SIBO Treatment & IBS Solutions

Tried SIBO Treatment Before? Does SIBO cause IBS?

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Welcome to the functional medicine and natural healing podcast when we share the secrets to upgrade your digestion, improve your hormones, restore your immune system and detoxify your body. I'm your host, Dr. Houston Anderson. Now let's get started. The following discussion is for educational purposes, it is not intended to diagnose or treat disease process. always discuss medical treatments or medical interventions to your personal physician. Alright guys, welcome back to the show. This is Dr. Houston Anderson here. Kind of exciting today to be back on the air with you guys. Gonna go over a few different things as take me forever to get this podcast out. Obviously, I had a guest speaker last time and I haven't done my own, just busy treating patients. Patient flow is just excessive right now there's so many people in need. And obviously I want to put people real people first before I put a podcast or just getting information out to the world. But if you're one of my faithful subscribers, it's actually listening to my podcast. I thank you for being here. And I am back for now. Which brings me to the concept of some exciting things that are office that are happening. We actually did just add a doctor Dr. Grady Don0hoe. So the cool thing about Dr. Donohoe is that we were at, we actually went to the same school, we know the same people, we have a lot of the same treatment philosophy. So this is going to be a really great transition for my patients that just can't get in to see me or new patients that want to see a great doctor, he's there. But it's going to allow me to do a little bit more of this podcasting, it's gonna allow me do a few more YouTube videos. And what I'm trying to do is really put out that information, as you know, that no one else is putting out there, right? All of the I mean, honestly, like a lot of the information out there is just put up by robots. Now there's a lot of AI stuff. And all your functional medicine information is just a copy from the last article that's been regurgitated by a robot and it sounds horrible, but I'm going to keep going into that, because nobody's telling you the actual clinical experiences that they're experiencing. There's a few great clinical doctors out there, and I appreciate them. Anyway, so today's topic, we're gonna talk about SIBO small intestine bacterial overgrowth, right? So everyone knows what SIBO is. But it's funny because everyone always searches What is SIBO? Let's go over the word really quick, just so we know SIBO small intestine, bacterial overgrowth, obviously, is an overgrowth of bacteria. Now, let's go back in time to where SIBO was originally called SIBO, because you had a large intestine, they thought at least at the time, they thought that your large intestine leaked a little bit of bacteria into the small intestine, and that bacteria from the large intestine went into the small intestine and Creek had more growth, which the small intestine supposed to have a little bit less bacteria than the large intestine. But long story short, it goes in, and then it starts to grow. And it was almost like a dislocation or a translocation that they didn't like, where the what you found was that the bacteria is going from large intestine, small intestine nowadays, I think that we've kind of evolved that definition in the SIBO world to just anytime that there's a proliferation or too much bacteria in the small intestine, and we actually start to wonder why that is. Or in other words, there's a lot of reasons why that can happen. We're gonna we're not going to chase down all the reasons why, but I will tell you some of the things that that lead to there, and what's the dangers of SIBO? What's the promise? SIBO? Well, the problem is eventually you get nutrient deficiencies. Eventually you get leaky gut. If you don't have gas and bloating already, you're lucky. And then you know, things like brain fog, and just overall poor digestion, things like that, that are going to suffer truthfully, SIBO is really one of the most dangerous things for your liver. liver toxicity is almost always caused by gut health, not by anything else, except for occasionally like a viral infection or good hepatitis or something like that. Right, you can actually see COVID Go into the liver too, right now. So

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just kind of a new thing that's popping up. Alright, let's talk about SIBO symptoms, see what symptoms when I'm talking about SIBO symptoms, people come to the office, they say, I think I have SIBO they're wondering about bloating, gas, pain, so pain is actually a pretty important one. Because SIBO only causes certain type of pain. But it is important to kind of describe that pain to your doctor so that they know exactly what type of pain you're dealing with. Because for example, I always say that parasites create stabbing pain. But SIBO doesn't create the same kind of sharp stabbing pain. SIBO is more like a cramping pain, it actually feels more like because of its mechanisms because the organisms that cause it feels a lot more like an ulcer, right? So and turns out that certain bacteria do create ulcers, obviously, in the small intestine and in the stomach, as well as the large intestine. So these are our concerns. We want to make sure that these bacteria don't get too high, because you get some of the symptoms of loss of appetite is a huge one, right? So people say I'm just not hungry anymore or excessive appetite, right? You keep trying to diet but you can't get yourself to stop putting food in your mouth. Okay, that can be a sign of this bacterial overgrowth, diarrhea and constipation. So both both forms of IBS, right, IBS, C and IBS D. Both can be caused by a bacterial infection. And actually, you know, I'll kind of go back and forth between seafoam and SIBO today, but but we're going to try and focus on SIBO but SIBO can can smelters, and fungal overgrowth can really cause a lot of these things, too. Okay,

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so let's talk about some of the main basic causes and how they present in the office when you're talking about SIBO. Okay, the first thing that comes in, which is like standard and functional medicine, and everyone says you have low stomach acid, so it's true, okay, if you have low stomach acid, your stomach acid isn't protecting you from the bacteria that go goes into your mouth and you breathe in and things like that, as well as it should. And and you end up having, you know, somewhat maybe of an not quite a clean meal, if that makes sense. Meaning some of the bacteria in your meat or in your vegetables can actually reach the intestinal tract. And I'll go over that really quick. Because I think that's important. Everyone thinks that if you eat vegetables, or salad or vegan or vegetarian like that, that's going to keep you from getting bacteria 100% That's not accurate. It's all over your food. I don't care what foods you eat, I don't care if it's clean, or if it's dirty, it has bacteria on it, accept it, don't think that you're better than bacteria, right? That doesn't really exist. Okay, so what's the number one sign or symptom that comes into my office when someone has low stomach acid, okay, they can't eat heavy meals, right? They only like small meals is that fullness that they feel when they have low stomach acid. And, you know, specifically, they'll say, like, oh, I can eat a lot of red meat because it just sits wrong, right? That's the number one sign that I hear all day long that you have low stomach acid. So if you think that red meat sits wrong, or doesn't feel good, or new, or is just not right for you, 100%, you can be assured that you have a digestive problem. And not that it's you know, I mean, yes, obviously, if you just don't like the texture before it goes into your stomach. But if you're saying that it doesn't feel right, then you definitely have a low stomach acid issue going on. Okay, lack of movement. Okay, more common. I don't know if it's more common, maybe more common in females where constipation exists, slower transit times. So some of this, obviously, so we talked about some of the reasons of low transit time or slow movement. They talked about the migrating motor complex, this is kind of an advanced word for the nerves that make your food go. And those nerves that make your food go essentially can be altered by a lot of things. One of the main things that is altered by is actually stress, right? So people say is stress causing my desk digestive issues? And the answer always is not directly. Okay? Stress can cause anything indirectly and a few things directly. But we can't say stress causes everything. Kagan arguments with this people all the time, especially some of my doctor, colleagues that think everything is emotional. And I would say this, I think a lot of things are emotional. But I think the way that I describe it to patients, because I'm not just an anti emotion guy, I say if you feel like it's emotional, it's probably emotional. If you feel like it's not, then it's probably not. So if you went into someone's office, and you said, Man, I think that the stress from my new job is creating this problem, I would totally agree it probably is because you just got a new job. But if you walk into my office, and you say, Man, my life is so perfect. You know, it's the most money I've ever had, my kids and family are the happiest, my relationships are the strongest. Do you think it's stress? You know, it's usually not stress, right? So you're going to be that judge, not your doctor. So that's one of the big things because obviously, when people get diagnosed with IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, they're often kind of thrown into the bus of you know, like, oh, well, you're just stressed out, that's anxiety, you're feeling your gut. And it's just not true if it doesn't apply to you. Now, because I've written this recently about about IBS, the story is, we do become hyper vigilant about our guts. Once your gut starts to hurt, you're always scared, right? There's a little bit of anxiety, we call it health anxiety in my office, that health anxiety. Yeah, it'll go away as soon as your stomach doesn't hurt anymore. So yeah, sometimes we do have to control our mind a little bit with regards to how much we're gonna think about treating SIBO or treating Candida or C fo or IBS, or what we should eat today. And we try not to go get obsessive about what we're eating or not eating at any point in time. But there is an awareness, right? And the awareness came from the fact that your stomach didn't feel so well. Right? Okay. So on that last thing on the lack of movement, really, in a perfect world, you really shouldn't be having two to three bowel movements per day. And this is probably why I throw throw the women out here because oftentimes women don't think that that's normal, while men might think it is normal. And I'm just saying, I don't know whether that's cultural or just truly gut problems that we talked about there. But let's, let's say that, you know, two to three is ideal. Most people I can get their SIBO to go away as long as they're having one bowel movement a day. If you are not having one bowel movement per day, that's gonna be my primary priority. So if you're not having a bowel movement every single day of your life, I mean, we're not talking about skipping some days, any day that you skip, you're going to have that bacterial overgrowth proliferate because your body's supposed to essentially treat it and kick it out and you're not kicking it out adequately. So now you have more that resides that goes back to the bacterial overgrowth, you have too much you have two days worth of bacteria in there instead of one day and once you have two days, then you start falling behind, okay? Low bile and digestive enzymes. So really, where you see the low bile and the low digestive enzymes is it's caught. So this is a kind of interesting when SIBO one can be SIBO can be caused by these problems, or it can cause these problems. So you'll see both and, you know, a lot of people say like, well

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what came first the chicken or the egg? And the answer is they both occur in different individuals at different times. Occasionally we can identify what that person was right? So let's say that they had listen to had constipation for a while before they had any kind of bacterial signs, then all of a sudden their stomach starts hurting or the gut starts hurting all the time, then they stopped being able to tolerate a lot of foods. So that might be the case where the constipation came first, and the low bile and digestive enzymes came first. And then they developed bacterial overgrowth. On the flip side, say you get a big ol case of bacterial overgrowth, maybe some food poisoning, for example, which we'll go over in a little bit. But food poisoning gets in there throws off your digestive tract, completely inflames everything destroys microvilli analysis, and you're stuck with bile and digestive enzyme deficiencies from that. Okay, so let's just go over that. So SIBO, antibiotic SIBO, you know, essentially see what can be caused by antibiotics. But the biggest thing I want you to be aware of, and this is true for all SIBO antibiotics, right? So you're going to, you know, we'll talk about this a little bit more at the end. But the concept is this antibiotics are bad for SIBO. Now you can take Rifaximin say facts and you feel a little bit better. But when you're talking about that class of drugs, which you actually can develop, if you take more than two or three courses over the course of your life, is you can develop these antibiotic resistant organisms. So now you're coming to Dr. Anderson and saying, Hey, Dr. Anderson, you know, I've already taken Rifaximin as I facts, and it won't go away. Well, now we're in a tough spot because you got some nasty organisms in there that I'm having to mess around with, because you thought that it'd be cool just to take an antibiotic, which it is never cool to take unless your life is at risk, right. So we don't want to treat things that don't need antibiotics with antibiotics, we will treat everything you know, obviously, any severe infection, we're going to treat with an antibiotic. But other than that, we want to avoid them. We don't want to take them for simple things like SIBO or gut bacteria that can be treated with high quality herbs. It's just that you probably missed it, you probably tried to treat it with probiotics. So let's go into that two things. Probiotics are usually not strong enough to treat SIBO there's a couple strains that are showing some promise these days but the dosages and quantities and timeframes are still wrong in my opinion, meaning you need a lot of probiotics for a long period of time and it takes forever to heal and then it seems to work so I don't really like to use them a ton still ask me again in another year maybe I have a cool one that I like or two years and maybe have something there that I like I see that there's some potential there. But I just a we haven't dialed it in. Right So the example I use my office about dialing in is always like CBD, everyone everyone at first is like, oh CBD cures all disease cures cancer cures brain trauma. Here's, here's whatever you want. Well, it turns out years after, you know, especially in Arizona, where it's legalized, you know, you have your marijuana legalized, turns out didn't cure every disease, right? We still have these diseases, even though it's supposed to be the natural cure. So it's just about dialing in, what's it used for? What's it best for what strain works for what, and we're getting there. So I think that's pretty cool. Low immune function. So basic causes a low immune function or like stress, autoimmune conditions, hormone imbalance, blood sugar issues, and any medication that you take, they'll take toll on the immune system, and essentially allow that bacteria which should be controlled by your immune system to proliferate a little bit. So you essentially had normal levels of bacteria. And then you had stress, or some type of other condition, or even just an illness or a viral infection, or you know, your hormones got off too long, or you went sugar eating too long. And now all of a sudden, your immune systems a little bit lower, while your immune system or protective system is lower than the bacteria grows a little bit. That's kind of basically how SIBO works. And so once again, you don't have to focus too much on where your SIBO come from. There's a lot a lot of places it's going to come from, and a lot of reasons why it's going to be there. So, you know, it's not about like, oh, did I do this to myself? Well, it is sometimes I mean, if you know that you were you know, eating sugar 24/7 for five years, then yeah, you probably cause your own problems. Okay, but let's go over this last one. And there's actually, this is this is probably the most funny enough, the most important one. Now, I think lifestyle matters. But the number one cause of SIBO, in my opinion, is actually food poisoning. And that's why I said at the beginning, it's not whether you eat red meat that's junky or whether you eat pork that's junky or lamb or chicken or all vegetables, right? No matter what you eat, there's going to be some type of some type of organism on them where there's bacteria, parasites, fungus, viruses, you know, everywhere you go, you're exposing them. I

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think people are more aware of that than ever, right? These are on everything. Specifically on food, you're talking about viruses. You're talking about parasites and bacteria, less fungi on on your on your food unless it's moldy, right? So this food poisoning disrupts the gut microbiome. So anytime you disrupt the gut microbiome, and this goes for good or bad. So once again, we'll go back to that probiotic top. If you had too much of a one good probiotic, it has to suppress another probiotic. So we always rotate so anyone that's in my office using probiotics is going to be rotating those things. If they're even allowed to take them So I would say we take probiotics once our gut feels mostly better. So that can be 90% better. And then you can mess around with probiotics to see if you can get you know a little bit better or an optimized or a brain fog kind of maximization. After you quote unquote feel mostly better your eat can eat any healthy food that you want. Things that don't irritate you things like that, then we're ready to talk about that. So anyway, so that anytime you get some type of bacterial infection from your food, so you get some E coli for something you eat, like I said, vegetables or meat, either one, you get that exposure. Now you have too much E. coli, and it suppresses some of the other good bacteria that you have in your gut. So it's not about necessarily adding a lot of bacteria to it. It's really about killing the E. coli. And that's how I prefer to treat that SIBO story. Okay, well, let's talk and talk really quickly about hydrogen dominant, SIBO, and methane dominant SIBO, because these are ones that are kind of in the news. And these are what the labs test for. So essentially, hydrogen producing bacteria live in both the small intestine and the large intestine. And when too much of possibly we'll say this is one of the causes too much bacteria comes from the large intestine, small intestine, you get that bacterial overgrowth in an overproduction of hydrogen that we can then measure in a few different tests. I won't go over all the lab tests for SIBO right now, but there's, there's a, there's really only two or three will come over those in one study that I'm gonna share with you in this in this podcast here. But we're not gonna go over too much. If we go to methane, same concept. There's these like organisms called myth antigens, and myth antigens, when they go and eat and digest and move and metabolize, they create methane. And that's another substance that we can actually measure. So we always get down to the concept of Yo, I treated SIBO with my other doctor, but I don't feel better. What's the problem? So first, number one common, most common? The number one most common problem you're gonna find with that is possibly or usually, that they treated the wrong organism, right? So they diagnosed you as SIBO, because of a breath test, or not because of a breath test, because they're their, you know, clinical expertise, they diagnose you with it, which is fine. And they find that you have SIBO, great, they treat it nothing gets better. Sometimes it just means that it was a parasite, a virus or a fungus. The question is, how are they going to check for that? How are they going to treat that? Okay. Now, probably one of the most important things that anyone can know is that IBS, okay, because I want to go to IBS. But I don't know what this podcast would be called yet. But it's going to be called something like SIBO and IBS, because that's what people are looking for. And people want to know, like, Why does my stomach hurt all the time? So here's the thing, you'll find that over 50% of people with IBS suffer from a bacterial overgrowth. And here's what I'm going to tell you. The IBS test the breath test, the lactulose test, or the glucose test, both of those are 100%. You know, they're under diagnosing let me put it that way. They're under diagnosing what's wrong with people. So they're missing a lot of cases. So let's just say that you didn't have high hydrogen on your glucose test. So you didn't have high hydrogen on your lactulose test, then they would say, oh, yeah, for sure. You don't have bacterial overgrowth. But is that really true? Is that is that the end all be all. So let me tell you take you then back to the traditional medicine realm, which I don't think is a bad thing. But oftentimes, a lot of people have colonoscopy, and endoscopy. And they'll do something like an upper gut aspirate culture, right. And it turns out that when they do that in IBS patients, not many people actually have SIBO. So technically, that's the gold standard right now. But here's what I'm going to tell you. Because I think that the upper gut aspirate misses things, I think that it's not the gold standard, what I'm telling you is the gold standard is gonna be closer to a breath test. And even more than a gold standard is gonna be a combination of history plus a test. Right, so let's say that your your SIBO test comes back as it looks pretty normal, maybe

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you bought an IBS, then that means if I if I were to go and take Dr. Anderson numbers, that means about 80% of all IBS is caused by SIBO. And that's a huge number. And then I would say like of IBS, probably another 20% 2015 20% is caused by fungus. So at a minimum, if we go back to just regular breath testing and the research that we have, we're gonna say 55% comes from, you know, not even go with Dr. Anderson's numbers, just 55% is going to come from bacteria that I'm telling you right now, it's 25% comes from fungus. At a minimum, you're looking at eight out of 10 people are suffering from IBS due to an infection. Okay, so I'm going to keep going back to this term, so that you guys understand this because our results are pretty stellar here now there's more to it. That can be what happened so you started off with a big ol infection and then okay, now your liver started failing you and so your liver started you know, being overburdened had a too much going on. So now your liver enzymes are elevated, which then suppresses your immune system because you have too much inflammation and your inflammation from your livers going into altering your spleen, and now your spleen is up regulated. So your spleen is trying to do all these crazy things. Now you get diagnosed with mast cell disorders and you all of a sudden you have an immune system dysfunction. All of these things pop up and it's like oh, Well, so where did it start? So the root cause oftentimes is, like I said, eight out of 10 might be that bacterial infection, or a fungal infection virus or parasite. We're seeing a lot of long term stuff happening from COVID. So I definitely that's a good demonstration of a wasn't the first virus to do this, right. Traditionally, we talked about Epstein Barr cytomegalovirus, herpes simplex viruses, things like that. And it's just evolved, right? So it's gonna continue to evolve, there's gonna be more infections that we run into, but it's just important to know that can so what's the best treatment for SIBO? I want to go over this really quick. And like I said, it's not Rifaximin. There's a facts and just straight up, it's not the right way. Now, it's super high dose, Rifaximin, xifaxan, you'll find that 80% of people get better. So it sounds really cool, right? You should go and take that, well guess what the recurrence rate on those is about 44%. So 44 percents a 50% chance that you come back. So 80 80%, success, minus times half of that. So you're really only looking at a 40% success. And it's something that you can't maintain. Right? So there's you can't go and take Rifaximin for the rest of your life, no one's going to prescribe it that way. And it's not safe. You also develop these resistant organisms and you're stuck there. So that's why I always recommend that people treat it naturally with herbs. And a lot of people say like, Well, what about herbal resistance, it does exist, it's slower. And it takes a very long time, sometimes years for the for the body actually become resistant to that. And once again, just like probiotics with herbal treatments, you're going to rotate them so that you don't get stuck on the same one forever, your body doesn't become resistant. And like I said, it's so much slower. So I guess I guess if we were going to talk about things that are mild, a lot of people look for the best probiotic for SIBO. I'm sorry, I'm just gonna give you one today, right? I'm not even gonna list that. Because they don't want you searching in that direction. I don't want you even looking that way that it might help you. I don't care whether it's, you know, the newest spore probiotic. And there's a lot of them now or the new soil based probiotic. There's a lot of those now, I don't care what it is. It's not strong enough. Usually, for most bacterial cases. If you're the person that's actually suffering, if you're the person that you know, just says a mild to moderate gut problem. Go ahead, go go find your favorite probiotic take, it will probably work when we're talking about some of these more kind of in depth clinical cases where people aren't responding to the typical care. This is what we're talking about. All right. So if you have any questions, go ahead and reach out to us. Like I said, you can book an appointment with me or with Dr. Donahoe, now, who has a little bit more availability than me, and we'd love to see in the office, you can give us a call our phone number of the office is 480-571-3030. And you can speak with one of our assistants, or with one of the doctors ourselves, and we'll get you started on treating your SIBO or treating your IBS or whatever else you have going on so that we can get ahead of your health and you can live a quality life. We'll see you next time.

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