Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)

I help people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) no matter where you are in the world. As a clinical naturopath, medical herbalist, medical nutritionist, clinical hypnotherapist and mental health professional, I work holistically with you. The real whole medicine.

You may even get health fund rebates.

It really helps that you are dealing with one clinician, instead of having to keep going from one specialist to another. It saves you time, money and you can use that to focus on your healing.

It also means that we work together faster and more concisely to make the changes you need to make to health your gut healthy.

What is IBS?

It’s series of conditions that include:

Constant diarrhea or constipation

Excess gas

incontinence

Diverticulitis

Alternate diarrhea and constipation

Abdominal pain and bloating

Colitis

Crohn’s disease

Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth

Celiac disease

A healthy bowel produces health stools when you go to the bathroom. Anything else is abnormal and causes nutritional deficiencies, infection, inflammation and affects all other body systems.

You can feel tired, aching, unable to concentrate, wanting to vomit, have a lack of energy and disturbed sleep patterns. It can severely affect your mental and emotional health. (1)

Why does IBS happen?

It is a disturbance of the bacteria, viruses, fungus and small creatures in your gut. There has been an assault on the delicate balance of good (commensal) and bad (pathogenic) bacteria in your gut, which leave you open to intestinal infection. The assaults can include bacteria, viruses, medications, and physical and mental stress. The brush boarder walls of the gut of the intestines may also have been damaged.

Your gut is the center of your world. The good bacterium in the gut, which is 80%, helps regulate every system in your body. When they are killed or injured by an assault you become ill, which can be for a very long time. You have gut bacterial dysbiosis.

You might not even know this has happened. (2)

Misdiagnose gastrointestinal illness

One of the most common things I see in clinic is that you are being treated with medication, without clinicians examining and testing the state of your gut. You could also be diagnosed with IBS but you actually have another condition (3)

Those medications then go on to cause secondary damage to the gut, making the condition worse so it becomes chronic and continues to get even worse.

Unfortunately, very little is taught to health professionals at university about nutrition and the health of the gut. This means they are only trying to treat the symptoms and not the cause of a disease.

If the cause is not treated, then the symptoms will remain.

How do I know if I have IBS?

I always order tests for patients. I want to know the percentage of good bacteria and bad bacteria in your gut, as well as what those bacteria are. We now have such advanced testing, that we can identify those bacteria by their genic markers.(4)

This allow me to decide how to kill the bad unwanted bacteria and supplement you with the good bacteria that may be missing. As a medical herbalist I prefer to use medical herbs, which are excellent at killing pathogenic bacteria, with damaging your gut, and actually support your good bacteria.(5)

I may also want blood tests to look for markers for infection, inflammation, liver and kidney function, as well nutritional deficiencies.

I may also look at your own genetics to see you have a metabolic difficulty processing nutrition.

What foods should I eat if I have IBS?

That of course depends on what kind of inflammatory bowel disease you have been diagnosed with. This is no one blanket diet to eliminate IBS.

I compose an individual diet to facilitate you getting rid of your particular illness. It must be precise because if it is not, it may be feeding the illness.

All the medication in the world will not help if you are nutritionally deficient. I will also look at nutritional supplementation in areas where you may be deficient to maximise your recovery.

There will be food you should absolutely not eat, and foods you absolutely should. I will teach you what you need to eat and when. (6)

Hypnotherapy for IBS?

I have used hypnotherapy with patients who have experienced IBS for over three decades. It helps calm down the gut.

Think about it – you maneuver the world according to your gut feeling.

It is true, isn’t it. It’s what’s called a bio-directional feedback loop of the state of the gut with every other system in your body.

I was at a conference many decades ago with the hypnotherapist who developed the field at Manchester University Hospital in the UK. I decided to use those methods alongside my clinical naturopathy skills to help people overcome IBS. (7)

Reducing stress and distress with hypnosis is a major component of the treatment.

I also use hypnotherapy to help train in what you need to be doing to stop the IBS and what you then need to do to retain that good health.