening to, say, the podcast version of this, I think it’s episode three, it’s like the five or the root causes, the five Rs, I think it was, of reversing IBD. We’ve gone through this before. We have to figure out the thing. We know inflammation is not, and never is, and never will be random. Excuse me, it’s your body always trying to heal you from something. The problem is a lot of these things block your drainage pathways so your body can’t clear out the junk. You’re trying to evict tenants from the building, but the doors are locked. Now they’re banging on the doors and making a stink and lighting fires ‘cause they’re mad at you.

That’s what happens when you try to get rid of junk. We tried— I had a kid just this week trying to clear some candida, and he started—his mom texted me, she’s like, “I don’t know what to do. He’s not even getting out of bed. He’s extremely depressed. He’s moody. He’s just not himself. He has no motivation. He’s got pain in his body.” Drainage. We had to back off, and right away, he started feeling better because we were trying to evict the tenants, and his drainage pathways were not open enough. That’s very important to understand. We have to go after the root cause.

After drainage is opened, now whether that’s a fungi or parasites or bacteria or mold or toxins or metals or whatever it can be, it’s always layers. We typically have a pecking order for that. That’s another talk for another time. Again, we can help you with that; it’s inside of all of our content online. You guys can always access on how to do that. Now, once we do our drainage, we go through the root cause. We have to remove the problem. This is where we start to get into repairing things. So we know, back to the five Rs, we have to replenish.

Your body is trying to put out fires. Your body and your immune system are trying to put out the fires, the inflammation, using its version of water, like a firefighting team, which is vitamins and minerals and amino acids and micronutrients and macronutrients, right? Proteins and all these things. So this is what we have to do: replenish, because you’ve been at a deficit. You’re not breaking down, digesting, absorbing, you’re highly inflamed, your body can’t get rid of the stuff on its own. It’s out of resources. We have to replenish those in, and then some.

Some of these resources help get rid of the root cause. Some of these resources help with drainage. They all have a process. Magnesium has over 300 enzymatic reactions in the body—300—from one certain mineral, magnesium. It’s very, very complex, the body. It’s an amazing, amazing machine. So once we replenish that, we have to continue going through the five Rs. We have to remove the problem, remove the root cause. We have to replenish the nutrients. This is where we can start going into rebuilding the microbiome and repairing the tissue.

So I’m just going to put down here, I’ll put "rebuild and repair" in chicken-scratch writing on the board. And so, rebuild and repair. Why? We talked about how inflammation can lead to a depletion of good microbes. Your bacteria—you don’t want to live in a house that’s been burned down. Neither do your microbes. They don’t like that. We need to repair the tissue and rebuild the microbiome back to normal, to figure out what deficits there are. It’s not as simple as taking probiotics, guys. You have 20 million different types of bacteria inside of your gut. Taking a handful of probiotics isn’t going to do a thing.

You have 100 trillion bacteria, taking 5 billion—grain of sand on a beach. So it’s not as simple as popping probiotics randomly, either. This is, again, where it gets complicated. We’re here to help. Another thing we can do after this one, of course—this is one of the most important—is just to rejuvenate the immune system. Not boost. Very different. If you boost an imbalanced immune system, you boost the imbalance. You can drive autoimmunity. We have to be careful with that one. So we have to know what we’re doing. We have to understand: are you Th1, Th2, Th17 dominant? Which immune pathways are there?

Now, I don’t expect you to know what I’m talking about. This is just, I’m trying to prevent Dunning-Krueger. I don’t want you guys to feel like, “Oh, I’ll take probiotics and I’ll be fine.” It’s far more complicated. I just want you to have the pieces, okay? So drainage, root cause, replenish, rebuild, repair, rejuvenate. After this, we have to go back and go through layers now, okay? This is where it gets complicated.

How do we rebuild the gut after these antibiotics? Well, we’ve done the main steps now, but now we have to go through layers. So, IBD is very complicated. There often—and this—I’m not going to go on about this one, I’m going to wrap it up with this statement here. There are often— it’s what we call multifactorial. There are many layers to IBD. So sometimes it’s a combination of things like drainage and parasites and fungi, um, so Candida, then we’re dealing with heavy metals, then we’re dealing with more toxicity, then we have stress, and we have food, and we have diet, and we have toxins in the home, and we have workplace stuff, and blah, blah, blah, blah. The list goes on.

There’s—I could list dozens of things that can influence IBD. So it’s a very layered process, and we say it takes, on average, one to two months of active, dedicated repair to your gut for every year you’ve had the problem. On average, some people more, some people less. And so everyone’s going to be different. I’ve had people come in through our program—50 bowel movements a day—in three weeks, they’re down to 5 and 8, after 15, 16 years of trying every drug and every doctor saying, “Do what you want. We’ve tried all the things. We’ll cut your colon up.”

50 bowel movements, down to 5 and 8 in three weeks' time. We’ve had people who have had a bowel movement every 2 to 4 weeks, who in 3 to 5 weeks are having a bowel movement every day. Sometimes it’s that easy. On the other hand, we’ve seen people who have had nothing for six weeks. Suddenly, boom, everything starts moving, and they’re feeling better. Everyone’s body responds differently, but it can be done.

Using medications to mask the symptoms is not the answer. It just is never going to work because you’re missing literally every step. You’re just putting up—I’m drawing all the steps on this whiteboard. It’s like taking a big piece of cardboard and taping over the whiteboard and pretending none of these steps matter. It doesn’t fix the problem. No wonder people are so sick all the time. No wonder North America is the gut disease capital of the world. 5% has 50% of the global cases.

Because we treat disease belligerently, quite frankly. Okay, so that’s how this works, guys. This is what it’s like to restore the microbiome. This is how antibiotics work. As a quick recap, they break down—they inhibit cell wall production, protein synthesis, they can inhibit DNA reproduction, but they target entire subspecies—so all mammals or all marine life, for example, rather than just the lions or just the mice or just the rabbits, whatever you’re trying to get at, okay?

They kill all the mammals, and that’s the problem we see. Leaving room for opportunistic microbes to overgrow. And so, after that, we know that these kill a lot of stuff, which leaves room to overgrow. It leaves room for these opportunistic microbes to overgrow. They come in. What does your doctor do? They give you more antibiotics, which feeds the machine and feeds the problem, and then we have to go into—one, we can look at changing our antimicrobials, but two, we have to go through a very lengthy process to rebuild the gut and the gut microbiome.

So, how do we do that, guys? The easiest way—in this L—half my career, I like to say, half my career is just convincing people this is possible. We’ve been on international TV, we’ve traveled across the states, we just did Dallas and Miami earlier this year for interviews on TV and podcasts, we’re talking to some of the top of the top in the world. We even have them on our show, and every single one of them looks at me with the exact same thing going: “This works.”

Obviously, why don’t people know? Because the system has taught you otherwise. The only thing standing right now between you and getting better—I mean, we’ve literally created programs for anybody, anywhere in the world, of all ages. We can help. The word “solution” is the only thing standing between you and getting better. If you are serious about reversing IBD and you want help, comment “solution.” It’s all you have to do. We’re going to be able to help you guys out and get you the results and the help that you need to actually reverse this. It’s that easy.

And if you’re on the podcast version of this one listening, you guys can just click the link in the show notes and you can, of course, go to that one and make sure you get the help. There’s a link there to reach out and get help with your gut as well, okay? It’s that easy, guys. Now, I want to see if there’s any questions here. This is a great time to go through them.

Carrie, your son was a preemie born with C. diff, treated immediately after birth with antibiotics. I think this is how Crohn’s Road started four years later. I think you’re absolutely right, Carrie. Here’s the thing. If you guys are born with C. diff, and that’s an early introduction—we all have clostridia—but a baby should be born with more bifidobacterium and more lactobacillus, and they start to grow. In C. diff, a gut microbiome is kind of like a new forest growing. It starts as a meadow, and it slowly starts to cultivate and grow over time, over many months or years, till it becomes like a rainforest. It can take decades or hundreds of years to grow.

But if you take early on and salt the Earth, or you burn that meadow down before it can become a rainforest, it’ll A) never grow to what it could have been or B) it’ll never grow at all. And so we have to take intervention going and plant trees. We do the same with the gut microbiome. We need to take manual intervention a lot of the time.

So, there’s early onset of imbalances. It needs to be intervened. A gut microbiome imprints like a thumbprint by about 3 or 5 years old, depending on who you’re asking, but that will—your body will always come back to that basic. So sometimes you have to take recurring and chronic intervention. Sometimes it’s a very complex process over many months or years to try to reinoculate and try to get that done properly.

 So, there’s a lot of steps and stages there to get it done, but just because you are set and that thumbprint was set early on doesn’t mean you’re screwed forever. Keep that in mind, guys. I have candida and naturalist says and mono virus and UC. See, how do you treat candida? So we have to go back to the basics. One, we have to go drainage. Two, we have to go antifungal. But I find with—I find with IBD, Crohn’s, and colitis that candida is a long game. You can’t take any fungals. You can’t go to the doctor and get an NiStatin or fluconazole and get rid of it in two weeks’ time. They might give you 10 days or two weeks, take the edge off, but it will come back. Candida can sometimes be a 6, 12, or 18-month process, depending on who you are.

Dr. Steven Cabral, we just spoke a couple of weeks back on my podcast. Actually, he had candida so bad, it was all the way up into his mouth. It climbed all the way up his esophagus, into his mouth and sinuses. That can take a very long time because not only do we have to kill the candida, open the drainage, we have to rebuild the biome. There’s a lot of steps and stages.

Christa says, “Alcohol is poison.” Damn straight. It is. It is straight poison. And there were a lot of things that people used to say that, “Well, the antioxidants or a little alcohol is good for you”—fully debunked a thousand times over. There are zero instances where alcohol is actually beneficial. If you want antioxidants, go have a handful of dark berries instead. Don’t drink the booze. It’s just an excuse. It doesn’t help.

Now Tanya says, “You can’t find a probiotic you can take.” If you need help with that, Tanya, let me know. There are a lot that some people can take, some people can’t. A lot of good ones, a lot of bad ones out there, and a lot of them are junk. A lot of probiotics we will take won’t actually get to the gut in seed. They’ll actually die in the upper GI tract, so we’re just getting the postbiotic benefits, right? I use the analogy: fishbowl in a fish tank, or fish in a fishbowl.

If you have a fish in a fishbowl, right—my marker is already drying, I need new markers, I got some on Amazon, guys, these are terrible. Anyway, you have a fish in a fishbowl, right? Prebiotics are the fish food. The probiotic is the fish itself. Postbiotics are what the fish poops. Now, bacteria, the probiotic, produces postbiotics. They poop out good things—short-chain fatty acids, all these things that are like signaling molecules to the body and the immune system. They have tons of great benefits. But if you have the wrong bacteria in there, they poop out bad things. You have the wrong kind of fish, and it ruins the ecosystem.

Amar asks, “What does prednisone do when in a UC flare?” So steroids and drugs, all these things, what they do is they suppress your body’s immune system in some way. So, think about it this way: if you have a traffic jam piling up on the road, right? You have a traffic jam, cars can’t really go around there, it’s going to inhibit the highway, it’s going to cause some problems eventually, but it takes a while. This is how inflammation slowly builds up. You have a trigger, and inflammation slowly backs up.

But imagine now your body sends in the cavalry. We say, “Hey, there’s a traffic jam pile-up on I-95. What do they do?” They send the signals to the body. This tissue down here, the immune system sends a signal and it says, “Hey, let’s bring in the cavalry.” So, they bring in the firefighters, the police, the ambulance. This is your immune system coming in to clean up the scene. They block down the whole highway, okay? This is where inflammation starts to come in. When your body sends immune signals down, that’s where inflammation is. It’s your body trying to heal you. It dilates the blood vessels, it sensitizes the nerves, it brings in immune cells.

Some, if they’re there too long, it’s chronic inflammation. It gets out of hand. It actually damages and breaks down tissue. Inflammation, by nature, is good. It’s there to heal you. Chronic inflammation and extreme inflammation is a problem. So in the case of UC, where you’ve never removed the problem, you’re just taking drugs to mask the symptom. You’ve never managed drainage. You never managed the root. You never rebuilt the biome, and replenished the nutrients, and rejuvenated the immune system, this is where problems come in.

And so what happens when we take prednisone and drugs is we block the signal. There’s a little traffic jam there, but nobody ever sends a signal for help. The immune system never gets to the highway, and so this chronic inflammation remains. It’s just we don’t feel the inflammation because the signal didn’t come in to get the help. We didn’t get the police and everything coming in, so nobody really notices.

So, the problem is still there, it’s still wreaking havoc, it’s still backing things up on the highway, but we’re not getting the inflammatory response because prednisone or Stelara or Entivio or Humira or whatever you’re using—Xeljanz—they block that signal from your immune system. So your body can’t send for help, which is why it’s a big problem.

If this is a fire, guys, if this is a forest fire, and we say, “Well, we’ll just try to contain it at our best, don’t call the fire department,” that shit’s going to get out of hand. And this is why people have these extraintestinal manifestations, where things get crazy out of hand. When you deal with, what is a little forest fire, now it’ll blow up. You get pancreas issues, we get PSC, or primary sclerosing cholangitis, you get hair issues, hair is falling out, you get fatigue, hormonal issues, menstrual issues, dark, thick, clotted blood, breast tenderness, really bad PMS, you get brain fog, or erectile dysfunction, you get psoriasis or eczema, acne, joint pain. All these things develop because your forest fire is spreading and nobody called the fire department.

 And your doctor is perfectly fine with that, and that drives me freaking mental. But the problem is they just don’t have the tools. They’re not even taught these things, and this is what’s crazy about it. Sandra drives four abscess teeth. Dentist put me on a moisten. Am I going to have problems? I'm going to a surgical dentist on Thursday. I have skin cancer in the first layer of skin. Here’s the problem, Sandra. If you have UC, we have to look—teeth can be a main root cause. I’ve seen teeth as a root cause of bowel disease as well. What we believe is one of the root causes being plural.

I met a girl at the gym. She was, when she was like 14, fell off a horse, broke her jaw, cracked a bunch of teeth, had a bunch of root canals, and she’s having a bunch of GI issues. She was—I’m like, look, what’s going on with your teeth? Have you had them scanned? Nope. She went in for what’s called a cone beam scan or CBCT, they call it, and they actually saw a bunch of dark pockets underneath her teeth where she had those root canals because the infection gets in there and they burrow, and that can get into your bloodstream.

It’s right to your gums. I mean, that’s—your gums are the same tissue, basically, as your GI system. Your mouth is the start of your gut. Abscesses, an infection in the mouth, if you have an infected mouth, you have an infected gut, damn near guaranteed. So, that’s something to keep an eye on. But you’ll probably have problems because your gut’s already a mess, Sandra.

There’s always an answer, guys. There’s always an answer. Every single problem that you will experience, that you will face with your gut, with your health, with anything, has a root cause. Doctors describe diseases as if they’re innate to the human body. They give it a name like it’s your pet, like, “Oh, you have colitis. You have gastritis. You have diverticulitis. You have this, you have that.” You don’t just have it. They happen for a reason. But in Western medicine, we just mask the symptoms. Functional medicine goes to the root cause. And this is what drives me bloody mental—is we’re not actually fixing the problem. We’re just giving people drugs to mask the symptoms, and that forest fire is still burning, but nobody’s calling the bloody fire department.

And we wonder why everything’s burned down, because we’re not actually fixing the problem, and this is the biggest issue. Every disease in the human body has a cause and effect. Everything. You go, you have a burn on your hand? Well, you touched something hot. You got pink eye? Should’ve washed your hands after wiping your butt, right? Like, everything. You broke your leg? Shouldn’t have jumped off the third floor, right? There’s always a reason. But you get, like, IBD, they’re like, “Well, it’s autoimmune. It’s genetic.” Absolutely not. 100%. It can all be fixed.

Kimberly says, “My hair is thinning out drastically. I hate it.” Oh, 100%, Kimberly. Here’s the thing. Hair thinning out, hair falling out, is a very common cause—not only of the drugs you take, but the UC itself. It can be a vitamin/mineral thing. It can be a hormone thing. It can be an inflammation thing. There’s so many reasons why. My voice is getting raspy here, guys. I’m getting too excited.

Anne-Marie asks, “I’ll take a couple more questions. I do have to go, guys. Is TMJ arthritis and/or TMJ (temporomandibular joint)? You know, guys, when your jaw locks up and cracks when you chew. Is it an EIM or an extraintestinal manifestation? Can TMJ be caused from your gut?” Theoretically, did you know that a very common cause of teeth grinding is actually parasites? If your jaw’s locking up and your teeth are a big mess and you’re grinding your teeth, it might be a parasite issue. Again, it’s more complex than going to the doctor and taking antiparasitics, because those are antibiotics, which will mess things up more. There’s more layers in that, but you get the idea.

Anne-Marie asks, “Can a program be started on a biologic?” Absolutely. Here’s the thing: you wouldn’t go in to do surgery without anesthesia, right? Sometimes you need medications. If you’re on biologics, we have people on all kinds of stuff coming in to see us. It doesn’t matter. You’re masking the symptoms. We can still take care of a lot of layers first. There may come a point where your biologics are inhibiting the final processes of healing. But here’s the thing—especially if you’re taking drugs right now for your IBD, and you are symptomatic, you will know it’s like, “Hey man, I have no more symptoms.” Cool. Maybe talk to your doctor about lengthening the doses.

We have it all the time. We have people who are nervous. We have a lady in one of our groups. She’s here on behalf of her son. And he was taking Stelara—or was taking Stelara, I should say, more correctly—and she was really nervous because every time the coffee goes into a flare, they would cue 8 weeks, and then it was 9 weeks, then 10 weeks, and 12 weeks, and 14 weeks. She’s like, “I still haven’t given it to him.” I’m like, “Great, do you want to?” She’s like, “Kind of. I’m nervous, but I get it because you don’t want him to flare, right?”

Well, she kept going and going. 16 weeks, 18 weeks, no Stelara. Symptoms are gone. He’s perfectly fine. And so, those are conversations to be had. If you’re on medication, it doesn’t change a thing. We can still help 100%, guys. So that’s all we got for you guys today. Thanks so much for coming in, and we will see you next time. Thanks for listening.

Now, if you want help reversing your IBD, I’d like to invite you to join a reversing Crohn’s and Colitis Naturally community where we give you the tools you need to actually reverse your IBD. Now, we’ve got courses, live Q&As, coaching calls, done-for-you meal plans, programs, and huge discounts on supplements from some of the top suppliers. Just click the link in the show notes to learn more