IBS Success

Root Cause Medical Clinic 
Patient Testimonial 

IBS controlled my life... 

I could not go anywhere where I was not absolutely sure that there was a close bathroom. I tried to take over the counter and prescription diarrhea medicine, but it would only last a few hours. Because of my symptoms, I was also on depression medication on a daily basis to "help" me deal with the anxiety that was caused by my IBS. I also suffered from extreme claustrophobia, and could not travel in my car without stopping to go to the bathroom every 20 minutes or so. On a good day I had 6-7 bowel movements and on a bad day 8-9 - every day. I have had IBS for the last 20 years, but this bad, only for the last 2-3 years.

I could not go skiing, running or walking outdoors. Traveling was a nightmare for my family and I. I was stressed about when I would have to next go to the restroom.

I remember at our first meeting Dr. Petersen told me that she could help me, not with arrogance, but with confidence. She showed me pictures of what my insides probably looked like, but explained it in an easy to understand, matter of fact way. Dr Petersen told me I would have to give up eating like I was (eating myself to death, or a certain heart attack), but I could do it gradually.

I was given a diet that included none of the things I had been eating or drinking. It included giving up caffeine and gluten and sugar and aspartame. I had come to the clinic willing to try anything and I knew it would be hard but nothing could have prepared me for the withdrawal from caffeine and sugar. I thought that during the first week I was getting sicker, but I made it through. No real progress on my IBS, but I felt different. We went through blood tests and saliva tests and stool samples. It turned out I had 2 infections in my intestines that were affecting my ability to digest food. 

The antibiotics at first made me feel even worse, but I was in this for the long haul. I knew I was on the right track because soon I started to feel better. Maybe the IBS was not cured yet, but I had more good days than bad, and I felt better emotionally and physically than I had in a long time. About one week after I finished the antibiotics, I began to lead a normal life. I was only going to the bathroom 3-4 times a day, and the experience was much better. Two weeks later, I had a few days in a row with only 2-3 bowel movements per day. In three days, I had what would have been one of my bad days, but with no anxiety or discomfort.

The side benefit of my gluten free diet is that I am off of my "maintenance anxiety drug". This did not happen because my new doctors told me not to take it, I just forgot to about two weeks ago, and have not had the need for it. Today I got in a car w/ 4 other men and I wasn’t doing the driving. It suddenly dawned on me that I would never have done that before. The anxiety would have prevented me.

I have additionally lost 18 pounds, which was not why I came here, but it's definitely a benefit.

It is very difficult to explain the pain and suffering that I went through and that I put my family through with my panic attacks and IBS. I am lucky that they supported me and did not leave me. I feel that I can start to be the person that I am meant to be. My life gets better every day. Maybe everyone is not as sensitive to gluten as I am, but for me it is poison. It is easy to pass up gluten with the great results I am seeing. I asked Dr. Petersen if it was just the caffeine that made me so irritable. She explained that for some people gluten is neurotoxic. This was definitely the case for me and understanding that makes it easy to stay on a gluten free diet. I came to realize that all of the food that made me sick has gluten in it....bagels, bread, pizza, pasta, sandwiches......I was killing myself while trying to eat healthy. When I had a salad with bread and croutons, it defeated the purpose.

That is my story so far. I feel better everyday. I can not thank Dr. Petersen enough for helping me change my life.

- E.B. 

Tired? Stressed? Trouble Sleeping? Is It Adrenal Exhaustion?

Are You Tired of Feeling Tired? You're Not Alone! 

To say the symptoms such as fatigue, exhaustion, stress and sleep trouble are common would be a grave understatement. Closer to the truth is that such symptoms are bordering on epidemic and we certainly see that in our medical and nutritional patients. 

Living in a medical, drug-based society, such symptoms are often “treated” with advice to take it easy, receive a prescription for a sleeping pill and an antidepressant, along with a hefty dose of self prescribed caffeine and sugar to try to lift the fog of low energy.

What’s wrong with such advice? 

It doesn’t get to the root cause of why the body is feeling poorly. If a drug addressed the true root cause, you wouldn’t have to keep taking it, and for it to be beneficial for you, it certainly wouldn’t have dangerous side effects. And that’s a claim no drug can make, let alone antidepressants with the known side effect of suicidal tendencies.

You Need to Know WHY You Don't Feel Well 

I'm not trying to be negative, but let’s really get a grasp of what it means when your body gives you a symptom. Does your body make you have little to no energy because it’s mad at you? Is your body vindictive in some fashion? The good news is “no”. 

The body gives you a symptom as a simple means of communicating that it is having difficulty adapting to some stress that’s coming its way. And when I say “stress” I don’t just mean mental stress. A stressor could be anything from a poor diet or eating foods you are reacting to, to poor digestion and hormonal imbalance. It could be the reaction to a drug or it could be an infection of a chronic nature.

The point is that once the true stressor(s) are identified and removed, the body can revert to the healthy state its designed to have.

How Does Root Cause Medicine Work? 

 

Getting back to masking symptoms with drugs – taking a drug that makes you “not feel” a certain symptom (but does nothing to address the real root cause) is akin to taking a pain reliever because there’s a rock in your shoe causing you pain. Wouldn’t it make more sense to remove the rock?

The example is simple and you may think the human body is complex, but surprisingly, identifying the root cause of a problem is fairly easy when you’ve been trained where to look.

Let’s look at sleep problems as an example. A person complains of poor restless sleep. They may take a long time to fall asleep or have trouble staying asleep. They may be tired all day and get a second wind at night, making it difficult to “turn off”. A sleeping pill might knock them out for a while, but in my experience with patients, the sleeping pills rarely work for long before the patient is looking for a new pill.

What should be known is that the same system of the body involved in making healthy energy during the day is involved in creating deep, restorative sleep at night. Further, what allows that healthy energy to be produced is a good diet and digestive tract that turns good fuel into utilizable fuel from which to make energy.

It’s not complicated. It’s almost like wondering why your car doesn’t move when there’s no gas. The energy that creates motion in your car requires fuel. Your body is very much the same.

Look at Digestion First and Move on to Adrenals Nest 

It shouldn’t be surprising to learn that the first system we begin with is the digestive tract and the patient’s diet. If the food being eaten is of low quality, it won’t turn into good fuel. If the food is good, but the digestive tract isn’t working properly, again we have a fuel delivery problem. And of course if you're eating a food you're sensitive to such as gluten, again we won't have good fuel.

Once that is addressed, which isn’t at all difficult, we move on to the system that makes that energy, theadrenal glands. You may not have heard of them--but you likely know the word adrenaline, something the adrenal glands produce.

While the adrenal glands are responsible for making effortless levels of energy during the day, they also tie into creating the balance with the sleep hormone at night. In other words the adrenal glands insure great energy when you are awake, but they also feed into the creation of deep, restorative sleep at night--sleep that would be uninterrupted and allow you to bounce out of bed in the morning ready to greet your day.

Why have most people never heard of their adrenal glands? 

Why do doctors never mention them to their patients who are complaining of such symptoms as fatigue, brain fog, stress and poor sleep (to name a few)?

The answer lies in our medical model that asks a doctor to take a symptom, discover if there is a disease process and then treat that disease with a pharmaceutical drug.

The adrenal glands, fortunately, do not fit into this model. The reason is that they disease rarely. There is a disease they can manifest, but it’s thankfully rare, though serious. The downside of this rarity is that doctors are disease-oriented and because adrenal disease is rare, they assume their patients won’t often have a problem that is adrenal related.

And they’re not wrong – they don’t see many patients with adrenal disease, but what they do see is a multitude of patients with adrenal fatigue. Their training doesn’t look for it or even provide a treatment protocol. Remember, it’s not a disease state. What we are describing is a malfunction of the adrenal glands.

What Do the Adrenal Glands Do? 

 

The malfunction of the adrenals can create the following symptoms:

Fatigue

Weakened immune system

Trouble sleeping

Weight gain

Thyroid problems

Hormonal imbalance

Anxiety, depression, mood swings

Hormonal imbalance such as PMS, menstrual cramps, infertility, etc.

Brain fog

Joint pain and muscle aches

Light-headedness - some people call this a "head rush"

Allergies

Inflammation –the cause of most degenerative diseases including heart disease, cancer and diabetes

Premature aging

Asthma

Sensitivity to bright light

That’s quite a list. And for two glands the size of walnuts, it’s a pretty impressive job description that they control all those aspects of your health.

Do you see the problem of missing the adrenal glands as the root cause of your symptoms when they are responsible for so many important jobs?

Imagine you’re tired and have muscle and joint pain and you’re prescribed a pain reliever. The pain reliever seems to do the job somewhat, although it’s temporary. Drinking several cups of coffee or soda gives some relief to the fatigue. But is either "treatment" making the adrenal glands healthier? Absolutely not. So while you may have started with two symptoms on the list above, ignoring the adrenal glands as the underlying root cause will find you in the future suffering from more symptoms or a worsening of the original symptoms… or both.

Would it be worthwhile to find out how to keep one’s adrenal glands happy and optimally functioning? Remember then adrenals also impact aging and inflammation, which is another way of saying that theyextend your life expectancy and fight against degenerative disease.

As an aside, when we wrote our book “The Gluten Effect”, the chapter on adrenal fatigue was the largest chapter in the book, now perhaps you see why that would be.

The exciting news is that the adrenal glands dislike drugs. They thrive on a natural program that is not difficult to implement.

Part 2 Will Tell You What to do Next

In Part 2 of this article, I will review what you need to do and what your doctor needs to do in order to revitalize and rebalance your adrenal glands.

It’s not difficult.

Need Help? We're Here for You! 

If you felt as if I was describing you above, you are not alone. As I mentioned earlier, adrenal fatigue/exhaustion is almost epidemic. If you would like assistance and don’t have a clinician whom you feel can assist you, consider contacting us for a FREE Health Analysis. We are a Destination Clinic and treat patients from across the country and internationally. We would be delighted to help you as we have been doing so for over two decades.

Visit us at www.RootCauseMedicalClinic.com. If you have questions or need any help, I’m here for you! Call 408-733-0400.

To your good health,
Dr Vikki Petersen, DC, CCN, CFMP


IFM Certified Practitioner

Founder of Root Cause Medical Clinic
Co-author of “The Gluten Effect”

Author of the eBook: “Gluten Intolerance – What You Don’t Know May Be Killing You!”

Gluten Sensitivity Can Cause Belly Fat

Where did my flat tummy go?

Below is a case study from our book, “The Gluten Effect”. This patient had some very common complaints, but the common treatment she was receiving was having no effect. Did you used to have a flat stomach but can't seem to “find” it anymore? Gluten intolerance could very well be the underlying cause.

J.W had developed a big belly that she could not get rid of. She felt bloated all the time—and no matter how often she exercised or how closely she watched her caloric intake, her weight remained the same. She felt and looked four months pregnant.

A Successful 30-pound Weight Loss!

We diagnosed her with gluten sensitivity, and after being off gluten for several months, she went from a size 14 to a size 6, with a thirty-pound weight loss. She not only lost the weight, but it came off her problem areas first—her stomach and face.

She now had a flat belly, which she had never enjoyed before. J.W. also noted that her bloating was gone, and that she felt “clean” inside.

Lab tests revealed several infections, which were treated successfully, and that removed other chronic stressors from her system.

In J.W.'s case, the distribution of weight around the mid-region of the body was typical of excessive cortisol (a hormone) production with adrenal (your stress gland) exhaustion, secondary to a food sensitivity. Once gluten was removed, the stress on her body subsided, and a normal weight distribution returned.

Do You Have a “Spare Tire” or “Muffin Top”?

What we've discovered after working with patients for over 20 years is that much of that “tire” can be due to swelling of the small intestine from the inflammation caused by gluten and the adrenal fatigue ensues from malabsorption of nutrients.

You have about 23 feet of small intestine—with the surface area the size of a tennis court.

Look down at your abdomen. That's a lot of track to be laid down in a relatively small space.
Now imagine, that 23 feet is swollen, due to irritation created by a diet that doesn't suit your body, or an infection. Infections in the intestine are very common secondary to gluten intolerance. When it swells it has to go somewhere—welcome spare tire!

What's the Solution?

The solution is to discover the underlying cause of the swelling. Now I'm not against exercise, quite the contrary. But I can promise you that all the crunches in the world will not flatten a tummy that's swollen from a food intolerance or irritation from an untreated parasite or bacteria.

5 Things You Can Do

1. Discover if you're gluten intolerant for starters. There are tests available for this and remember we're talking about finding out if you're sensitive to gluten, not just if you have celiac disease.

2. If you already know that you're sensitive to gluten, then realize that you must be perfect about removing if from your diet. Being good “most of the time” is just not enough.

3. If you have not had a comprehensive stool analysis to check for the presence of infectious organisms, this really is something you should look into. It is rare that a gluten sensitive individual DOESN'T have some type of infection due to years of assault on the immune system from eating gluten.

4. The damage created by gluten in the intestines results in a condition known as a “leaky gut”. This is very common. Removing gluten from the diet is usually not enough to restore the integrity to the intestine. Such treatments as probiotics, herbs and other supplements may be needed to repair the lining of the gut to it's normal healthy state.

5. Get an idea of how your adrenal glands are functioning. Adrenal fatigue or exhaustion is quite common in our society. It is especially associated with malabsorption of nutrients and unstable blood sugar, which is definitely an effect created by gluten sensitivity.

The good news is that with some help from clinical nutrition, including dietary changes and lifestyle management, restoring that nice flat tummy is within reach—no surgery required!

Please let me know how I can assist you. Or call us to schedule a Free Health Analysis: (408) 733-0400.

Here at HealthNOW we are a Destination Clinic and we see patients from across the country as well as internationally. We are here to help!

Visit us at www.RootCauseMedicalClinic.com. If you have questions or need any help, I’m here for you! 

To your good health,
Dr Vikki Petersen, DC, CCN, CFMP


IFM Certified Practitioner

Founder of Root Cause Medical Clinic
Co-author of “The Gluten Effect”

Author of the eBook: “Gluten Intolerance – What You Don’t Know May Be Killing You!”