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My Leaky Gut Story Janice Palmer, B.Ed. This is my personal story about how I suffered for many years with a leaky gut, and how I found a way to heal myself and regain my health. I am not a doctor, nor do I claim to be - but maybe that's a good thing because no doctor was ever able to figure out what was wrong with me ..... but I do have a degree in Education from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, earned "With Distinction", while looking after two young children, and so I am confident in my ability to read and research a subject, and to reorganize and present new materials, and so, after almost 15 years of independent study, on topics ranging from Candida yeast overgrowth, antibiotics, automimmmune disease, the female reproductive system, the gastrointestinal system, celiac disease and the gluten-free diet, inflammation, food allergies, and back again, I am pleased to announce that I HAVE FINALLY FIGURED IT OUT --- AND I FEEL GREAT ! I have suffered most of my adult life with various celiac-type symptoms. I have had many tests for many different diseases and conditions, but I have never actually been diagnosed with anything. Every single test ever administered to me came back negative or inconclusive. So officially, I have nothing. This doesn’t mean that I haven't been sick. It only means that with the tests currently available, they were unable to identify what was wrong with me. About ten years ago, over a dozen different doctors told me that there was nothing wrong with me, and that I was probably reacting poorly to the stress in my life. My family physician told me that he couldn't help me because, as he indignantly proclaimed, I sent you to see the best gastroenterologist in the city and she couldn't find anything wrong with you either - you must be a hypochondriac. But I was never satisfied with that answer because I knew I was sick, so I kept looking for a solution. Looking back now I wonder if I'd even be alive if I hadn't. And so, I have tested negative for intestinal parasites, the kind you get when you go on tropical vacations or to underdeveloped countries, liver disease, and thyroid problems. The tests for cancer and HIV also came back negative, and the results were inconclusive for the endoscopy, the colonoscopy, the barium swallow, and the barium enema x-rays [I'm not sure which barium test was worse]. Routine and uninformative were the screenings for endometriosis, uterine fibroid tumors, and rheumatoid arthritis. Quite possibly unnecessary was the gall bladder removal - open surgery performed at the tender age of eighteen, by an unscrupulous physician, and followed by an immediate return of symptoms, and three years of unproductive pharmaceutical therapy for gastric ulcers and cystic acne. Unsuccessful were my own attempts to cure a suspected case of candida yeast overgrowth with a combination of herbal supplements and homeopathic drops. And clearly ineffective was the added dietary fiber in the form of wheat, and the three different kinds of pharmaceutical drugs, one a narcotic, all designed to calm bowel spasms and stop diarrhea - none of which did any good at all. (BTW - that best gastroenterologist told me it wasn't possible that the drugs weren't working - but I wasn't really sure what she meant by that statement ... ) I was very gradually starving to death, no one could figure out why, and not a single doctor seemed to care. My symptoms were dismissed as psychosomatic in origin and I was told I had Irritable Bowel Syndrome and that I should learn to live with it - which translated usually means, we haven’t a clue what’s wrong with you. In 2001, I heard about celiac disease and so I started to follow a gluten-free diet. I immediately felt ten or twenty years younger. I couldn't believe the difference! For the first six months or so, I did not have access to any gluten-free bread, cakes, or cookies and I continued to feel great. But then I discovered the gluten-free goodies and ate lots of them in an attempt to gain weight. My health slowly started to deteriorate and I developed other food intolerances in addition to gluten, like milk and soy. I continued to blame my ongoing intermittent diarrhea, constant fatigue, and depression on cross-contamination issues and trace amounts of gluten in processed foods. In 2006, my husband developed an excellent recipe for a wonderful-tasting gluten-free bread. He baked and baked and I ate and ate. And I got sicker than ever. I began to wonder if living was even worth the effort - and it was a lot of effort - and so I decided I had to do something about it. I had been keeping up on the development of Dr. Fasano's new zonulin-inhibiting drug, AT-1000, and read from a recent press release as follows: "A few years ago, Fasano's team discovered the key - the protein zonulin, which regulates the opening and closing of the gates and controls gut permeability. Around the same time, they also determined that most autoimmune diseases are characterized by an extremely permeable intestinal wall (leaky gut) and that individuals with impaired immune function, particularly those with diabetes and Celiac disease, have abnormally high zonulin levels."So I started to think that if I could heal my leaky gut then I would probably feel better. But I couldn't wait another ten years for a drug to be developed - I needed help right away. So I decided to revisit the idea of candida yeast overgrowth. Since I had taken antibiotics so many times over the past ten years, including high dosages delivered intravenously, it was likely that my gut flora had been altered. I had tried candida therapy years ago, but now realized after doing some more research on the subject, that the program had probably not worked for me because I had continued to eat large amounts of sugar. I hadn't realized how important the diet was. At this point anything was worth a try, and since I had become accustomed to denying myself certain foods in an effort to follow a strict gluten-free diet, this seemed easy. I simply removed the sugar and carbs from my diet, added some probiotics and an anti-fungal, and took digestive enzymes with my meals. I was simply amazed at the results. However, it really bothered me that so many people, including the vast majority of family doctors and physicians, believed that Candidiasis simply did not exist. Even the mere possiblity that I could be suffering from candida overgrowth was swept casually under the rug by the North American medical establishment as something that could only happen to cancer patients, AIDS patients, and those undergoing bone marrow transplant; never to any reasonably healthy individual. In fact, medical associations around the world, in some bizarre form of pharmaceutical conspiracy, have actually gone to the trouble of issuing formal "anti-candida statements". And so, always being the skeptic, I couldn't believe it myself until I had either proved or disproved it's existence. I had seen enough natural, alternative and/or holistic medical practices that seemed to have no scientific validity, to know enough to question that which I didn't fully understand. And so I spent some more time doing further research, and have confirmed in the medical literature - and I think this is one of the most important points - that candida overgrowth does indeed exist and that researchers knew about it within ten years of the introduction of antibiotics into the general population. For more info see "About Candida" Based on my own extensive research and reading, personal experience, discussions with colleagues, and experimentation with diet and supplementation, I have come to believe that I suffer from a leaky gut caused primarily by the effects of antibiotic-induced dysbiosis, combined with the use of other pharmaceutical drugs such as birth control pills, tetracycline, NSAIDs, antacids, ulcer medication; and by specific lifestyle choices such as alcohol use and a diet high in sugar and carbohydrates. I am now pleased to report that I am well, and it's not - all in my head - after all. In addition to changing my diet to reduce sugar/carb intake, I have done a candida cleanse and have started taking a probiotic supplement called LB17. Most of the changes have been subtle ..... better bowel movements, clearer skin, no more stiff and achy joints ..... but one remarkable change has been "the stairs". We live in a split-level home and there are nine stairs going up to the bedrooms. At my worst, I could barely make it up these stairs and would literally crawl up, exhausted and weak in the legs by the time I reached the top. I have tried many different brands of probiotic supplements, without much success, but since I have been taking LB17, I have been running up these nine stairs with almost no effort. And today, after only two weeks of the LB17 live probiotic, I was in a hurry and surprised myself by scooting up those stairs two at a time !! Janice Palmer, 2008. |
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