Digestive Health

Conventional Approaches to Treating Gut Issues

If you have been dealing with regular bloating, acid reflux or GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease), diarrhea, stomach cramps, or even fatigue and brain fog associated with these symptoms, a visit to your primary care physician likely ends with a prescription to deal with the symptoms. To confront these issues, conventional physicians likely recommended antacids like Tums or Pepto-Bismol; or, they listed proton-pump inhibitors (PPIs) to deal with your “overactive” stomach acid, then prescribed some other medications to deal with the resulting symptoms. While some medicines may slightly ease symptoms in the short term, they can cause harm down the line because treating an observed symptom with a prescription distracts from exploring the origin of its persistence. Thus, both patients and primary care doctors feel ill-equipped in resolving these gut issues and instead only manage the resulting symptoms through repression. The problem with such a common, conventional approach is that there are so many reasons why you could be experiencing chronic digestive distress! Unless you understand the root causes of your observed digestive symptoms, you will not know how to relieve them for good.

Getting Down to the Root Cause of Your Symptoms

What is important to note about the gut microbiome is that when it is out of order, most systems in the body suffer the consequences. Hundreds of gut diseases share the same symptoms including bloating, gassiness, diarrhea, constipation, and abdominal pain. People with poor gut health can also report brain fog, fatigue, low mood, and other debilitating symptoms. In the 1990s, we made incredible advances in understanding that our overall health is deeply linked to our microbiome: a collection of microbes including bacteria, fungi, protozoa and viruses that live on and inside the human body.

The bacteria in our gut microbiome help digest our food, protect our immune system, fight harmful bacteria or viruses, and produce important nutrients like B12, thiamine (B1) and riboflavin. They also produce important neurotransmitters that allow for proper brain function. Alleviating the disruptive symptoms of gut diseases requires a specialized approach in areas where conventional medicine is lagging behind. Functional medicine providers, like those at Alliance Integrative Medicine, are equipped to take this specialized approach to get to the true root of the cause of these symptoms.

The Functional Medicine Approach

Since the gut impacts our health on so many levels, our functional medicine approach is to make the gut the first place we focus on when we explore a patient’s case – determining whether they have leaky gut, irritable bowel syndrome, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), or small intestinal fungal overgrowth (SIFO). At Alliance Integrative Medicine, our expert team is trained to investigate the symptoms and causes of your chronic digestive disorder through appropriate, advanced lab testing. We then assemble a custom-tailored, effective treatment plan to restore your body’s innate healing potential and bring your gut back into balance. The lab tests help us arrive at a precise diagnosis so we can understand how to address the underlying dysfunction for good – whether it is unresolved stealth infections, environmental toxins, food allergies or other endocrine or system-wide issues. So, don’t just chalk your pain and discomfort up to a “sensitive stomach” or that you are just “getting older.” Seek out care from a trained functional medicine provider to avoid compromising your long-term health.