Getting to the Root Cause of IBS With Dr. Izabella Wentz

IBS as a symptom label 0:00

If you've been diagnosed with IBS, you should know that it's actually a waste basket diagnosis. What does that mean exactly? It means that is just a label that tells you what is happening, what symptoms you're experiencing, but it doesn't inform you as to why that's happening in your body. Worst of all, it does not give you a plan for what you need to do to feel better. Only 25% of people who have been diagnosed with IBS actually find that they have relief from conventional medical treatments. This is where functional medicine steps in, and I really want to educate you about the potential root causes of Ibs.

Yes, there are multiple root causes. In fact, a research study by Dr. Haba done in 2011 found that 98% of people who were diagnosed with IBS out of 300 plus patients had some kind of treatable cause. So that meant that once the cause was identified and once that cause is treated, they no longer had Ibs. Now, here's the thing. Your IBS is not your cousin's I.B.S. It's not. Your sister's. I B. S. it's Not going to be the same root cause for your best friend. Dr. Isabella Wentz, also known as your thyroid pharmacist, and this is the thyroid Pharmacist Healing Conversations podcast.

Now you're like, why is a thyroid? Pharmacy's talking about Ibs. Let me tell you something. IBS can precede many autoimmune conditions and thyroid disorders 5 to 10 to 15 years before a person is diagnosed with autoimmunity. This was certainly my case.

Functional medicine and root causes 1:44

I was diagnosed in with I.B.S. during pharmacy school, and a few years down the road, I Was diagnosed With auto immune thyroid disease, also known as Hashimoto's thyroiditis. Once I figured out what to do about my Hashimoto's, I decided to write a book about this. My New York Times bestselling book, Hashimoto's Protocol, is one of the books that I've written that has helped thousands of people take charge of their own health and figure out a plan, a path, for what they need to once they have a Hashimao's diagnosis to feel significantly better and potentially even get into remission within 90 days.

Before I wrote that book I, wrote Hashimoto's The Root Cause, sharing all of my research on how to get autoimmune thyroid disease into remission. Now as part of, my own healing journey, I actually got my irritable bowel syndrome into, remision before I got Hashimoto's into Remission, and IBS was much easier and faster of a fix. And for a while I thought, okay, I need to really write about the root causes of IBS and they're going to be very much similar as the roots causes Hashimoto's. And then I started working with clients and I starting to learn so much more about irritable bowel syndrome.

I was like, there's so many information about Irritable Bowel Syndrome and the causes that nobody's really talking about. and I've waited for many, many years since probably 2013 is when I first wanted to write a book about IBS. I waited somebody to come out with a comprehensive guide on the root causes of irritable bowel syndrome as well as what to do about it, but that hasn't happened. So here I am today sharing that I have a new book called Finding and Treating the Root Cause of irritable bowel syndrome.

This is a book that's going to help you take charge of your own health. You can work through the book yourself or you can on it with your practitioner. this is going give you a roadmap for figuring out what's driving your symptoms and what to do about it. I'm going read a little bit of an excerpt about what is really going on and how the root cause approach can help. So conventional medicine has made headway since I was initially diagnosed with IBS, but it's still light years behind the insight of medical researchers and root cause practitioners.

For over 10 years, I have been aware of most of the causes of Ibs I'm sharing in these pages, and the body of evidence keeps growing in the medical journals.

IBS, Hashimoto's, and the new book 4:08

Yet the average patient isn't going to get the most information from their pharmacist or doctor. Emerging research and clinical experiences of functional medicine practitioners are showing that irritable bowel syndrome is not a condition you're stuck with forever and ever, and it's not chronic condition that needs long-term treatment with prescription medications. Rather, it is a set of symptoms with various underlying root causes that can be addressed and resolved. I first became fascinated with getting to the root cause when I was working in public health as part of a government-sponsored project.

to improve health outcomes for people with chronic health conditions by focusing on healthcare systems. I was trained in root cause analysis, a method that helps to differentiate symptoms from causes. We know that focusing-on symptoms can help temporarily feel better, but with long-term, it feels more like a game of whack-a-mole. That said, focusing, on root causes can solve the problem and prevent it from recurring. So discovering the different root causes out there. When I was initially working with clients with IBS, I thought all of them had SIBO because that was the information that were put out.

And the low FODMAP diet was a really popular move, popular choice for people, and I feel like it still is. But here's the deal. not everybody with irritable bowel syndrome has SIBO, and the low FODMAP diet isn't actually the best treatment for SIBo and IBS. The low-FODMAF diet is a band-aid approach, oftentimes it makes gut diversity worse, it doesn't treat the underlying cause behind SIbo, which is an overgrowth in the small intestine, which, by the way, can be caused by a whole host of issues like hypothyroidism, just giving you one example, or low stomach acid.

So this book gets through all of the root causes and tells you how to figure out which one you have. Sometimes you might have more than one and how treat this accordingly. The difference between the conventional approach versus the Root Cause approach. The conventional approach is focused on trying to answer the question, what condition does a person have? The root cause approach focused, on, trying, to, answer, the, question why did this person develop a particular condition and how do we intervene?

Why root-cause treatment matters 6:32

the IBS diagnosis is based on medical history and self-reported symptoms according to the Rome for diagnostic criteria via the conventional, approach so it's basically like a symptom-based diagnosis, whereas we do know that in functional medicine, IBS is treated like an umbrella term for a cluster of symptoms with various causes. And while conventional medicine doesn't recommend testing, we now have advanced diagnostics that can figure out what your causes might be. So lab testing is not required to make a diagnosis of IBS and conventional medicine.

However, through functional medicine, we have the tools to do these diagnostics to figure out what is actually driving the symptoms and what are the causes underneath that. With the conventional approach, the treatment involves chronic symptom management with medications and sometimes diet, whereas the root cause approach we seek to resolve symptoms by treating the body as a whole integrated system. We utilize targeted protocols to address each unique root-cause. With conventional medicine, there's a band-aid approach that means IBS symptoms can persist and progress, allowing for more immune system imbalances and potential progression to autoimmune conditions.

Whereas with the Rurika's approach, we're really addressing the whole body. We're figuring out what is driving these symptoms, helping to restore gut and immune-system balance. So going back to Dr. Saad Habba, he identified that 98% of 303 patients with IBS diarrhea, for example, actually had treatable causes behind the diarrhea such as celiac disease, non-celiac gluten intolerance, carbohydrate intolerace, and bile acid-induced diarrhea. He discovered a syndrome he coined as HABA syndrome, now called bile acid malabsorption, which connects some cases of chronic diarrhea to too much bile

Common IBS causes and SIBO 8:40

in the intestines due to gallbladder dysfunction. Using low-cost generic prescription drugs that reabsorb bile, he's able to see symptom resolution for most of his patients. There's another study done in 2022 by scientific reports found the prevalence of five conditions causing IBS-like symptoms went undiagnosed and were oftentimes misdiagnose as Ibs. These conditions included pancreatic exocrine insufficiency, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, microscopic colitis, carbohydrate malabsorption, and bile acid diarrhea.

Dr. Benjamin I. Brown published an article in the journal Gastrointestinal Disorders, focused on even more causes to consider, including stress, circadian rhythm disruption, physical inactivity, lactose intolerance, food sensitivities, non-celiac gluten sensitivity, nickel sensitivity vitamin D deficiency, low-grade inflammation, intestinal permeability, dysbiosis, and parasitic. infections. I've personally seen many of these as drivers for IBS symptoms for my clients in my experience and I really wanted to get this information out into the world because here's the thing.

All of these conditions, they're going to require a different treatment. So if you have SIBO, for example, then you want to use targeted treatments such as the elemental diet or medications or herbs that have antimicrobial properties to help get the SIBo out of your small intestine. You may also wish to utilize prokinetics. that help your gastric motility so that the body has a chance to move the bacteria out of the small intestine. You may also wish to utilize stomach acid support, such as hydrochloric acid, so the bacterias don't have a change to get into the smaller intestine in the first place.

If you have another condition, such as celiac disease, then the solution for your IBS might be to go on a gluten-free diet. There's also people that have fructose intolerance, there's people who have lactose-intolerance.

Testing, infections, and nutrient issues 11:04

Sometimes people might have more than one intolerant, and so really figuring out what's causing you to have these symptoms is going to be the key to reversing them. In my experience, in addition to these research-backed causes, I've oftentimes found medications can cause constipation or diarrhea. I have seen this prescribing cascade where a person is put on a medication for one reason. and they end up getting side effects from the medication and then they get on another medication for the side-effects and this prescribing cascade can go on and on until somebody catches on it intervenes that every new condition is a side effect of a previously started medication.

Now, when I was going through pharmacy school, we had a lot of exams, I would say two exams a week for three years until we did our clinical rotations during the fourth year. And when in doubt, if there was ever a multiple choice question about a certain medication and what kind of side effects it caused, gastric issues. So constipation, diarrhea, if I saw that on an exam, I was going to pick that as a potential symptom just because medications are notorious for changing GI function. These include painkiller medications, these include medications like proton pump inhibitors, even birth control pills specifically and the Drisperinone-containing birth control pills such as Yaz and Yasmin, these can actually trigger gut dysfunction and have been linked to higher rates of irritable bowel syndrome.

Another common thing that I find is that people often have digestive enzyme deficiencies when they have irritative bowel syndrom. So they might have a difficult time digesting fats They might have difficult time digesting protein. They may have trouble with digestsing starches. Some people might also have troubles digusting fibrous foods. And high fiber diets are often times recommended for IBS, yet for some individuals, they have some kind of a gut dysbiosis, which means their gut bacteria are out of balance.

And instead of taking fiber and creating beautiful short-chain fatty acids out of it that are beneficial to our health, they create problematic byproducts

Thyroid, inflammation, and lifestyle triggers 13:28

that can worsen constipation or diarrhea. I've also found that various nutrient depletions can contribute to irritable bowel syndrome. Some of the more common ones are going to be glutamine and zinc, vitamin D. These are gonna be common in diarrhea, thiamine, carnitine are going to be a little bit more common in constipation. And probably the most notorious nutrient deficiency in people who are constepated is going be magnesium. In my work, I've worked with a lot of functional medicine tests. I really love the GI map and the gut zoomer tests to figure out if there are infectious organisms that could be driving irritable bowel syndrome.

Blastocystis hominis is something that I found in a lot of my clients with Hashimoto's. It has been recognized as a trigger for Hashimoto's, for hives, and also for Irritable Bowel Syndrome. This protozoa is found irritable bowel syndrome depending on where the studies were done and what kind of methodology was used to figure out if somebody had that infection. The remarkable thing is oftentimes treating that pathogen can result in a remission of IBS. Giardia is another pathogenic that can be found in 5-10 percent of people with Ibs.

Dientoamoeba fragilis is a another potential infection that really can mean the driving force behind irritative bowel syndrom. and potentially later on additional conditions such as autoimmunity. Alterations in stress hormones can definitely contribute to IBS as well as thyroid imbalances and auto immunity. We do know that hypothyroidism can cause constipation while an overactive thyroid can caused diarrhea. Inflammation Another big thing that most people don't recognize is that there's a separate and more serious condition that can look similar to irritable bowel syndrome known as inflammatory bowel disease.

The categories, inflammatory bowel disease, this could be something like Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis. People might present with digestive distress, but they oftentimes might also have severe diarrhea, weight loss, they might have blood in their stools. This is something that can be life-threatening and very problematic, yet many people When they have this inflammatory bowel disease, about 10% of them, they're still going to get diagnosed with IBS. This is really relevant because inflammatory ball disease requires a much more intensive treatment approach.

There are some conventional treatment approaches that use heavy duty drugs in order to getting into remission. there's also a really solid functional medicine approach in getting inflammatory bowel disease into remission, but it's really important to know which one you have because if you try to do the things for, let's say, getting rid of SIBO for IBD, you can make yourself feel worse. So if your assume that your IBS is caused by SIBo, then you could make the inflammatory disease worse There's also various toxins and chemical triggers

Book bonuses and closing message 16:48

that can contribute to IBS. Of course, our Western lifestyle factors, stress, alcohol use, dehydration, poor bowel habits, a low fiber diet, lack of exercise, smoking, using various substances, these can also lead to a higher prevalence of Ibs. We do have higher rates of ibs in North America and I do think our lifestyle is an important factor for this. So I do want to show this, if you can go to my YouTube channel and see this here, this is the umbrella term for IBS. Ibs can be caused by a whole bunch of different conditions.

If you've gotten the label of Ips, I encourage you to explore what that actually means so you get on the right treatment approach because you're not meant to live your life around a toilet, you're not meant to have stomach pains, You're Not Meant to Feel Awful, and I hope that this book, this is called Finding and Treating the Root Cause of Irritable Bowel Syndrome, can help you on your healing journey. Currently it's in pre-order and as part of the preorder bonuses you can get the entire guide on getting ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, inflammatory bowel disease into remission.

You can get a whole guide on food sensitivities, how to recover from food sensitivity. So in my experience, food sensibilities are very much reversible and temporary. They can be drivers of IBS, but we can fix them. And then another thing that we have in this guide is fast solutions to getting rid of IBS symptoms. And in those symptoms, I also include acid reflux so that you can get rid to preorder a copy of this book to secure your bonuses. I hope that this is going to be helpful on your healing journey.