I have studied many different fields of medicine – from conventional medicine to many alternative forms of healing. All of them (except maybe conventional medicine), have one commonality: If you don’t fix the gut, you will never get the person well. You will always just continue to chase symptoms. In my 40 years of being in the field of health and healing, I have increasingly found this to be true.
We now live in a time of great severity of digestive dis-eases. No longer is it “just” a little heartburn, easily resolved with a bit of bicarbonate. Today’s digestive issues are painful, deep, and are progressed to auto-immune states. There are more diseases involving significant tissue damage and profound effect on the lives of the sufferers.
Nearly every disease you can think of, there is a link to poor digestion – whether symptomatic or not. For instance, arthritis, kidney and gall stones, bone spurs and cataracts, while they sound completely unrelated, share a common issue with calcium metabolism. Translated, that means something is wrong with digesting calcium as a starting point. From there it progresses to a place of inherent weakness (eyes, joints, kidneys, bony surface), and then we attach a fancy medical name to it. The problem? If you don’t address the gut, you’ll never fully get the condition to resolve (notice I didn’t say simply controlled?)
Of course, Crohn’s Disease, Colitis, IBS – any inflammatory bowel disease – is a disease of the gut. But how many of your practitioners are starting with correcting stomach deficiencies first? Usually just the lower gut is addressed in these conditions, with a target to simply restore quality of life, yet the upper gut is left unaddressed. If the upper gut, the stomach, is not putting out sufficient enzymes, taking an acid-stopping medication to resolve the “acid excess” is not correcting the problem. This is an article in itself, because this sounds contradictory, but it isn’t. Email me at [email protected] if you want the article on stomach acid. To try to correct lower gut issues without addressing the stomach, is like trying to mop up a floor flooded by a faucet left on, while not turning off the faucet.
If you are suffering from any gut issue and are taking antacids, acid-stopping medications, or steroids, you need to be asking if the condition is being corrected, the underlying reason why you have the issue, or is it just being masked to enable you to function in life? As gut issues are not corrected, they morph into other more serious degenerative diseases.
The gut is perhaps the most important factor in resolving seemingly unrelated illnesses. It takes guts to stand up and say “It’s time to heal my gut!” “I want my health, my life back!”
©2017 Holly A. Carling, O.M.D., L.Ac., Ph.D.
