Maria's doctor recommended fiber and gave her a referral to see a gastroenterologist (GI specialist). The GI specialist gave Maria a colonoscopy and several other tests to rule out serious physical pathology. “The results are all negative,” said the specialist. “This means that your symptoms are not due to something serious like cancer or inflammatory bowel disease. Your symptoms are due to irritable bowel syndrome, or IBS.”
She then discussed lifestyle changes and stress reduction, and reviewed the range of prescription drugs that might be helpful. She also suggested that Maria might benefit by seeing a psychologist to address some of the stresses affecting her symptoms. Maria was concerned about the drug recommendations because of her previous sensitivity to medications. And the suggestion to see a psychologist pressed the wrong button in her. Now Maria was really scared. “They think I'm crazy,” she said to herself. “They think it's all in my head.”
The psychologist could not solve her problem either. “It is true that severe depression or acute anxiety can cause intestinal problems,” he told Maria, “but I don't think you have psychological issues significant enough to warrant treatment. A psychiatrist might prescribe something to help you relax, but otherwise I don't think my services would be helpful for you at this time.”
Maria was back where she started, only worse. She made the rounds of seeing different doctors and getting prescriptions that treated her symptoms, but she felt no hope for successful treatment. “I've been scoped from both ends and told that not much can be done for me,” said Maria. “Yet I still have pain and gastric distress. What now?”
What Maria didn't realize was that she wasn't the only one who felt frustrated and helpless. The health professionals who see patients like Maria often feel frustrated by their limited impact on problems like hers. This can be true even for GI specialists, the physicians with the most training in gastrointestinal diseases. They are the ones we go to for evaluation for the most serious or life-threatening diseases, such as gastrointestinal cancer and inflammatory bowel disease. They have the technologies for diagnosis of organic or structural diseases. But even they get frustrated by the severe suffering experienced by those who have unexplained symptoms, what is termed functional bowel disease. In spite of the diligent and caring work of GI specialists, Maria and millions of others can't find relief for their chronic digestive distress. Can't anything be done for them?
That's where we enter the picture. Greg Plotnikoff is an MD and a leader in the field of integrative medicine who spent six years in Japan studying traditional medicine. Mark Weisberg is a PhD psychologist who specializes in the treatment of chronic pain and the emerging field of clinical health psychology. Our novel approach extends the range of standard practice in both medicine and clinical psychology. We share a holistic vision of how the body and mind work together, a perspective that allows us to see new ways to solve old problems. As recently as ten years ago, our holistic approach would have been marginalized by the medical profession. These days we are the go-to doctors that other doctors refer their patients to when they run out of answers. We wrote Trust Your Gut to share our answers with you, so you can help yourself. This book will help you free yourself from your chronic misery.
A Revolution in the Treatment of Gut Distress: The CORE Program
We approach the treatment of gut issues from the premise that the mind and body are all part of an integrated system. We know both from our own clinical experience and from research data that the mind-body relationship is interactive in both directions, and we must always look at health from a 360-degree perspective. Otherwise, we miss some of the most important cues and clues to our wellness. In fact, both the latest neuroscience of the gut and the ancient wisdom of Asian medicine agree that the gut is the focal point of human energy and the seat of the emotions. Indeed, scientists are increasingly referring to the gut as the second brain. Although your gut appears to be the cause of all your problems, it is actually the center of hope for relief from your symptoms.
Western philosophy and science—starting from the days of Plato and Aristotle—have seen the mind and rational thought as part of some higher reality, whereas the body and emotions are of lesser importance. Classical philosophers taught that reason must control the emotions and that the mind must rise above bodily concerns. Centuries later, French philosopher René Descartes formalized the split by declaring the mind and body to be two metaphysically different kinds of realities. This led to centuries of scientific exploration of the body with little regard to the mind. Although few scientists believe in such dualities anymore, the study of the mind still lags far behind the study of the body. That's because it's much easier to study the body. You can see it, measure it, touch it, and x-ray it. You can do none of those things with a mind.
The problem is that our mind is subjective, but science is only looking for objective truth that can be measured. That's how behaviorism, the theory that all behavior is based on conditioning, became the dominant movement in psychology in the 20th century—it removed the mind as an object of study and focused only on behavior. This started to change by the 1970s when pioneering scientists integrated the study of psychology, neurology, and immunology—termed psychoneuroimmunology—to create the new science of mind-body interactions. It is still a very new and developing science, and we are among the first wave of health professionals to apply this new knowledge to solve chronic gastric distress. The results we've had are astounding.
Instead of talking about the body and mind as two separate entities, we talk about the body/mind. Each person is a unified system and should be approached as such. This shift in perspective was possible due to the technical advances in imaging that allow scientists to measure the brain's functional activity in living people. The most surprising insight is that our brain does not distinguish between what is physical and what is psychological. It creates the same neurohormonal responses either way. This new perspective allows a completely different way of looking at the problem of gastric distress. More important, it makes it possible to find new solutions.
The Western approach to disease and illness uses a lot of violent metaphors that suggest health care is a huge battle. Doctors fight disease, they wage war on cancer, and patients struggle valiantly to conquer the disease. The medical arsenal includes lasers, radiation, chemicals, and pills. One of the primary goals is to kill pain.
Surprisingly, in other cultures, such as that of Japan, not a single word associated with care is related with violence. In Japanese, the key actions that health professionals take are expressed with words conveying comfort, harmony, and balance. We have pain killers, and they have pain calmers or suppressors.
The Western “us versus them” strategy works well for a lot of illnesses, such as when you need an antibiotic to kill bacteria or chemotherapy to kill cancer cells. But this approach falls short for many gut sufferers. You probably believe that your gut is a problem to be attacked, because that is how you have been taught to think about illness. But as you can see from the title of our book, we have a totally different approach: we don't want you to fight your gut; we want you to trust it.
The main theme of this book—and the key to solving your gut distress—is that your gut is not your enemy; on the contrary, it is the center of your body/mind system. It is your core. Your chronic gut problems are signs that your system is out of balance. To restore that balance and become centered, you must learn to listen to what your gut is telling you. Just as heat sensations tell you to take your hand off the stove, and the bad smell of spoiled milk tells you not to drink it, the various symptoms of gut distress are messages that need to be deciphered and acted upon. Instead of killing the pain with a pill, we want you to observe the pain and try to understand what it is telling you.
Your gut is not your enemy; on the contrary, it is the center of your body/mind system. It is your core. Your chronic gut problems are signs that your system is out of balance.
